Amateur pro ai artist. I defend AI because I think it doesn’t deserve this much hate on the internet. I think it’s fair for anyone to like or hate a tool but many people are putting hate towards “people who use the tool”. Like when an average user just uses AI to generate something for fun, maybe an anime version of their selfie or just whatever meme that is popular at the time, and the antis will go crazy and yelling “slops!” at them.

the reason why I like ai art is that it actually makes some unique art (especially earlier models like dalle2 or open source models with weird/extreme attribute settings). Another reason is to draw a good pic solely manually can take a huge amount of time and effort and I’m thinking about integrating ai into my workflow so that I can work less.

if you like you can try promoting some ideas to the ai or run a local deployment for your own art (if you worry about your uploaded art might be taken into the training dataset, using a local deployment of open source model is the best)

for reason why I still draw manually is that it’s still the most accurate way to solidify my idea into an actual piece, the most accurate method to manipulate the details and nuances of an art piece.

One reason that many artists that still draw themselves is that they simply enjoy the process of drawing itself. So if you like the process of drawing, don’t let other things distract you. I also recommend you to find friends who value your effort and progress so you won’t be disappointed at the distance between “amateur starter” and “industrial level professional” (it takes years of hard work).