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I know that feel. You should finish it, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
A big advantage of the grind is that it works from both ends of the chasm. Working problems gives you a clearer, more systemic understanding of their solutions, and also a language with which to communicate those solutions, while also increasing your ability to actually implement solutions yourself. Ideally, you end up in an area where you can both show and tell, and both the showing and the telling cover for each others' deficiencies. Frequently, there's a problem that I'm having trouble putting into words, so I make a quick sketch. Or the opposite, there's a sketch I can't get right, but I can describe what I'm going for. The grind gives me a deeper understanding of the structure of art, a whole multitude of hooks to hang different concepts on so I can think about them in an organized fashion.
I think that Syd Mead picture is in fact expressible in words. But it would take a whole lot of words, where some form of meta-collage would be vastly easier and clearer. The video you linked of the guy doing step-by-step infilling and editing, we both recognize that's baby steps. Something more mature would be a 3d-volume with a camera, where you can position elements, each of which have their own prompt-identity, and then apply an overall prompt to the scene as a whole. fine control over elements and composition, blending to overall control of the style, lighting and so on.
I enjoyed this quite a bit, but I enjoyed your plantae story below quite a bit more. I think you sell yourself a bit short, sir.
I think you need the pain of a grind. I'm not sure it matters much what you're grinding. You need to learn that there's good ideas and bad ideas, and to gain the ability to discern between them. And to do that, you need an understanding of the underlying mechanics of your chosen medium, so that you can think and talk meaningfully about it. I have zero doubt that AI tools can provide this grind, because the core questions remain the same: "is this good? Why or why not? how do I make it better?" If you're asking that, you're an artist already.
I'll leave aside img2img and inpainting and other gimmicks, because ultimately they do not allow fine control of pixel values of the finished product, and using a normal editor to get there is just the stone soup route.
To the first approximation, promptgrinding and drawgrinding are similar in that one internalizes reproducible patterns of affecting the medium, and with any luck, gets closer to transferring imagination onto the canvas. But under scrutiny this charitable analogy breaks down, which is why /ic/ crabs feel in their gut (but can't explain without appealing to SOVL and bashing pajeets etc.) that «this is not art» as normally conceived, not even digital illustration art.
The thing is simply that drawing is the realm of continuous effects, iterating over a smooth isomorphic fitness landscape towards perfection; one can make a gotcha with pixel art, but usually digital environments emulate the truly continuous traditional medium. This is how we learn, this is how we perceive getting better, minimizing the deviation. Prompting, like text generation, are discrete procedures. It's not an accident that «AI art» tends towards gacha rolls: there's the ease of getting good-enough stuff, there's the low bandwidth of prompting, but the fundamental issue is that combinatorics of token interpretation are inherently jumpy, so the feedback is discontinuous, and such a surface is qualitatively much harder to master on a level that's deeper than memorizing cheap rules of thumb – for our natural learning algorithm, at least. And perhaps for any learning algorithm, seeing as image diffusion generation (continuous process) runs circles around autoregressive next token prediction in terms of wow effect per FLOP.
We're making progress in diffusion for text, though – perhaps making text gen more human-like (at least I sort of feel the diffusion of meanings when I write). And we're making progress on interpreting the black box gacha mechanic and controlling its attention maps. With a few more tricks, such as bringing back latent space exploration (that was developed for GANs), I hope to see a qualitative breakthrough in interfaces that will finally fit like a glove and improve on traditional continuous-effect GUI editors, rather than on CLI programs with output to a GUI plugin.
But it's a serious ergonomic design challenge, maybe on par with creating GUIs as a concept, so for now it's fair to say that prompting is not a human-worthy way to learn to do art, even if it's a great shortcut to illustrating concepts.
Then again, I take issue with drawing too. Prompting is unnatural bullshit in a whole another dimension.
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