>"While the role of the artist isn’t going away soon, the role of stock image sites might disappear. "

Not, yet. While it's cheap relative to stock images, it's time consuming to generate exactly what you want. Prices for stock images will collapse for the common quick to use images but the price for the specialized high end images will hold their value or even increase in value. Those historical and such images will continue to be valuable.

It will be interesting to see if a specialized job will rise where people will get paid to generate just the right image. It might be called "A.I. image artist " This individual will generate an image with an A.I. but use graphic tools to finalize it for use.

Also there is nothing preventing Stock Image Sites themselves using Dall-E to generate additional images. Heck they can use their own existing images for training (which the other's can't due to copyright issues) to increase the portfolio, but the Stock Image Sites can access free public images.

So, counter-intuitively it may strengthen Stock Image Sites value

Considering how DALL-E is fed with so many stock images that it sometimes spontaneously generates specific stock image websites' watermarks on output,[1] this is the stupidest, blandest possible ouroboros.

[1] https://twitter.com/kevin2kelly/status/1551964984325812224

[1] https://github.com/CompVis/latent-diffusion [2] https://imgur.com/a/8tOI9QU