Oh the Ai art generator has no "soul" and it's soy and reddit? This precious art form (illustrating things that other people pay you to, a medium dominated almost entirely by furries, porn, and furry porn) is being destroyed by the evil AI? I'm sorry that the democratization of art creation is so upsetting to you. I've brought dozens of ideas to life by typing words into a prompt and I didn't have to pay someone $300 to do so.
You didn't bring dozens of ideas to life. A computer found a bunch of other people who already had your idea and composed them together so you could steal them.
It's okay for internal concepting or creating reference images, but you're literally just having a computer take other people's art and mix it together. It's like copying someone's homework and changing some of the wording and claiming you did your homework.
AI art is quite literally worker exploitation (the original artists). If no one makes original art, the AI has nothing to steal from.
This is not how it works, it doesn't just mix images. It learns how to effectively distill images and text into a common representation and how to manipulate this representation to make more palatable images.
That means that you can explain stuff to it and can have enough understanding to know what it should look like.
Think of it like this - the program is only able to store around 40 bytes from every 512x512 image. If it was just copying it wouldn't be able to remember much. It has to find a way to distill an image into something that approaches meaning, and a find a way to go the other way, and find a way to get to this "meaning" from text. The big difference between this and humans is that we are far better at manipulation of "meaning". But this is copying to approximately the same extent as a painter taking a detailed comission copies their environment.
What other scenarios are you imagining?
the ones where people are calling themselves artists and showing me AI art
I'm sorry you're come across annoying stupid people.