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I have also been experimenting with AI art generation (although I only had the basic StableDiffusion model, so thanks for showing me these other ones). Like you, I've found that in order to get what I want I need to use AI as one of many tools, iterating over AI generation -> make a collage in an art program -> run it through AI img2img -> edit in an art program, and repeat until I get what I want.
My drawing skills are a bit stronger, and I have a drawing tablet on hand, so I've been going a bit harder in the editing direction. One of the things I've noticed is that AI is really good at shading and texture, but really bad at composition. One of the things I can do is have the AI generate a texture, draw an image in flat color, edit the texture onto the flat image, inpaint the flat image but leave the texture alone, and the AI will shade the image in the style of the texture. (Obviously this only works for one texture at a time, so for a e.g. a person wearing jeans and a t-shirt you would need to do it three times: once for skin, once for denim, and once for the t-shirt.)
I'm not sure if I see AI generating meaningful images from scratch any time soon. People don't really want to see random pictures of landscapes or people standing with their arms at their sides. What people want is action.
What I do expect to see is for AI to be used as a tool to make faster art. Coloring lineart is a massive job, and AI can already do a pretty good first draft with img2img. In ten years maybe comic books will be one creator doing lineart and a highly-trained AI assistant filling in backgrounds and colors. Maybe cartoons will cut out the Korean animation studios and just feed their storyboards into an AI. As with all mechanization, this probably won't eliminate artists, but it will allow one artist to do the work of ten.
Stable diffusion's inability to produce non-trivial and correct composition on demand is entirely expected from its text encoder's properties, expecially after Imagen's paper, and the model is in fact grossly outperforming initial expectations; hell, it runs on smartphones with 6Gb memory, it has no business understanding compositionality even on small scale. Midjourney v4 seems better already; Imagen, parti and now eDiff-i are vastly better; SD 2.0 (assuming that's what it's called) will probably wipe the floor with Midjourney.
In any case, have you looked into RunwayML inpainting model? It's much more capable of parsing the context of the image.
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