Yes they are. And no the AI art doesn't need to be better, it just needs to be cheaper and good enough. This isn't adapting to an improvement, it's adapting to easier access to worse or similar quality. The bigger problem is it's like if an auto manufacturer had machines that were trained on the other machines, and got consistently worse the fewer human workers there were. It might be better in the short term for everyone but the artists, but in the long term it's worse for everyone.