Neural-network-based image generators have a lot of problems, as a tool for making art. There's the issue of artists' work being used for training without credit or compensation, the environmental aspects, and the fact that they're just not very good as a way to express oneself. They're short on customization, hard to wrangle into any sort of consistent output, and mediocre at best at expressing something new.
All that said, there's one argument against them that's really fucked up?
I keep seeing people saying "AI art is bad because what makes it real art is the effort you put into it, and the hard work, and the grindset, and taking shortcuts to make it easier means you don't respect yourself or other artists!" and it's like... what kind of Protestant work ethic bullshit is this?
Odds are that every moving, compelling, meaningful piece of art you've ever experienced had its creator(s) doing all they could to make the process easier on themselves, because art isn't about making it hard on yourself - it's about expressing something truly and honestly, and about giving your audience experiences, and making them feel emotions - none of which has to be hard. Sometimes it is hard, but how difficult something is to create doesn't have much to do with how much it affects the audience. (You can see this in action by looking at people on Tumblr complaining about how the most popular post they've made was some offhand joke.)
You, as an artist, should feel free to use the tools that help you express yourself, and quite frankly, you should feel free to make lazy art, sloppy art, and art that doesn't meet people's standards of being Good Art. As long as it makes you happy to make, fuck the people who think art needs to be hard.
