I think it's kinda interesting to look at what someone else thinks when it isn't just autistic screeching. It's more interesting than the 500000th 'ai bad because it uses electricity' post. But to be honest I think it's mostly bullshit. I know that personally I have done nothing in the past year to improve dramatically. Yea ok I have learnt how to prompt better and learned the ideal weights and certain things that the AI loves or hates to do. But that's it. The real improvement has just come from the technology. I won't say too much but there's two niche characters that no one likes from a gacha game that is also pretty niche. I spent ages with pixai trying to get these two characters in the same image together and it would never work, even editing the images myself before denoising it still did not work, it would always create a homogenous character instead of two distinct ones. I swapped to the xl models and genuinely in one prompt it did exactly what I wanted it to do. Admittedly the xl models have made much cleaner art which is much easier to go in to photoshop and clean up before denoising, before I just couldn't be fucked to bother because it would take so much time whereas now it's much easier. But I would say that 95% of the reason why what I make looks better now than a year ago is simply just because the technology is better.
Even since the days of the shitty old models the AI was always pumping shit out in a mix of styles, I have no idea what that first one is meant to mean. They were always different styles, obviously AI yea, but it was never the exact same style, even within models you could get a wide range.
It also just doesn't really combine other art styles and 'combine with prompts', it's normally just a hyper generic style; it's not combining different art styles it's just using the most generic one. I have no idea what combining with prompts is even meant to mean. But I also just don't agree anyway. I mean I see a lot of AI stuff in my feed, I can almost instantly clock what is and isn't AI with a pretty high level of accuracy. It could just be from my own familiarity with the software but AI stuff stands out like a sore thumb, especially niji stuff, not in a bad way but it's almost always instantly obvious.
I do like how in this subtly anti ai post the hand drawing looks kinda AI generated, just the way that the pen appears to almost be becoming a finger. Fr though it's not getting harder and harder every day, maybe for some people who have psyopped themselves into feeling bad but realistically nothing has changed for actual artists in the past year. At least other than algorithm changes and other shit completely detached from AI. It is true though we do grow more and more every day, I am actually a form of slime mold and every 50 minutes I split off into another copy of myself.