Rant: I said AI art was just theft, then a 19 year old at a Denver con showed me her process
She pulled up her layers and showed me she'd painted every texture by hand, then used AI to blend backgrounds for a 40 page comic she sells for $8 a copy. Has anyone else seen a workflow where the human part is clearly doing the heavy lifting?
Figured out pretty quick that my own finger painting skills would not cover a single panel of a comic, so I get why she leans on AI for the boring background stuff. The key detail here is that she painted the textures by hand first, which means the AI is filling in gaps, not doing the work for her. That sounds like a tool, not a replacement, and I can see why she would use it to keep forty pages at eight bucks.