The cost of purchasing a course related to IT proffession is quite on a high side in our world today, still lots of competition out there, a lot of people searching for clients using different advertising methods making it harder to find clients.
the competition will continue to exist, you have to be prepared for that but only those who have added value will survive and dominate the hearts of consumers.
before AI, competition only happened between humans but now it's different, with AI amateur web designers look professional but is the (purely human) web designer market threatened? the answer is no -- you must be ready to compete with millions of other web designers, show your clients that they have chosen the right person to handle their web design and give discounts or other services that can attract potential customers to choose you.
and when you have got consumers, then take care of them so they can continue to order (you handle updating their site design continuously) and even ask your client for help to market it to friends (companies) they might know.
The fact you mentioned about AI is quite accurate actually. Nowadays, a beginner in web designing can easily curate a stunning web design utilizing an AI model such as ChatGPT, all they need is to have a basic understanding of the coding syntaxes that are used in web designing only to rectify things that AI might have missed.
In such times, a web designer who is serious about their work will surely need to keep themselves updated with all new and old programming, designing and scripting languages so that he can stay ahead of the competition.