What is the actual economic value proposition for AI-generated images and videos?

(Please don’t make any moral arguments about AI. This is not the thread for that.)

The only people whom I’ve seen make use of AI-generated images are basically bad bloggers, spammers, Twitter users, and that’s essentially it. I imagine very few of these people are actually paying for the image generation.

As for AI video, I have even less understand if who is supposed to use that. Maybe like, concept artists? But the point of concept art is that you’re supposed to have a lot of control over the output, and even the most sophisticated AI video is still hard to fine-tune.

This apparent lack of use cases is important because the R&D cost to develop these technologies (and to maintain the enormous servers they run off of) must be unfathomable. It’s no wonder to me why tech companies want to give their shareholders the impression of mass adoption, even though consumers probably aren’t adopting it at the rate that would be needed to pay for the research.

My question is twofold:

1) Who exactly are the intended consumers of AI image and video generation?

2) What is the intended business plan to make this tech profitable?