People misunderstand what illustrators do. They don't take an idea like "teddy bears playing poker" and make a literal image of teddy bears playing poker. They look at the total context of a marketing campaign, a brand, an audience, sub-currents and winking references in culture from the latest internet memes to 14th century masterpieces they can subtly reference, and then they synthesize images that play on these in a way that
telling them to do something that crosses 14th C painting with a meme with a teddy bear would not accomplish. They sit and think about the
meaning of what you want, and then they bring
the big idea to it; how to draw the point so it resonates with everyday people, tickles intellectuals, and fascinates other artists. Every good illustrator I've ever worked with has done this; has surprised me by
cleverness.
To illustrate this: A marketing person or even an art director (like me) who replaces their illustrators with DallE-2 is not going to think of all those wonderful esoteric things that illustrators bring to to the table, not even enough to put them into a sentence, let alone to bring them to the degree of quality that close study and a honed lifetime of irony/history/intelligent communication and the skill to use visual language to tell stories that trigger recognition and memory and emotion can bring to the audience.
Illustrators don't just "draw picture of donkey". That is actually the most conceited part of the idea that they can be replaced; and it's entirely on the part of marketing people who, again, have no design background. (But do have a permanent financial interest in automating artwork, which is in tension with their overarching job of improving their employer's communications).
Most people with no design background don't know the value of good design. When they see it, they think it's something that can be mechanically aped. It's hard to assign a dollar value to the exact glint in someone's eye in a photograph, the exact alignment of their smile, the placement of the reflection in the watch on their wrist; does taking time and spending a lot of money for a human to consider each of those visual decisions microscopically really pay off in hard cash for the brand? If the answer from your marketing people is "not really", then your brand isn't going further than a local retail chain.
An AI can never compute those things because the slight shift in a smile will always be perceived subjectively by humans whose entire "software" is built around understanding whether smiles are genuine or not. Or noticing (subconsciously) if reflections are slightly displeasing. And it's not just a matter of having it mathematically accurate, in fact, mathematical accuracy is not what you want in a successful illustration. Maddeningly for the people who want to reduce everything to data, visual "mistakes" are a tool that can be used to register extremely positive emotions when deployed with a full understanding of the human psyche and the local culture, just as much as they register displeasingly when used without that knowledge. So at best a machine can only achieve neutral mediocrity in producing an image. If photorealism or the imitation of any particular style were the key to successful illustration, we could have replaced actual illustrators 50 years ago.