I don't think you understand the point. Your claims that "all of this needs extensive tuning and hand-holding and picking results" do not help your argument, they help _mine_.

Most egregious if you are even doing more tuning and cherry picking that the authors of the models are doing, which you definitely are.

It sounds magic to you because you are unskilled. Like people using the mouse for the first time. The things he talks about are very basic, very easy.

I could spend 20,000 hours trying to learn to draw and I would still be far worse than what I could generate with Stable Diffusion + Control Net + etc.

I'm fairly sure if you can best stable diffusion after 7 years of daily 8h investment into drawing :)

I doubt you would be better than someone who would use Stable Diffusion for 7 years. and I don’t even include the technological advancements in the next 7 years.

I don't think writing SD prompts compounds like actually make art from scratch does. It's kind of inherent right? Because one is derivative (with a bunch of computer science) and one is from people. You can be cynical and say all art is derivative, I guess.

Learning to draw at the level of what Stable Diffusion can generate would take thousands of hours of practice, and the individual drawings would take hours.

But if you do learn, you can then render photorealistic image with nothing but pencil and paper instead of being reliant on a beefy computer running a blackbox model trained at enormous cost :)

SD will never compare to the power of pencil and paper imo. Drawing is an essential skill for any visual artist not just for mechanics but for developing style, taste, and true understanding of the world around you visually.

I recommend Freehand Figure Drawing for Illustrators as a good starting point (along with some beginner art lessons). It won't take 1k hours before you see results. It's also fun!

> But if you do learn, you can then render photorealistic image with nothing but pencil and paper instead of being reliant on a beefy computer running a blackbox model trained at enormous cost :)

Why do I want to avoid that reliance, other than to be smug to the nerds? And as far as general self-satisfaction, let's assume I would rather master a different skill with the time it would take.

Especially because that training cost only has to be done once, so on a per-person basis it beats learning to draw by a lot.

If you said something about flexibility and specificity of what you can create I could get behind that, but I think the arguments you're making are very unconvincing.

You can optimize that: feed SD a sketch, get a finished painting as a result.

It works surprisingly well.

Having spent several orders of magnitude more time working on drawing than with SD, I’ll say “Drawing isn’t hard for some people”.

If drawing was that easy, no one would worry about disruption from AI image generators, because everyone who wanted images would be knocking them out by hand, not paying people for them, so there’d be nothing to disrupt.

Anyone can learn to draw, and it's not hard. If you want to create, you can and will learn to draw.

Therefore, I would say most people hyped for SD and friends are the capitalists and consumers of the art world - not the creators.

> Anyone can learn to draw, and it's not hard.

Repeating an assertion more times doesn’t make it true.

> If you want to create, you can and will learn to draw.

“Drawing”, even when it comes to imagery, is far from the only form of creation, and, even if it were, will is not determinative of capacity.

But, yeah, I mean, people have said similar things about basically evey new means of creation ever.

SD isn't creation imo. I have used it + followed stuff made with it, and I don't care how much people rebrand it as prompt engineering. Its consumption. Just because some imagination is involved in the query doesn't make it creation.

> SD isn't creation imo. I have used it + followed stuff made with it, and I don't care how much people rebrand it as prompt engineering. Its consumption. Just because some imagination is involved in the query doesn't make it creation.

No, the fact that something is made with it makes it creation. Imagination makes it creative, on top of being creation.

The problem I see here is you are trying to insert your moral/aesthetic judgement of the quality/value of the mechanism/process of creation into the objective description of whether creation is happening, probably because you have subscribed to a worldview which valorizes creation and denigrates consumption so accepting something you don’t want valorized as “creation” is incompatible with that worldview.

You can just say you don't like Generative AI and wish people wouldn’t use it. You don’t need to declare that creating things with it isn’t creation to try to mask your (valid as any other) aesthetic preference in a very silly circumlocution designed to resemble an objective description, albeit a patently self-contradictory one.

I mean I actually do think AI art isn't actually art - philosophically. It's not being snooty it's based on years of studying and thinking about art from a philosophical perspective.

The best artists are the ones that adapt to both, generating an initial image and using it as scaffolding to paint over. Drawing and using a diffusion model are not mutually exclusive concepts.