No AI

I'm going to go ahead and say that I am not necessarily opposed to the idea of AI assistance when it comes to digital art and drawing, because it could be a phenomenal time-saving tool, as well as a means of self-expression for disabled artists.

HOWEVER.

This system CANNOT exist as it currently stands, where it's a money-making tool for its creators, who engaged in mass-scale art theft and copyright infringement to create their program. And no, it's not "just like another human looking at an art piece and imitating it." A human artist engaging with someone else's art is BY DEFAULT only able to engage with that art in an interpretive fashion. They see the art through the lens of their own experience and perspective. As such, anything they make, even if it is inspired by something else, is a product of their worldview alone. The current AI image generating algorithm is literally just creating an average plot of every image it was fed. It is not interpretive; it is derivative, and owes every single pixel to the efforts of someone else.

Dismantle the current AI image generators. Start from scratch with art obtained with consent and compensation appropriate for the skilled labour. THEN we can talk about how these images fits into the general art landscape.