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Notes -
As someone quite familiar with the space, it's less of a tool and more the tool.
Progress will most likely continue at its current breakneck pace; there's no real architectural reason as of now why it shouldn't. And I suspect 2-3 years from now, image models will completely invalidate the need for Photoshop (nor will there be a need for Procreate, Lightroom, etc). You'll Just Add Language™ and achieve functionality several orders of magnitude more effective than the old point-and-click approach.
I anticipate a future where every seed for every concept in every imaginable latent space will be pre-generated, and humans will simply browse through the results until they find something they enjoy. Does that sound artistic to you?
And to your point on AI generated imagery having a "distinct appearance": that may have been true a handful of months ago, but the most recently open sourced Stable Diffusion model (v1.5) no longer suffers from any real stylistic slant. Try a free generator here if you're still skeptical. AI is really getting to the "blink and you'll miss it" stage, and it's exciting to see.
I recently asked an artist friend of mine what he thought of the tool after showing him the thing in all of its glory with img2img and GFPGAN and so on. And his take was that it was impressive but still just a tool, that maybe with an advanced version of this you would only need an art director for a project instead of 5 people, but definitely out of bounds was this idea that it would replace the artist.
In the end, browsing for what is enjoyable in the litany of possibilities is what art is. And it's a skill.
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