[Brad]

Originally Posted by drewprops How do you know that I'm not actually a computer already? ...

There's been a running gag on Reddit for as many years as I can remember that you are the only human posting. Everyone else and I are bots. Sometimes it feels true. Sometimes it actually is true. There are tons of bots on Reddit (and Twitter and probably all other major social networks).

Originally Posted by kscherer From the images I've seen you guys posting, I'm thinking we'll soon be able to fire most of the world's artists and send them packing! I mean, who needs them, right? Is there anything computers won't be able to do?

This is actually a legitimate concern, and some art-sharing sites are already discussing and debating how to identify, discourage, block, or ban users who submit AI/ML-generated art as their own. This has been a hotly growing topic over the last few months since DALL-E mini took the world by storm.

Ultimately, though, the output is only as good as the input. Stable Diffusion is so good because the models have been trained on billions of labeled images that someone else already made. Photographs. Paintings. Drawings. Scans. Screenshots. Computer graphics. You name it. Remove the artist from the equation, and the whole thing stagnates and stops. These systems are very interesting and really good at synthesizing new-ish things based on old things, but they cannot generate anything truly original in a meaningful way. New vocabulary, new images, and new concepts are still the domain of the human mind. Although a tool like this could spit out something completely random abstract, it's going to be based on preexisting art. It still needs us to interpret, judge and accept or reject as good or bad, and apply meaning to it, and that work would have to be fed back into the models on a massive scale, rinse, and repeat.

So, in the general sense, artists and hobbyists and genuinely creative types aren't going to be out of job for a long time, but there are certainly lots of niches where you do just want something vaguely derivative of something else, and this synthetic art is plenty good enough.