I disagree, one time I asked AI to draw Judas' hands and it made the stack of coins in his hands cast a shadow in the middle of his palm that looked like the stigmata. I did have to feed it the idea of there being silver coins and "red liquid,/ and a rope necklace" but by selecting what I wanted it to be drawing from (pictures and statues of saints, therefore basically entirely public domain) and having a keen eye for what I was looking for (photography, after all, is 90% selection), I got a lot of intent in there! Haven't really done anything with it since, because I don't have any other projects that would avoid the sourcing issue that well/working around the fact that the sites demand you ask for squeaky clean prompts is annoying.

this is a good point and not a type of ai program use i was addressing in the original post, but fwiw i don’t think we actually disagree

like, a camera is also a tool that allows people to generate images that prior to its invention could only be produced through sometimes-inaccessible levels of skill and practice, but it’s still possible to take bad pictures. you get out what you put in. you got a lot of intent in your generated picture because you HAD a lot of intent, and the skills necessary to effectively use the tool

the thing is, the actual, stated goal of a lot of ‘ai artists’ is to make artistic skill itself obsolete/less valuable, for some godforsaken reason. and they’re trying to accomplish this by feeding examples of the result of that skill into a machine until it can replicate everything they understand about it without learning anything themselves.

what i’m saying, and i think your example here supports this if anything, is any image produced with that primary motivation is going to fail in its purpose because even aside from any ethical/intellectual property issues, it’s self-defeating. cameras didn’t make art obsolete, they just gave us a new way to make art.

and it also feels relevant to note that to this day one of the best compliments a photograph can receive is “it looks just like a painting”