[Spivak]

If you just go into the Midjourney Discord you'll see people with absolutely no mechanical artistic talent be create absolutely stunning novel art. The creativity people have there is crazy and the AI is letting them go from head to canvas in a few seconds.

[bogwog]

When I see AI art from those communities, it all looks the same to me.

People tend to overestimate their talent, and get overly attached to their own ideas. So when a tool like midjourney/stable diffusion generates beautiful artwork based on a low effort prompt from the user, it's comfy to think that they had a big part in it.

The reality is that almost everything those tools make is equally gorgeous/amazing regardless of who uses it, so they're effectively interchangeable. As a tool for personal expression, it has a lot of value because of the impact it can have on the individual using it, but as art it's pretty worthless. A generated AI image could potentially have some cultural impact or value, but not on the merits of "it looks pretty", since they all look like that.

[tablatom]

> as art it's pretty worthless

My experience browsing midjourney supports this. It's amazing how quickly you go from "wow" to "whatever". But that's probably cold comfort for a huge number of jobbing illustrators. Paying clients typically don't want art.