solarpunk memes

While I kind of get what you're trying to say, I do personally think you have some point that the expression of the AI is more generic, but that's kind of where the value is. Certain actions, even if you are manually doing everything, are repetitive and provide a low level of artistic expression. Like coloring in large surfaces, background characters, background buildings. It's impressive to do so yourself and you can even get very good at it, but in a regular scenario they are unimportant by design. Sometimes you just want to get to the core of where your ideas matter. You can also use AI to upscale your own drawings to allow yourself to add more detail and work on a larger scale. I personally find it horrible and demotivating to manually upscale something I've drawn already. You'll be tracing lines for hours if you want to do it well.

For the more detailed things that no AI is sophisticated enough to be guided towards, that's something I would also draw myself and leave the AI out of, exactly because I want that level of finer control there. To me it's about using AI for it's strengths and not as a catch all, just like you don't use a sledge hammer to kill a fly.

I do disagree with the framing that ControlNet 'claws back' control over the process. I see it more as it enhancing the control you already have. Because you are specifically priming the AI with very fine parameters. The amount of information you can encode in a string of text is just miniscule compared to being able to provide a texture that could realistically be 2K in resolution where you have 2048*2048*4(For every RGBA value) = 16777216 individual pixels that you could fine tune. Same thing with image to image, even doing a couple of iterations with that creates possibilities beyond human understanding of scale, same as other art. Now not every one of those permutations will be valuable, but the same can be said about drawn art. And driving it to the valuable creations is what an artist does.

A big part of my process is reflecting on the value the AI added, and whether or not I can still call something my own by the end of it. I even compare images I've completely made myself to the ones that I produced with the AI to ensure that. Especially when I started out I binned some ideas because I didn't feel they were expressive enough. To me it is a requirement to be happy with what I created. And I think that's something a lot of people understand in their own way. So I guess we must agree to disagree on that, based on our different experiences.