I’ve never claimed to be a fortune teller, but I can always attempt to make an educated guess on the future.
Based on current AI models and the possible advancements they will make in the near future, change in the industry is inevitable. There’s currently a lot of fear (and fear mongering) about “AI is going to take your job!” or “AI is replacing art”, but the reality is that AI isn’t replacing these jobs, it is simply being implemented into these jobs.
I personally do not believe that designers will be replaced by AI, but I do think that AI tools will keep a strong prevalence within the industry. It is likely that we will have better documentation of what images have used AI, not only for documentation purposes, but because AI generated content dramatically falters whenever it is fed something AI generated. Since this has became an issue for some AI models, I think we will start seeing more and more AI detection tools, a divide in “Non-AI” designers and “AI” designers, and possibly even an extreme increase in regular automatically generated content, but “dead internet theory” is for another day…