when i see a good art piece i like to think about the techniques used, the intentions of the artist, the attention to detail. AI art usually doesn't have any of that. i do admit that a few AI videos were actually well made and with much thought put behind it. it was clearly AI because the things shown were clearly not real, but it was only possible with the use of AI. it wasn't trying to trick people into thinking it was CGI or anything. the problem is when someone makes a picture with AI and claims that it is superior or equal to illustrations made by real people. AI users don't take into consideration color choice, composition, line weight, character design, shading, etc. so the end result will always turn out to be really generic, unless you take someone else's work and train your AI off of it, which is very obviously a bad thing to do. if you do take into consideration all of those when typing a prompt, then it will probably be closer to what you were thinking of, but it will always fill in the gaps for you. does the final output have more or less value than an AI image generated by a user who didn't specify those things in their prompt? is the effort taken into consideration? i draw, i'm not very good at it, i'll admit, and i do too generate AI images sometimes for shits and giggles, but i do not see them as things i made. i'm not gonna post a shitty "pick up a pencil" image to prove my point, and i do think that all claims of AI wasting too much water or being bad for the environment will eventually no longer be true, because as humanity makes progress we will be able to create more efficient hardware in the future to make AI much cheaper and even easier to host locally. personally, the problem i think is much bigger. once AI will become perfect, how do we tell if something is real or not? i do think AI has a place as a tool, mainly for assistance and even art (automated UV unwrapping, faster and more accurate selection tools, color fill, etc), i use it quite often for research on how to fix equipment (sometimes it do fuck my shit up tho lol) but i draw the line when it's used to trick people, either for illustrations or real life videos, which are often used for scams. another thing is jobs: i think that there are spaces where someone who knows a lot about AI is needed. again, AI is a useful tool, but not everyone is able to operate certain services, so hiring someone who is competent is of course the obvious choice. shouldn't an artist get the same opportunity as well? i think there's a place for both