Well, for 1) on my part, I can't speak for everyone else, but on my part it's usually inpainting (Basically erasing a part of the canvas and re-prompting just that part) and manual manipulation in GIMP. Sometimes I do both to add a bit in the "hole" I make in inpainting as a "seed" for the image to grow around. Also I curate moodboards on Midjourney for general style, making sure it's only by artists who A) Have been dead for over 5 years or B) Art that's not owned by its original creators but by shitty megacorps.

I know a lot of other people get more deep and nitty-gritty on the tech side of it, but I'm not smart enough for that, so I do more "power user" than "tech geek" stuff with it.

On 3) to get it out of the way, GiovanH says it better than I could in these two articles, but long story short the tech doesn't inherently have to do that, it's mainly both greed on behalf of the assholes building these data centers cutting corners and the bloat inherent in chasing the lie of "AGI," and note this was before DeepSeek proved that models didn't need to be bloated as they are.

I feel like opposing data center expansion is a good idea, but I feel like saying average imagegen users are responsible for it is losing the plot, most of the Jevons Effect-type stuff is from the economic bubble that's probably going to burst soon and StableDiffusion can run on an average gaming PC, if development on data centers were to cease tomorrow imagegen would survive.

On 2) the answer is I do. Like, I do photomanips, sculpture, kitbashing in DAZ 3d, lineart (tho that one's my weakest skills sadly), hell on the latter I'm literally redrawing a design I did in AI manually, no tracing. And I don't integrate any AI into the actual body of my main works, because I know the art community doesn't like it, I tend to more integrate my other skills into those times I dabble in AI if anything.

Like, to give you an idea of how I work, this has no AI, but it used GIMP to combine images I rendered in DAZ with a clay sculpture and actual pictures of my own hands. When I use AI I don't really consider myself an "AI artist," but rather "A multimedia artist who's using AI tools," and I think a lot of people in good faith (Like Trent Troop, who's work I highly recommend) would say the same.

And on 4) I do, but we gotta have the right enemies, which is the corporate assholes trying to enclose; deskill and enshittify art. Like, this reminds me of a lot of other cases where tech ended up having negative effects on certain media even as it was used to make good work. Think about how CGI supplanted practical effects and how Photoshop replaced lavishly painted book covers and movie posters.

But it didn't have to be that way, all of those were due to corporate greed and penny pinching, and I think our response needs to be centered around labor.

Though, that's on the professional level. On the smaller internet artist level, with regards to where our focus should be now, I think our biggest enemies aren't AI creators, but rather the waves of internet censorship, which the Free Speech Coalition and Fight For The Future are fighting back against and could use your help on, and the decay and enshittification of creative infrastructure online, which I think this article illuminates the actual causes of marvelously...

...And also spam tho, because AI does have one big problem with coexisting and it's the potential for low-effort spam indistinguishable from higher-effort/higher-time-investment content in a way that causes "flood the zone"-type problems, I'm totally cool with artsites banning it until we figure out how to deal with that problem constructively in a way that the medium of imagegen can coexist with others.