After using SD heavily for a week, I half agree with this. It is incredibly disruptive, and it's wild how much it accelerates the creative process. I'll give you that.

But two things I've noticed:

First, artists will still have a massive advantage over non-artists with this tool. A photographer who intimately knows the different lenses and cameras and industry terms will get to a representation of their idea much faster than someone without that experience. Without that depth of knowledge, someone might have to rely instead on random luck to create what's in their head. Art curators might be well-positioned here since having a wide breadth of knowledge and point of reference is their advantage.

Second, we need the ability to persist a design. If I create a character using SD, I need to be able to persist that character across different scenarios, poses, emotions, lighting, etc. Based on what I know about the methods SD/Midjourney/Dall-E are using, I'm not sure how easy this will be to implement, or if it's even possible at all. There will always be subtle differences and that's where being an artist who can use SD for inspiration instead of merely creation will retain their advantage over a non-artist.

That said, holy crap. This tech is insane.

>we need the ability to persist a design

isn't that Textual Inversion (https://textual-inversion.github.io/ ) ?

It's more or less implemented in some forks (e.g. https://github.com/lstein/stable-diffusion#personalizing-tex... or https://github.com/hlky/sd-enable-textual-inversion (discussed previously ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32643564 ) )