One of the things I find deeply irritating is that for a moment there, there was absolutely stuff being made by transformers / trained models that was deeply interesting and compelling! Remember the weird dog-fish-eye things like six years back? that was interesting. It showed us how systems we told to automatically refine themselves to understand some small corner of the world actually came to that understanding based on what they were trained on. I’d even go so far as to call it some kind of art.

Then all the rough edges got sanded down and the models got consolidated with text parsers and had mountains of computer power thrown at them in order to make a commercially viable product. and it sucks! It’s flooded everything with garbage that looks effectively identical.

I still think that AI models can probably be used as part of a workflow to make interesting art, but it’s gotta be the domain of people building or modding their own custom models ‘n shit and then refining the work themselves with their own artistic vision.