To start this off, as the title says, I'm a beginner artist. I'm not sure how much, if at all, that comes into play here, but keep that in mind. Anyway, getting into the meat of it, I first found out about this stuff through Marques Brownlee's video on Dall-E 2. I was completely blown away at the time and it turned out that's around the time it really started to take off. I yearned for a model I could use, and thought how in maybe 5 years I could be generating anything I can imagine. That day came a lot sooner than I expected.

When StableDiffusion was announced and demonstrated, it was just about all I could've asked for. Open source, able to be modified and trained however you want, can even be run locally. Truly the Linux of AI. With that said though, it turns out it is heavily dependent on the model. Stuff like NovelAI and MidJourney are beyond insane, but others are barely even passable. But after coming back to it and using NovelAI last night, I'd say that's a good thing. The capabilities with what I thought were really simple prompts were astonishing. It was creating things that at times were so good you could slap it on a poster for an anime and no one would bat an eye. Mind you we're still less than a year into this.

Granted, there are limitations, I can't ask for literally anything on any model. At the same time, SD being the way that it is allows anyone to create a model to generate whatever that thing is. Give it 5 years, and there will be models for just about anything you can ask for.

Now, onto the elephant in the room. Is it art, is it stealing, and can someone say that it's theirs*?*

To answer the first question, I'd argue yes, but not in the sense that it's a drawing. I'd say it's akin to photography vs painting. They're too very different things, but they serve an ultimately similar purpose. It's still used to express oneself, even if it is just imputing specific words into a certain program. I'm not here to argue on whether or not it's the effort that counts, and what that means, I'm just saying what I felt when generating my stuff on NAI.

As for it being theft, I'd say no, but I can definitely see why one can think that, and that sort of leads into the next question. However, for this specifically, I'd say it's different enough from base works that it can't be considered theft. Maybe more akin to an easier fanart, in some cases. However, I'm not expert on this, and I'd love to hear more skilled artist's and programmer's thoughts alike.

As for saying it's someone's creation akin to a drawing kind of seems disingenuous. Sure, I helped the AI come to its conclusion, but it just doesn't feel like I made it. If it's a back and forth of improvement, you feed it a rough outline, it gives back something better, you improve that and so on, then yeah, it's yours. If you're just generating it from scratch, I just wouldn't feel right saying it's mine.

I'm not sure where this all will go, but I think it's a really cool tool, and I think it will end up helping a lot of artists once the initial stigma it has right now goes away. I also think it will help a lot of people who don't have the time or money to learn how to draw create things that they always wanted to. I'd also even say a lot of commissions for real artists will still exist, albeit more competitively because I'd say half of a commission is for the art, and the other half is for or because of the artist making it. These are just predictions for the 2020s, I can't say what will happen further down the road.

In the end, there's a lot more I could go into, but this is long enough as is. Also, these are all just my opinions, and I'd love to hear more. Maybe I'll learn or hear something I didn't think of. I'm not too passionate either way, so go nuts. Thank you!