I have been watching tutorials for making art with automatic generators, because I'm working on a zine about that, and I did not want to actually use a generator at any point so I figured that was the best next thing. and I was actually kind of surprised by it!
I suspected that the entire process of making art with generators can't be just "write a description in a box and get a sick picture" because some of these tutorials are over an *hour* long. and while the process is based on that, there's also a lot of image editing, converting and moving files between programs, and in general just a lot of software tinkering. generator-assisted processes are creative processes, even if the author is never drawing, nor animating.
and that's kind of the point of this post: the people using generators don't want to draw. what they want is to learn how to use and tinker with several software programs.
I think that's completely fair (drawing is not for everybody!), but it also means that telling "ai artists" to pick up a pen and draw is a fundamental misunderstanding of why they do what they do. if we want to offer them an alternative as a means to get them to stop using image generators it can't be to "actually draw"; it needs to appeal to their editing and software skills. something like pulling stock pictures from a public bank, rather than generating them.
