From the platform perspective, this is just a faster way to generate the same crap that's been on these sites for years, with less risk of copyright claims and associated take-down notices.
From the perspective of artists, I think whether or not there's a problem has a lot to do with how much artists have decided to centre their efforts around social media, as opposed to something more intrinsically bad or damaging.
Let's consider the first work that appears in the article, the image of the carving of the dog. The article states:
> The real German Shepherd carving was made by a UK-based professional chainsaw sculptor named Michael Jones, who detailed his work in a series of videos and photos posted over the course of the summer. Jones’ work has since been stolen and turned into endless variations.
First of all, Jones's work has not actually been "stolen". The output of his artistic process in this instance is a wooden carving of a German Shepherd. That carving has not been stolen. What has had actually happened is that a photograph of him posing next to his art has been used to generate other, similar images.
The impact of this image generation and subsequent garbage posting on social media is, according to Jones, that he and his fellow carvers are "missing out on the rightful credit exposure to their work" and that this is "setting unrealistic expectations when it comes to creating chainsaw carving art or any art".
Personally, I am skeptical that exposure to people on Facebook whose appreciation for artistry consists of "your a fantastic artist" is worth very much. And what's the counterfactual here? If these posters were not making these fake image memes, would that traffic be going to his posts instead? That seems far from certain.
The second part of his complaint, that this sets "unrealistic expectations", is closer to the heart of the matter, I think. I don't think qualified buyers of genuine art will pay less for real works of art because they've seen so many AI-generated artworks that they no longer have a realistic understanding of what real art looks like. I think they are, and will continue to be, educated and discerning enough to understand the difference, to appreciate process, and so on.
I do think that people on Facebook who have seen increasingly fantastic "wood carvings" on Facebook may appreciate his genuine wood carving photographs less in the future. This might be a real problem for him, given that it seems like posting on Facebook is something important to him, and might also be important to his business model. In other words, his real problem might boil down to, "Some people are better at making viral posts on Facebook than I am". But how much this qualifies as a genuine problem for the platforms, their users, or society at large, is not all that clear to me.