I've been following both posts and looking at this stuff from a lot of people. Some IRL communist friends as well. I always have these two gripes (or three, depending on how it's counted)

• Art is already (profoundly) commodified: Look at the whole Hollywood complex. And, even if you want to be super specific, at animation. Human hand drawn art is already commodified. Look at Magic: the Gathering art. Look at any piece of drawn advertising. I'm not even bringing up photography, photo editing, filmography, 3D modeling, acting and such to the loop. I've read in another comment that the OP has more of a "it's about the sincerity of the art", like, we know that corporate art is (to some degree) soulless regardless of human intent or not. So, automating it would be a good way to take away this burnout-inducing lack of the artist's will. (This last part is written in naïvety, just to bridge to this second part)
• Most arguments liberal artists use are more like labor aristocracy than anything: From what I usually get, at least from my reality and part of the world, people who graduate in or study arts are, usually, people with so much money that they can afford to not ever work to sustain themselves, or are from a proletariat class that is either looking for some economic ascension, but is lost in some romantic thought about the artistic profession. And, again, using my own experience, those are people that like to entrench themselves in such arguments. So, I go with the thought process of the textile industry during the industrial revolution

The final gripe is just a pedantism: please, let's call it image generation. We use AI all the time. Not for LLMs only, but for disease diagnosis, image recognition, text recognition, audio noise suppression, traffic control and so much more. People usually throw the baby out with the bathwater, but it just shows their complete ignorance on the matter.