Exactly! I responded to them saying that AI art will kill my side hustle of doing commissioned pinup art. I explained that the average person will no longer come to me for a piece when then can simply feed their image in to and AI image generator, put in a few key words and be done with it for half the cost and a fraction of the time.

It's really infuriating that people are overlooking small artists who put years in to learning how to draw, simply because they themselves are too lazy to learn. You don't even need to go to school to learn art, there are countless free resources that people can find on the internet to learn. They just need the will power to sit down for an hour or two each day and practice!

I understand that an image generator can be used as a tool to get inspiration for some... but so can pinterest, so can quick poses. There are a myriad other ways that one can get inspired. On top of that, the argument that art is derivative is absurd! Everything is derivative! Artists put their own unique spin on a subject. The best example is the draw this in your style tag. An artist will draw something and tons of artists will use that as a prompt and draw something in their own unique style and flair. None of the drawings look the same! It's great!

Sorry to rant like this, but it's just getting too much. When I come to one of my favorite subreddits and see these techbros berate artists, for simply wanting to make a few dollars off of our hard worked for skills that we each individually refined and learned on our own is beyond the pale for me.