WHAT GOOD ARE AI TO SOMEONE WHO IS ALREADY A DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION PROFESSIONAL (A PRACTICAL DEMONSTRATION)? I seriously believe that the crusade of these days against "artistic" AIs is dictated solely by a momentary hype due to the fact that dogs and pigs started using them thinking that this supposed "democratization" of the creative medium, allowed anyone to make masterpieces by writing two lines. I am also sure that if these AIs had been difficult to use, expensive, and therefore of elite and professional use, very few would have complained; in fact, quite the opposite would have happened! Did you want the total democratization of artistic media through technology? Well here is the inevitable outcome! Anyway undoubtedly there are several works made with AIs that are truly beautiful and meaningful, but this is because those who made them put a lot of effort into bending stupid AIs to their will and really had something to say artistically. Most of the works, however, leave their time alone and have the same artistic value as work done by Sunday hobbyists with canvas, paints, and brushes (which is why they all look the same). When this hype passes, to use AIs as a tool (which is then what they are) will be only professionals and those who have discovered themselves as well-rounded artists precisely through the use of AIs and who are likely to expand their boundaries technically as well. So when the hype passes, what will be left of "artistic" AIs and who will they really be useful to? Now I demonstrate you what AIs can be professionally useful for a digital illustrator ass I am, who in theory would not need them. In the image on the left is a 3D render of mine that I made years ago in high resolution, also using fractal programs and compositing and retouching it all in Photoshop. The original render was in panoramic format but I, for personal needs, currently needed to have it portrait and vertical format, but I could no longer operate on the original file with the several Photoshop layers because I thrown it away time ago. So I had the DALL-E AI enlarge the top and bottom of the image. This AI in particular, allows you in seconds to enlarge images out of their frame by "making up" what is missing, following the user's written description of what is to be added. If I wanted, through DALL-E, I could also add elements and objects that did not exist in the original render (and even that feature is very useful), keeping only those to my artistic taste. Aside from some very small and quick manual retouching by me in Photoshop on the raw AI result, the processing time was about 5 minutes, and since I am not a hobbyist "painter" who produces his art only when he has the inspiration, those 5 minutes instead of an hour or more to make that same changes manually (which I would have known how to do) are VERY valuable. I pay all my bills with my digital art in the last 20 years and without Ai's, and I don't see why I shouldn't also use this new artistic tool if needed and if it is useful, and in fact lately I have been experimenting a lot with AI and its professional usability, as evidenced by my posts in recent months. In addition, many of the features and possibilities currently present in AI applications will be increasingly present in future versions of Photoshop (a software everyone uses professionally) starting with the next version. Will you really continue to use Photoshop and not take advantage of the new possibilities given by the AI built into it, out of ideological point-scoring? You honestly cannot subtend such a hypocritical argument. More than useless "NO's" now would really need some very thoughtful "YES BUTS," but such an attitude is too structured and common-sense to be paced by people who always prefer the superficiality of immediate, hot-headed judgments made at the drop of a hat, and the convenient simplification of Taliban kind of bias seems to be obligatory in this century. Who knows then why the Talibanization always comes from people who generally don't really know a shit about the thing they are opposing - in this case very often people who have never seriously, perhaps even professionally, and extensively used an artistic AI - and with arguments heard somewhere.