It sure did have a big impact, comparable to what some people expect to happen soon with AI.

However, I think your framing misses the main point of why many artists today are wary about AI: They are not just being replaced, their own work is used as a building block for the tools that will replace them; and they were not asked for permission and don’t even get any compensation for that.

If you have a basic understanding how AI works then this argument doesn’t hold much water.

Let’s take the human approach: I’m going to look at all the works of popular painters to learn their styles. Then I grab my painting tools and create similar works.

No credit there, I still used all those other works as input and created by own based on them.

With AI it’s the same, just in a much bigger capacity. If you ask AI to redraw the Mona Lisa you won’t get a 1:1 copy out, because the original doesn’t exist in the trained model, it’s just statistics.

Same as if you tell a human to recreate the painting, no matter how good they are, they’ll never be able to perfectly reproduce the original work.