[visarga]

> your still working with other people's borrowed humanity usefully pureed and reformed by a machine

Exactly, isn't it amazing? You can travel the latent space of human culture in any direction. It's an endless mirror house where you can explore. I find it an inspiring experience, it's like a microscope that allows zooming into anything.

[chefandy]

Sure it's a lot of fun. I also find it very useful for some things like references and mood boards. No matter how granular you get with control nets or LORAs and how good the models get, you just can't get the specificity needed for professional work and the forms it gives you are just too onerous to mold into a useful shape using professional tools. It's still, fundamentally, asking another thing to make it for you, like work for hire or a commission. Software like Nuke's copycat tool or Adobe's background remover or content-aware fill were professionally useful right off the bat because they were designed for professional use cases. Even then, text prompt image generators are more useful than not in low-effort, high-volume use cases where the extremely granular per-pixel nuance doesn't really matter. I doubt they'll ever be useful enough for anything higher-level than that. It's just fundamentally the wrong interface for this work. It's like saying a bus driver on a specific route with a bus is equally useful to a cab driver with a cab. There are obviously instances where that's true, but no matter how many great things you can show are on that bus route, and no matter how many people it's perfectly suited for, there's just no way a FedEx driver could use it to replace their van.

[mrandish]

Very well said. Agree completely.