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Notes -
This is where I disagree, at least in the realm of weeb fanart (I don't read/write fanfiction, but I imagine it's not dissimilar). There are orders of magnitude more possible niches and tastes than there are artists to fill them, such that I regularly run into concepts that I want to see that I simply cannot find that even one amateur illustrator has created and posted online.
For a concrete example, one common "genre" of fanart is having two characters voiced by the same voice actor cosplaying each other, sometimes in a way that directly copies official art of the character. I wanted to see fanart of Jean from Genshin Impact cosplaying Hitagi from Bakemonogatari (both voiced by Chiwa Saito), and done in a way that copies official promotional Bakemonogatari art, in a style as if drawn by Akio Watanabe (the actual artist who drew the actual official promotional art and did the character designs for the anime). Searching the usual places like Danbooru or Gelbooru or Pixiv, I found that not even a single example of such a cosplay fanart existed, much less one that directly copied official art and in the same style as the official artist. So I made some using Stable Diffusion. I've done similar things with other bits of fanart, based around scenarios I like to imagine they encounter in their fictional everyday lives, or in an alternate universe or whatever; unpopular characters don't get much fanart to begin with, and them doing niche activities is even rarer. Combine that with desire to see it in certain artists' styles, and you get a combinatoric explosion of possibilities that the rather limited number of skilled human illustrators simply can't fill.
I imagine fanfiction could have even more possibilities that go unfulfilled if not for generative AI, due to how many different combinations of character interactions and plot events there are. There's probably a million different Harry Potter/Ron Weasley slashfics on AO3, but does it have one that also sets it in the backdrop of a specific plot that some particular fujoshi wants, with the particular style of writing she wants to read, and with the specific sequence of relationship escalations and speedbumps that she wants to see? Maybe for some fujoshi, but probably not for most.
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