@lokeloski whenever I do end up trying to use gen AI for anything, it's precisely because I know I'm not good at whatever I ask it to do, knowing it'll spit out something mediocre to either use as a placeholder so I can at least move on with the stuff I am good at or as something that's "good enough" if it's of lower importance but still needs to be present. If it was as quick and... dirt cheap to commission, that might be good for me but let's be real, commissioning stuff from people who actually know what they're doing shouldn't be paid bargain-bin style.

Some of my D&D characters have faces now because this one time I messed around with Stable Diffusion a little. It's not something I'd have been able to justify spending money on to get commissioned, and the results from the gen AI were mediocre at best but they serve their purpose of visualising my characters at least more than just words on paper. I don't have an amazingly vivid imagination and I definitely don't have that of anyone else so sometimes it's just convenient to have a visual representation that can be shared with others in this case.

And tbf a lot of the time when I want AI to fill in the gaps, it's not actually good enough to do so. The sad reality is that even with the more ethical approach of using AI as a tool to help with productivity rather than replacing people, it's usually not nearly good enough to actually help. Oftentimes, just struggling to do it yourself anyway and producing something crappy is still better than an AI generated hallucination that looks alright at first but progressively gets worse with every passing second of looking at it. I'll sometimes use it for stuff that it's sufficiently okay at and when it makes sense, and will certainly never claim credit for what pops out of it. But besides that it's just often not even useful in the first place.