When DALLE-3 dropped 2 or 3 years ago, I was right in those threads fucking around with it like everyone else. It was a very cool new toy, and it was funny seeing what other people were coming up with. A lot of the threads were boring 1girl pinups, but sometimes someone would drop something cool or funny. I wanted to see how far I could push it, and started feeding the names of some obscure horror mangaka into my prompts to see if it would understand. It ended up generating some work that I still think legitimately looks good. I wouldn't call myself an artist. I was feeding the same block of text into the toy 10, 20 times and cherrypicking the best looking images of the bunch. While it was generating, I was wasting time fucking around here. I definitely wasn't engaged in the creative process.

What happened to me was, I was showing some of this crap off before the internet was flooded with AI slop and everyone learned how to identify it at a glance. Someone says to me, "Hey, that series look cool! What's it called? I'd love to check it out." and I say, "Well, there is no series! An AI made this picture! Isn't that kinda neat?" and he responds to me "Aw man, that sucks. I wish there was some substance behind it." I thought it over for a while, and I found out that I agreed with him. It's a cardboard cut-out. I can't beg my friends to read it or watch it. I can't engage with a community of people who also like it. I can't marvel at the talent someone has to be able to write it, draw it, and ink it. A machine spat it out in 120 seconds while I did something else. There's no vision behind it, it's not part of a larger story, it's just showing off an aesthetic that I found cool at the time. I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with generating AI pictures, but they're not 'art'.