a tool that is going to change the industry and digital art, the same way computers did back in the day.
This type of comparison makes no sense: with traditional art you have to put skill, knowledge and personality into your work, with digital art it's the same thing but with computers, with AI "art" you don't. You just ask the mighty machine what you want and it'll spit processed garbage heavily approximating what you asked for. You could try fixing the output yourself, but at that point it's no longer just AI, it becomes a mix of digital art and AI "art" with all the other problems the latter carries with it such as copyright, constant output reprocessing and especially energy consumption as making one crappy looking output takes way too much power for it to be viable in the long term.
An artist using references doesn't just copy and paste, there's a whole process of understanding what they're looking at, their interpretation of it, of why it is like that and of how they can learn something new from it, things that AI generators cannot do. And the "romantic" part is essential because that's what art is about. You make art to transmit a message, an emotion, it isn't just about making something "pretty", that's something contemplated only by naive people who never made art or who don't understand it.