The main differentiator I've noticed is: how much work is the tool doing, and how much work is the artist doing? And that's not to say that strictly more effort on the part of the artist is a good thing, it just has to be a notable amount to, IMHO, be an interesting thing.

This is the primary failure of all of the AI creative tooling, not even necessarily that it does too much, but that the effort of the artist doesn't correlate to good output. Sometimes you can get something usable in 1 or 2 prompts, and it almost feels like magic/cheating. Other times you spend tons of time going over prompts repeatedly trying to get it to do something, and are never successful.

Any other toolset I can become familiar and better equipped to use. AI-based tools are uniquely unpredictable and so I haven't really found any places beyond base concepting work where I'm comfortable making them a permanent component.

And more generally, to your nod that some day artists will use AI: I mean, it's not impossible. That being said, as an artist, I'm not comfortable chaining my output to anything as liquid and ever-changing and unreliable as anything currently out there. I don't want to put myself in a situation where my ability to create hinges on paying a digital landlord for access to a product that can change at any time. I got out of Adobe for the same reason: I was sick of having my workflows frustrated by arbitrary changes to the tooling I didn't ask for, while actual issues went unsolved for years.

Edit: I would also add the caveat that, the more work the tool does, the less room the artist has to actually be creative. That's my main beef with AI imagery: it literally all looks the same. I can clock AI stuff incredibly well because it has a lot of the same characteristics: things are too shiny is weirdly the biggest giveaway, I'm not sure why AI's think everything is wet at all times, but it's very consistent. It also over-populates scenes; more shit in the frame isn't necessarily a good thing that contributes to a work, and AI has no concept at all of negative space. And if a human artist has no space to be creative in the tool... well they're going to struggle pretty hard to have any kind of recognizable style.

There is an AI plugin for krita that lets you define regions, selection bounds, sub-prompts, control nodes, and lots more control over a given image generation model than standard Automattic or comfyUI workflows...down to 'put an arm wearing armor here' for example in my RPG NPC token writing.

It has full image generation mode, it has an animation mode, it has a live mode where you can draw a blob of images and it will refine it 2-50 steps only in that area.

So you are no longer doing per line stroke and saved brush settings, but you are still painting and composing an image yourself, down to a pixel by pixel rate. It's just that the tool it gives is WAY more compute intensive, the AI is sort of rendering a given part of a drawing as you specify as many times as you need.

How much of that workflow is just prompting a one-shot image, vs photoshopping +++ an image together until it meets your exact specifications?

No, the final image cannot be copyrighted under current US law in 2026, but for use in private settings like tabletop RPGs...my production values have gone way up and I didn't need to get a MFA degree in The old Masters drawing or open a drawing studio to get those images.

> Sometimes you can get something usable in 1 or 2 prompts, and it almost feels like magic/cheating. Other times you spend tons of time going over prompts repeatedly trying to get it to do something, and are never successful.

That's normal for any kind of creative work. Some days it just happens quickly, other days you keep trying and trying and nothing works.

I spent some of the 90s and 00s making digital art. There was a lot of hostility to Photoshop then, and a lot of "That's not really art."

But I found that if I allowed myself to experiment, the output still had a unique personality and flavour which wasn't defined by the tool.

AI is the same.

The requirement for interesting art is producing something that's unique. AI makes that harder, but there's a lot of hand-made art - especially on fan sites like Deviant Art - which has some basic craft skill but scores very low on original imagination, unusual mood, or unique personality.

The reality is that most hand-made art is an unconscious mash-up of learned signifiers mediated by some kind of technique. AI-made art mechanises the mash-up, but it's still up to the creator to steer the process to somewhere interesting.

Some people are better at that than others, and more willing to dig deep into the medium and not take it at face value.