chapotraphouse

if a prompt produces a style that an artist would like to learn from, they can't really easily repeat it,

A little tangentially, I've ironically found that it can be a good learning and practice tool in one particular way: spotting and fixing its mistakes. Like I originally learned how to edit images well about a decade ago when I went through and digitized and cleaned up hundreds of my grandfather's old slides, and trying to clean up an AI's mistakes has a similar feel to trying to clean up lines and mildew spots on an old photo. You have to think about why it's wrong and what technique you can do to fix it without making it more wrong, basically.

It sucks to be at such a precarious position in my career because of this, and struggling harder than I was several years ago because of this new technology that people say is "great and wonderful" just being nothing bu all around awful for both myself and society as a whole. It isn't the fault of AI art itself though, just the nature of capitalism to make everything worse in the name of profit.

Yep. Everything capitalists will use it for is bad, and the response I've settled on is to encourage leftists and artists to try to take that ball and run with it, to exploit it the same way capitalists will but for the sake of independent works or agitprop instead. The only positive I see to it is that it's like if past skilled tradesmen being made obsolete by new tech could just summon up that capital for themselves, like if a simple hammer could have been made to also be an industrial press just by telling it how to be that, because that's what we can do with open-source AI so to speak - that wouldn't make the factories less bad, but it would have meant the factory owners lacked a monopoly on industrial capital.