I've commissioned tens of thousands of dollars in art, and spent many hundreds of hours working with Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and Flux. What all the generators are missing is intentionality in art.
They can generate something that looks great at surface level, but doesn't make sense when you look at the details. Why is a particular character wearing a certain bracelet? Why do the windows on that cottage look a certain way? What does a certain engraving mean? Which direction is a character looking, and why?
The diffusers do not understand what they are generating, so they just generates what "looks right." Often this results in art that looks pretty but has no deeper logic, world building, meaning, etc.
And of course, image generators cannot handle the client-artist relationship as well (even LLMs cannot), because it requires an understanding of what the customer wants and what emotion they want to convey with the piece they're commissioning.
So - I rely on artists for art I care about (art I will hang on my walls), and image generators for throwaway work (such as weekly D&D campaign images.)
