I've played around a fair bit with Stable Diffusion running locally on my PC and can confidently say it has an absurd potential as a streamlining tool for art because unlike the simple prompt remote tools you have tons of tools available to control composition, pose, details, etc instead of just giving a vague prompt and hitting "generate" over and over like it's a slot machine and you're addicted to the rush of seeing if the latest pull will be a winner or more garbage.

That said, if anyone's actually using it well they're keeping it to themselves: the hobbyist AI community itself is compromised of the most vapid, talentless dipshits you'll ever see who want pats on the head for asking the inscrutable machine "pls give good image" while using something like A1111 or Forge because ComfyUI's extremely simple flowchart UI is too hard for them and they want a single text box they can ask for their skinner box treats instead. And don't even get me started on civitai, a site that I think I've actually gotten addicted to raging at, like I'll check it multiple times a day just to about its userbase.

I've compared it to things like Poser or Daz3d before, which caused floods of absolute dogshit CGI content made with prefab assets that still haven't completely subsided to this day, which is made all the funnier because of how many people seem to want a terrible faux CGI look out of image generators. That, the weird sort of soft-focus glossy style that makes me think of like sketchy airbrush art on cars for some reason, and the creepy grasping for photorealism are all weirdly popular with them and it's all uniformly awful drek.

Still, I paradoxically think it has a ton of potential for more minimalist aesthetics where it can serve as a labor amplifier for an artist that can feed it a sketch with maybe some crude shading, and then fix up the output in short order, it can create out-of-focus filler for backgrounds, etc. I strongly believe that open source models should be embraced and exploited for that purpose by independent artists and the left in general, because the corporate use of proprietary models is not going to stop and we should adapt to the way that's transforming the landscape and seize upon new capital to compete and survive. The only alternative would be en masse, and there's just not a militant anti-AI movement that could do that nor is one going to form because of how abstract and unemotional the problem is.