The question has never been whether people want it. I think it's pretty clear they do. The problem is whether people want to spend the time in money, or skill, to get it.
I would love to be able to paint sci-fi pinups. But do I want to trade 10k hours of other stuff I'm already better at to do it? Once I painted them, would I truly love the work, or would I just see all the imperfections and be grumpy about it?
Artists have it hard. They spend unending hours on their passion and, in the end, see everything through a critical lens. And when they spend a month of time on something amazing, no one wants to trade a day of salary to own a copy, or a month of salary to own the original.
AI is so wildly popular because it's cheap, and through the lens of the consumer (read untrained eye), the best of it evokes emotions they get from a piece that would go for hundreds or thousands of dollars.
The true fucked up part. If the courts all say NFG, dump all your diffusion models that are full of copyrighted material. They'd just go back and commission artists in distressed places and rebuild the models from properly purchased material and we'll be right back where we are.
Still image diffusion isn't even expensive to run,