As a follow on: One of my friends is a professional illustrator and was concerned about the impact of AI on their work.
As a demonstration I trained some models on their styles. They were worried right up until they saw the output. Yes, it looked superficially like their work, but the slightest glance showed it to be absolute crap. Anyone who would consider using the AI version of their work over commissioning the actual artist would absolutely get what they paid for.
However, they have found the models to be very useful in exploring concepts and compositions, becoming an essential part of their creative process.
It's possible that your model wasn't great, for my experience, in the past I uploaded an AI image in the same style of a certain artist to a website that organizes anime images, someone tagged it with the artist's tag because they thought it was made by him, also the image I uploaded got much more "likes" than anything made by the artist in months, and it's not like I'm spamming images, that was the only upload. (I later removed the tag, of course)
Part of the reason for that is those artists are doing commercial art, which means the "style" is imposed on them by the customer/series character designs/etc, and they're not putting their whole ability into it.
It's like how it was easier to automate office workers because they just followed steps in a process and didn't use creativity.
I mean, the artists you see on Twitter or other platforms usually have a dominant art style, their own, but even without changing the art style, you can still be really creative with the composition, actions, and so on.
Just call them what they are, "booru" websites. The AI community needs to actually understand what these are and why they just happen to give us extremely large, high quality, well taged datasets. Yes, the AI community will have to admit that coomers have been really good for AI development. Yes that will rustle feathers.
A lot of AI researchers are either playing dumb or are actually ignorant of this space. A lot of really talented folks are operating in the shadows and should be at NeurIPS and ACL presenting and bartering for VC funding rather than posting anime waifus on /g/ and staying anonymous on discord...
The model was good, it’s just that the illustrations needed to convey specific concepts and were created for particular purposes, something gen AI is not good at without significant guidance.
Superficial style is easy to replicate, the underlying meaning and thought process is not.
As a demonstration I trained some models on their styles. They were worried right up until they saw the output. Yes, it looked superficially like their work, but the slightest glance showed it to be absolute crap. Anyone who would consider using the AI version of their work over commissioning the actual artist would absolutely get what they paid for.
However, they have found the models to be very useful in exploring concepts and compositions, becoming an essential part of their creative process.