Lots of interesting commentary here, but back to Mr. X' original post and point. It's an unfortunate problem that will solve itself when the gullible run out of money. I remember 2010 when Amazon let independent authors monetize independent writing. They were flooded with obvious scam titles that had contents that resembled a phone book, and the good works were obscured. I think this is what Mr. X is reacting to, and I say it's unfortunate, but it will pass. A fool and his money are soon parted, but that only means we get fewer fools with money.
Worse for me is the folks who aren't trying to charge for it, but are still flooding their pages with AI generated images. I had to un-watch someone I like on DA because, although she is a talented amateur artist, she fell into generating dozens of AI images every day, and I didn't want that in my feed. She was rewarded with thousands of other followers though. shrug_emoji
As to labeling your own productions AI, where do you draw the line? Even trying to be honest, I'm not sure where to draw the line if I start with an AI prompt, put it through several filters, clean it up with Clip Studio, and add a few touches to it. I've done a lot of playing around with this image that started as generated AI and that I intend as an illustration of a story by a writer I admire. It's still clearly AI and not exactly what I intend, but I'm no artist. Still, it's far from the original image I generated, and also far from something drawn by a real artist.
I'm sure you can spot the many flaws. For instance the terribly done shiver lines that I tried to put in to indicate the rope was pulled taut, and the amateurish collar. But should it be called AI? Many artists "borrow" from classic poses for part of their artwork. They just didn't have the tools before to do it without being artists themselves.
In any case I'm with Mr. X and decry people who join DA, throw up thousands of unedited AI images and try to charge for them. It just pollutes the site, and will eventually fade in my opinion but not before it pisses a lot of people off.
I'm a paid customer, so....
