Comment by 10000truths
5 hours ago
That's because of people who treat AI like a magical "give me a finished product" button. Someone whipping up PowerPoint slides tends to care more about saving time than maintaining quality - the (usually watermarked) stock photos of yore weren't exactly the zenith of artistic presentation either.
Like any other tool, the quality of output is proportional to the quality of input. You'll get much better results if you provide specifics (detailed description of what you want, reference pictures, iterative clarifications etc.) and have it work on bite-sized pieces of the process (outlining, shading etc.), with manual verification and touch-ups in between. But all that still requires time, taste and experience, which deflates the "AI will replace skilled labor" hype.
An example. The upper right drawing replaced the hand-drawn much cruder version I did 20 years go.
https://dlang.org/spec/iasm.html
I was quite pleased with the improvement.
>> the (usually watermarked) stock photos
I didn't care for those either but they didn't have the signature AI art "look" and they're usually real things that an actual artist or photographer made for or sold to the stock imagery company, which curated their collection.
I'm pretty sure my "D-Man" cartoons are not in some stock image collection. Ironically, I've received complaints that my hand-drawn and laboriously edited cartoons were derided as "unprofessional".
Having an on-topic cartoon goes well with the slides, rather than some random stock photo.