This is basically my take - I'm mostly confused by the people up in arms about this (except that it likely makes their work more of a commodity, so I get that fear).
People look at art and make art in that style all the time, now a machine exists that can do that. Why is that unethical? Because they didn't consent for the machine to look at it/learn from it, but they did for humans? I don't think this argument will be able to hold the wave of change that's coming from this new capability. They'd be better off long term learning how to use it.
Nobody creates purely original things in a vacuum, machines won't either.
Automation is okay if it is about taxi drivers or warehouse workers. But when it targets artists some people turn Luddite.
My brother is an artist by the way who does a lot of work with AI, 3D printing and internet. Art will always survive and adapt.
If memory serves it took decades before photography was socially accepted among the art world.
The question now is what value can (human) artists bring besides merely producing images of a certain subject in a certain style. Software has clearly just solved that problem, although the buildup was the last 10-20 years (cnns, gans, style transfer, and now generative language-based models).
But when I think of the value and interestingness of art, there's a lot of intention and meaning in choosing what to draw, the form, etc.
Even from a first glance, the one by David is clearly superior. The scene is so much more striking and interesting to look at. You can see the emotions of the characters, and overall the composition underscores the significance of the philosopher's death, especially in the context of the enlightenment/romantic period. (This is my opinion as a pleb; not an art expert.) But what I do understand, as a computer person, is that these concepts are still beyond what a model can encode in an image as of today.
So although humans are no longer superior in the mechanics of producing images, I think in the higher-level/psychological aspects of "art", there's room for humans, at least for now.
Want to add, I understand the debate is also around the revenue loss in the commission/fanart/online art scene. But from having looked at lots of these over the years, I'd still argue the same thing: that IMO the really good series and artists are good because of their ideas and themes, and not their technique. But if a particular artist's revenue is 90% from drawing lewd fanart, unfortunately it seems like they'll have to adapt and compete, using the skills that humans are still dominant in.
And although I'm just an dumb anon on the internet spewing these ideas, I know I sound harsh, but I think I'm correct. Because the reality is that now, everybody's downloaded the SDv1.4 weights onto their hard drives, and the cat's out of the bag permanently.
I have never used any of those services before. I have never considered using one of the services before because it was always outside my price range.
Now that I have tried stable diffusion and have photo bashed and rendered some concept art for each of the main characters in my novel, I now want to commission an artist to create the 30 or so needed training images so I can ask stable diffusion to spit out my own character in various poses and expressions.
At minimum, that will require a human to render a model sheet of the character from front and back and side and 3/4 and above and below, as well as the emotions on the basic emotions wheel.
If I want the character to be able to wear different outfits, then I will also need to pay for renderings of that character wearing that clothing, all in service of trying to train stable diffusion to be able to remix that character into future images.
Let's also say that I do not have a killer graphics card to be able to train images into a model, luckily, for another $100 fee, the artist will use their existing graphics card to spit out an embedding or a hypernetwork or a VAE or whatever it is that you can use to add custom training to a model and send me that as well as the original set of input photos.
After all of that, I can generate the photos I want...but I will then have to slightly tweak each image so that it has human authorship, even if it's just removing noise and fixing the cursed loops that happen on limbs at times.
In short, I am considering something that is at least $200 for the crappiest cheapest artist out there, multiply that by my six or so main characters, and that is money that I am genuinely considering spending that I would not have even dreamed of entertaining for a moment.
The proof is in the pudding as to whether this thought process will be happening for other stable diffusion users who are able to get images they like, but do not have good rendering skills on their own, weather they too are willing to pay for this or not.
If so, there will instantly become a new type of artist job available, that of the AI art trainer artist.
At the very least, there will be AI art cleanup artists that remove the noise and so-called cursed elements of ai art when used in the concept art stage.
People look at art and make art in that style all the time, now a machine exists that can do that. Why is that unethical? Because they didn't consent for the machine to look at it/learn from it, but they did for humans? I don't think this argument will be able to hold the wave of change that's coming from this new capability. They'd be better off long term learning how to use it.
Nobody creates purely original things in a vacuum, machines won't either.