Inside the surreal world of $20,000 pet portraits

Damn I need to start doing pet portraits for money. I've done some freebies for family but apparently I've been missing out on piles of sweet rich people cash.

I assumed that it's only a matter of time until AI makes it trivial to generate these kinds of composite images. Then it's just a matter of tracing it onto canvas and painting over. You can already get paintings of your pet done overseas for quite cheap, I assume they will transition to this workflow to be even faster.

Money laundering.