I’m a technical artist, so wielding tech to make art is my thing. I come from a dev background but just graduated from art school this year.

I reckon there are some hurdles to overcome before seeing a lot of non-technical generative AI imaging uptake among advanced and professional artists. A) most of these tools UIs aren’t useful to traditional artists in any part of the direct creation process yet, B) the prompt-based workflow, conceptually, doesn’t fit into traditional art processes so it’s essentially starting from scratch, and C) some vocal denizens of the DIY NN scene have done a fine job of making it as unappealing as possible to traditional artists.

I know plenty of artists— both commercial artists and professional fine artists— that use simpler generative tools like midjourney for mood boards, reference, etc. but don’t know a single one that directly uses the output to make art.

One big problem is that the UIs of all local stable diffusion front ends are not designed for people to make art— they’re designed for people to operate a neural network image generator. From a technical perspective, that’s the same thing, but from an interface design perspective, it is a very different goal, and it shows. For people that are enamored with the technology, or for people with a technical background that are used to wielding a bunch of abstract acronyms and don’t have to build up a bunch of base knowledge, that’s great. For people that just want to express themselves and already have another way to do so, it’s a huge, annoying impediment. (And while it’s done with the best of intentions (usually,) assuming non-technical artists will be as enriched by the technical knowledge and tools much as technical people without art expertise comes across as pretty conceited.)

Another problem is that getting an image generator to create things in a way that makes sense in a normal artistic process is difficult. Art, generally, is about building things from broad stroke base to the finest finishing details with direct, granular control, and deciding/discovering what that finished piece will look like while you go, with all of the kismet and happy accidents that go with that process. You don’t usually make huge changes after you’ve polished it up because you probably wouldn’t have gotten that far with an element that didn’t work. When you start with something that has all of the “finished product” detail implemented already, that entire process is turned upside down. It’s distracting. Think about the way Bob Ross worked his way through a painting— do you think he would even want a workflow where he used words to describe a completed painting and then decided things he wanted to change about it? Not being an artist, encountering that tool is incredibly freeing. When you’ve put a bunch of time and practice into figuring out how to wield that artistic perspective and then use the tools you prefer to build and develop your visions from raw ingredients, it’s restrictive, disorienting. The thing you’ve been organically growing into for years that makes your art yours— the way you make basic shapes, flicks of the pencils or brush, ways that you might subconsciously separate tiny little background elements from each other, all of which are equally applicable with digital tools— is missing from this piece and has been replaced with an amalgam of many other artists hands. That’s the reason many people like generative image stuff: you don’t have to understand all of the tiny little components that make a piece what it is and just think about the objects and comparatively very-broad-stroke style. You’ve lost the verbs and adverbs from your process and are left only with nouns and adjectives.

Also, while obviously not representative of the user base on a whole, the active, vocal community of stans that can’t distinguish between Reddit and the rest of their interactions have done a great job of alienating traditional artists. Their gleefully predicting the obsolescence of traditional artists— using tools built with their work without permission, no less — makes it tough to tap into that excitement. A lot of us have mouths to feed, mortgages to pay, and cancer to treat, and while many disciplines are not as vulnerable as many think, people like concept artists are actively being screwed over because tech money decided they want to get paid for our hard-won skills instead of artists. This alone makes it a tougher sell than it should be.