I believe AI (whether for images or other things) is first and foremost a tool. I remember shortly after the GenZedong exodus here we even played a bit with AI image generation. (There was even a thread for generating images, but idk if it’s still around anymore or if the bot dedicated to it still works.) Although this was when AI was just getting popular. I would much rather write stuff with my own words and do my own research instead of rely on something like ChatGPT or Grok to do the same though.

Personally, I’m not a big fan of the commodified AI slop nowadays, (although you can blame capitalism for that, and AI, with its pattern detection, only accentuates the soulless nature of capitalism) but it is clearly here to stay. Although if used well, AI can be actually entertaining. (Neuro-Sama for example)

My main concern with AI is privacy and transparency. Services like Google have recently been pushing for AI in places that involve your personal information such as your phone, and they make the excuse that collecting your data is needed for training their AI. If AI was fully open-source and trained exclusively on voluntarily given data instead of scraping it without permission, it probably wouldn’t have the bad rep it has currently.

Edit: Deepfakes are also potentially problematic IMO. As AI image and video generation gets better, it may become harder to discern if something is real or if it is AI generated in the near future, so I believe that an AI use disclosure should be absolutely necessary.