That comment about AI art being "not real art" made me rethink my whole process

I was scrolling through a thread in another group last night and someone said that digital artists who use AI are just "button pushers" and don't actually create anything. It stung because I've been mixing AI-generated bases with my own hand-painted details for about 8 months now. Sometimes I spend 6 hours layering textures and fixing edges on a piece that started from an AI prompt. The person who said that probably never sat in front of a tablet at 2 AM trying to get a shadow to look right on a dragon wing. I guess my takeaway is that people see the tool, not the hours of tweaking behind it. Has anyone else here found a way to explain their mixed process to skeptics without sounding defensive?

2 comments

2 Comments

holly_gonzalez6112d ago

Oh man, that button pusher comment hit close to home. I spent three hours last week fighting with a texture layer because the AI gave me a rock face that looked like mashed potatoes and I had to manually redo every single crack and crevice. I guess I'm a button pusher with really carpal tunnel thumbs now. What gets me is people act like we're just typing "pretty dragon" and collecting praise. More like typing "pretty dragon" then staying up until 3 AM fixing the left wing because the AI decided it should be a noodle.

johnson.lee12d ago

Three hours on a texture layer is a lot, but it sounds like you chose to do that. Nobody forced you to stay up until 3 AM fixing a wing. The AI gave you a base, you just didn't like it. That's the whole thing with these tools - they spit out raw material, not finished art. If you want something specific, you're always going to have to tweak it, whether you drew it from scratch or not. People call them button pushers because the heavy lifting of generating the thing is done in seconds, not days. The rest is just polishing, which is work, but it's not the same as the original creation process.