This bothers me because IMO it fundamentally misunderstands why people hate machine learning. Machine learning isn’t inherently bad. It’s what people do with it that’s bad, because image generators have scraped billions of images without the users or creators consent and regurgitate them according to probability. Now they have improved somewhat. The soup look is gone, instead exchanged with some weird plastic look. The result of an image generation will always be the lowest common denominator, even if it may look high quality. It isn’t. It is just an average of the specific word group you have chosen. And with that, it boils down to high quality cliches. So, just like Disney Marvel, you can pump out high quality looking slop and cliches at an unprecedented rate. And all happened by exploiting literally anyone who has ever created any image. What did people get? Not a single cent.