Raw LLM Responses

I think the comment made didn't quite hit the main problem. If you didn't start seriously putting in work at around age 4, and have no aptitude for it, the gap in skill and what it will take to catch up just keeps widening and at some point you'll NEVER catch up. Why is catching up important? Because the system has monetized and marketed art, and if you're not making money with it, it's not worth doing because in this economy if you live paycheck to paycheck and you stop working overtime, even just a little, you'll be overcome and probably lose your home or something like that. You can't eat your art. You can't wear your art (unless your art is actual clothing). Some people are actually willing to put in the work, and do, but their time is so limited that they work 16 hours a day so by the time they get home it's already time to go to sleep and do it all over again. At that point the person can TRY to catch up to the artist making money with their art, but odds are they won't. The days where hard work and determination guarantee success have long since been over, and what makes that worse is that the artist making enough money to live off of will insult and ridicule the person who is TRYING to catch up because their art doesn't compare, instead of offering actual constructive criticism or any words of encouragement. They'll just tell them their art sucks and won't even tell them why. So who wants to drag themselves through the mud and then be told they don't belong? That their efforts are for nothing and that they'll never be any good? Who wants to do all of that hard just to be spit on and never get to where they can support themselves in a system based on greed? I want to point out that I am neither for, or against image generation, but that I think I get where the commenter was coming from. Some people have all kinds of fantastic ideas in their head, but the time it takes to visualize those ideas sometimes just can't be justified when they have bills/rent that they need to deal with first. Prior to the emergency of AI there just seemed to be this air of elitism in the art world, sites like DeviantArt with groups that literally wouldn't let you submit your work if it didn't meet a certain 'level of quality'. But now that AI is here those very same people want to pretend they weren't gatekeeping the little guy who just wanted to try and catch up. Yeah, I can see why they think some artists have this blue blood mentality.