@Humpleupagus @skylar @lonestarr @Goalkeeper @bronze @EdBoatConnoisseur @cunnyoisseur @mischievoustomato I view AI art in the same way I view every other technological advancement in the creative fields. It's just another medium. Painting didn't go away when the camera was invented. Live performances are still how musicians make the majority of their money. Synth didn't destroy real instruments. It shifts demographics a little, but I think as long as there is somebody doing a thing, there will be people who enjoy the thing.

There is AI art out there that is pretty cool, but a lot of it I personally just kind of view it as kind of cheap. Make no mistake, there is real art like that too. Likening it back to music, I don't see any real difference between someone who just puts a bunch of loops together and someone who prompts an AI to make some song.

I also think that the kinds of people who were paying for art in the first place aren't going to suddenly stop paying for it because they can just generate stuff instead. I like the kind of personality each artist brings to the table, and if I'm commissioning something it's extremely nice to be able to give them a bunch of references and more complex ideas. Then I don't have to fiddle around with an AI and watch it like a hawk for an hour just so I can get something relatively close to what I was picturing. On the flipside, I'm not going to ask an artist to draw a picture of a random NPC in my D&D campaign. Beforehand I would just find a picture online that looked kind of similar, now I can generate one that looks a little bit more similar (although even that usually takes some time).

What I'm mostly getting at is that I don't think it actually affects artists *that much* at the end of the day. Perhaps it does a little bit, but not in a way that's dissimilar from any other technological advancement. The only thing that is really annoying about it to me is just how much of it gets shit out, especially if it's taking up space on a website like pixiv or something. I think it's totally fine (preferable, even) to segregate it. I also hate how it's the only thing that comes up on Google images anymore, because I don't always want some AI slop coming up when I search for "white knight on horse" you know what I mean?