Raw LLM Responses

While its totally understable that artists use AI poisoning to protect their IP, it is still a very privileged and gatekeeping take to tell people to 'just pick a pen and paper'. Proper drawing skill is a serious time investment which can take literal years to master and not everyone has the time resource to do that. I think a majority of full-time employees fall behind that category. If you are doing a complex pet project (a game for example), it requires several skill sets; you may be good at programming or music design but lack in other departments. For this scenario AI really is a helping hand. The fun part is that, even if you use AI, you still need a lot of personal involvement to actually review the result, correct prompts, do direct editing to achieve acceptable results. Quality AI image creation is in fact a lot of work - setting up the pipeline, prompt engineering, control-net (pose edit, etc), picking up Lora or even do custom model training, upscaling and further detail refining. Its not just 'draw me a monke with a banana', its more like using advanced photoshop. You just do it faster, with lower budget and you can solo the entire project to an acceptable or sellable state. If you dont do at least this much, you receive an 'AI slop' in the end, which has low value. As of right now, even if bigtech AI go bankrup in the future, which is fine, there are free to use models out there, some are even hostable on a customer-grade PC, so the technology will not perish, and the training will continue, but it will be done by individuals rather than corporations.