AI is going to destroy art the same way Photoshop, or photography, or pre-made tubes of paints, destroyed art. It's a tool, it helps people take the idea in their head and put it in the world. And it lowers the barrier to entry, now you don't need years of practice in drawing technique to bring your ideas to life, you just need ideas.
If AI gets to a point that it can give us creative, original, art that sparks emotion in novel ways...well we probably also made a super intelligent AI and our list of problems is much different than today.
As someone who's absolutely terrible at drawing, but enjoys photography and generally creativity, having AI tools to generate my own art is opening up a whole different avenue for me to scratch my creative itch.
I've got a technical background, so figuring out the tools and modifying them for my purposes has been a lot more fun than practice drawing.
I've only dabbled a bit with ML art, and I am by no means an artist, but it doesn't scratch that itch for me the same way that drawing or doing stuff in blender does. It doesn't really feel like I'm watching my vision slowly take shape, no matter how precise I make the prompt. It kinda just feels like what it is, a transformer iterating over some random noise.
I'm also a very technical person, and for years I was stuck in that same mindset of "I'm a technical guy, I'm not cut out for art". I was only able to get out of this slump thanks to some of my art friends, who were really helpful in pointing me in the right direction.
Learning to draw isn't the easiest thing in the world, and trust me I'm probably as bad at it as you are, but it's fun, and it feels satisfying.
I agree that AI has a place as another artistic medium, but I also feel like it can become a trap for people like me who think they don't have an artistic bone in their body.
If you do feel like getting back into drawing, then as a fellow technical person I'd recommend learning blender first. It taught me some of the skills I also use in drawing, like perspective, shading, and splitting complex objects into simpler shapes. It's also just plain fun.
I think the way I use AI is fundamentally different from how most people draw. For me it's much more like I'm exploring what's possible, while making creative decisions on the direction to explore. I don't start with anything in particular in mind. In a lot of ways it helps with the choice paralysis I get when faced with completely open-ended things like art.
I hate this sentiment. It's not a tool like a brush is to a canvas. It's a machine that runs off the fuel of our creative achievements.
The sheer amount of pro AI shit I read from this place just makes me that closer to putting a bullet in my fucking skull
And if text-based images remain uninspired and samey... oh well? Congratulations, you will foreverafter be able to spot when someone's extremely timely gag image was cranked out via its description, rather than badly composited from Google Images results. I've done a lot of bad compositing for Something Awful shitpost threads and speed beats effort every time.
Some people also doesn't care if there is a Rembrandt or a Picasso or an AI but like to dabble in the arts anyways because it's something they like to do.
Tbh I hate Photoshop for a lot of photography. It is unfortunately necessary for macro photography, which is the only type I do. Which is one of the reasons mine is not nearly as good as it could be because I refuse to use it.