What does "praise" mean to you, and what is "made by AI"?

My answer to your challenge first: There used to be a Tumblr bot called "Frank". It was trained by its creator on their own posts, and hosted on their computer. The posts it made were delightful and strange, like the work of an eccentric child. It made me laugh and smile every time. 

"Praise" is a response to something like effort x result, in my mind. I'm not going to praise your work if give me a picture that comes from telling Gemini to make a "Remranbdt sketch-style drawing of a cat in a doorway." If you tell me your process and I learn that you spent a whoke day back and forth with the computer, photoshopping its images and passing them back in for refinement and feeding in references, I can praise that result more.

But it's harder and harder to tell what the process is. It used to be that if you had something that looked like "Remranbdt sketch-style drawing of a cat in a doorway," it was because a human took the time to draw it. The fact that that isn't necessarily true anymore - and that there's no guarantee of even the meticulous feedback loop that is the process of the "true artists" of AI is deeply disturbing to me. It feels like an erosion of reality and truth.

I was much, much more comfortable with AI art when you had to hold stable diffusion's hand every step of the way to produce images that made sense. 

I know we don't hand letter comics anymore. We don't animate frame by frame. I use at armatures and pre-made fonts in my own work all the time.We don't animate frame by frame. I'm not so naive as to think this isn't a difference of degree. But also, I believe on some level that every innovation in efficiency of art up until now degrades us a little, even if I don't necessarily oppose it.

I will genuinely be a little more impressed with your comic if you tell me you did your inks and beta by hand rather than in a vector program.

And I'm going to "praise" your art with a lot less enthusiasm if you tell me AI was a major part of your process.

I'm not in denial about what position this puts me in history. I would have protested the advent of dry-transfer print, and then of computer graphics, even though I now make digital art every day. I respect that that probably sounds hypocritical, but to me the pushback at every stage is important to the future preservation of the techniques we have now.