Again, I appreciate your candor and genuine interest in discussion (as an OG from that other place, this is a breath of fresh air, frankly)

Thanks, certainly, and same. Indeed, I guess one nice thing that’s come out of our little exodus to the FV is that there’s more positive, invested user-engagement, and less casuals & ‘herd activity.’ Haha, at least for now.

Also, and just personally, it makes me feel honored that I was evidently the first to create a BD-themed community in the FV, and as a result, I have much residual goodwill towards the sub, my instance, and Lemmy in general.

Anyway, it doesn’t sound like we’re far apart on the issues, moreso that we’re coming from different activity & experience POV’s. It also occurs to me, based on your explanations, that it might just be that the traditional concept of “artist” is less useful than formerly. Sorta makes me curious if William Gibson coined any good anticipatory terminology in his “Neuromancer” series (that I haven’t read for ages).

1) The fact is that the vast majority of skillfully created “AI generated” artwork (graphical or otherwise) requires not only thousands upon thousands of hours of high level coding, database training, and testing, 2) but even then the end-user is required to compose and refine each prompt in the pursuit of their vision, making innumerable creative choices along the way.

1) Right, for sure. Those folks are like arch-mages to me, or whatnot. Indistinguishable from magic. :P

2) “Innumerable,” really? I’ve never really got that impression from the MidJourney posters, but what do I know? I’ve only played with the lower-tier free AI’s so far, and despite the quality being relatively crap (plus random-ish), it was pretty clear who was doing the heavy lifting there. Do you know of any good examples (like, articles) of people talking about the process of refining their prompts and settings?