[wpietri]

It's a different skill than pushing a pencil around, sure, but that's a small portion of what people learn on the way to being good at visual art. I'm terrible at it but know some people who are quite skilled. They are worlds beyond me in terms of composition and expression.

Right now naively generated AI images are having their day, but I expect we'll soon get over that. I think the real future is in visual artists who closely collaborate with future generations of ML systems that are much more tractable and responsive. I expect a lot of that iteration will involve pretty traditional art skills, because those are time-tested ways to convey visual information.

[petra]

I've read a little bit about prompt engineering. The author said the stuff he needed to learn to be good at using stable diffusion, is about art history - knowing many art styles and their parts.

So basically, you read over a book(with amazing art) over, know your terms(or maybe know how to use a neat visual dictionary), and now you can paint in many art styles.

Of course there will be some more learning while playing with stable diffusion and getting a feel how to talk to it.

But it's very far from the old skill of neing an artist, not much knowledge will transfer.