Once they have to pay the actual costs of AI after all the VC money dries up, it will be clear that humans are much cheaper than AI. A $20 AI tool is just an introductory price, and that's mostly because companies don't want to pass on the real cost because they want people hooked.
AI image gen in particular is really cheap. You can run the best state of the art open source model, which also gives you much more control than something like DALL-E, on a consumer GPU.