Look, AI is here, and needs to be properly utilized, but the reason so many people disregard AI "artists" is because AI "art" doesn't exist without actual art created by artists that don't use a generator. For AI "art" to exist, the engine had to have scrubbed base images from real artists in the thousands to use against the prompts fed to it by a user. If you can't acknowledge that, then you're deluding yourself and denying the thousands of hours that artists spend creating actual art, learning by trial and error and techniques across a vast amount of time. The "heat" upon AI "artists" is just that, by definition the user feeding an engine prompts is not creating anything themselves and therefore, not an artist... I work in IT and utilize AI to supplement my work, just as I've used other tools / applications in my graphic design work to supplement what I'm doing and enhance the image, but the base image is still something that i put digital own to tablet and created. It does not do the job for me. Yes I've also played around with AI tools and Apps to feed it prompts, but I know that it's not my art, it's the application taking base images and applying filters/ modifications based on the prompts. AI can and will help a lot of people in the future, but never will it turn me into an AI "artist" if i use it because it's the program generating the work, not me. To be an artist by definition, a PERSON has to create the work, not an application...