[Paracompact]

> One other thing I'll tack on here is that I find it fascinating that the kinds of skills required to be "good" at using these image generation models — "prompt engineering" if you like — are largely different than the ones required to create art from scratch.

As someone intimately-amateurly involved with AI artwork over the past six months, I've come to disagree with the term "prompt engineering" as a description of the skillset. It's not just feeding it a good prompt (which is not that much of a puzzle once you get into it, and is close to being a solved problem in my book), but instead a whole iterative pipeline of human-in-the-loop hacks and touchups in order to make up for the tech's existing faults and unwieldiness. Many aspects of this pipeline, interestingly, are already familiar to digital artists.

I think the specifics of this pipeline will continue to change on a weekly basis until we reach a plateau in the technologies. But, novelty lies at the heart of all art: I don't think the pipeline will ever be replaced by one-shot, completely automated and brainless txt2img processes. Even if the difference between "beginner artist" and "expert artist" shrinks to a hair's breadth because of access to AI, it goes back to that xkcd quote, "Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit." We will continue to instinctually desire and respect the efforts of people who go the extra mile to create something just a little more perfect or a little more original.