People used to use photo-editing software to do the same thing 20 years ago. A significant change in the prevalence of something (due to making it easier in this case: painting->photoshop->AI tools), can make a qualitative difference in the harm.
A really dedicated person might crank out a painting or two per week, and a minuscule fraction of the population has the skills to do so at all. Around the turn of the millennium, a much larger (but still small) fraction of the population had access and skills to use digital photo editing tools, and it still took quite some time if you wanted to make something convincing.
I am fairly confident that if one were to spend an hour or two researching how, a significant fraction of the population could generate dozens of images in a single evening.