It unironically absolutely does not. Source: every visual artist that's spent the last 20 years slowly improving their work.

FWIW I don’t think they are defending AI by saying that it takes more effort than drawing to make an “intentionally innovative” image.

The person you’re responding to is a titan in their field. Check yourself before you try to check others.

How do you know the background/experience of the person you're responding to? And even if the person you're claiming has authority here were the worlds leading expert on generative AI, that wouldn't make them authorative on the difficulty of drawing an intentionally innovative image from scratch.

Regardless, the original comment was clearly not serious.

tbh I don't consider myself a titan in the field but I appreciate the complement :)

I don't get paid enough to be a titan.

You genuinely can’t believe that, right? An “innovative AI image” is created all the time whereas it’s much harder to paint an “innovative painting” due to the skill required and the well-tread medium. That’s not even getting into the fact that you can set up and really learn ComfyUI in a week whereas painting is a life-long pursuit.

It was not a completely serious comment and was not intended to be a slight against professional artists.

Honestly, that happened to me. Was making some UI elements for a game, and tried to generate some. After a while, I was so tired of getting results that weren't quite what I wanted that I just drew them.

It certainly has its place, but the "its taking people's jobs" argument kinda fell apart for me after that moment

If you find ComfyUI offputting you really wouldn't like the nodegraph based applications we use in VFX.

That is a correct inference.

People honestly overcomplicate it, the variety you can get just out of base SDXL without even using loras or other models and comfy nodes is crazy once you get a feel of it but a lot of people make the mistake of not spending the time on it to figure out how to push it in the direction they want and instead think piling on a bunch of loras and an extra model is the key to getting something different.