Curious as to what your objection to the D&D stuff is.

I'll tell you why I don't care: for me, "art" has always been about creative individuals using tools to manifest their ideas for the consumption of others and I find that in general, those who consume only have a rudimentary understanding of the process by which their art is made.

This makes art extremely sensitive to vagaries of public opinion; two hundred years later, you will still find plenty of people arguing that photography isn't art. Every artistic movement suffered the same; realism wasn't romanticism, expressionism wasn't realism, etc. Fundamentally, if you make art a different way you have to suffer a generation's worth of poseurs insisting that if it isn't exactly what came before it's doggerel.

I think people who get bent over AI don't realize how much "AI" has been used in art and photography already. Content-aware fill has been in photoshop for something like fifteen years now, and in the rest of the creative suite for five or so years. Luminar will nature-fake just about anything you want without you having much of a clue how to do it and Google is busily selling Pixels that are busily upsetting columnists everywhere with their ability to comp pretty much anything in-phone. My personal fave: the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra which can recognize the moon and put a sticker wherever it detects it.

I also happen to know the utter sweatshop content like Dungeons & Dragons manuals are produced under. See, three of my friends used to draw comics and now draw big hollywood movies. And I spent a couple years trying to turn a script into a graphic novel. And fundamentally, pretty much any art you see at that level is run through off-shore sweatshops that pay pennies on the dollar what Americans cost; considering how little scrutiny most of the pictures in books like that get, it's not like the AI is putting anyone out of business.

The one on the left has been zhuzh'd by an AI, the one on the right hasn't. Okay, the hands are marginally better, which is saying something for AI. The feet are marginally worse. You could argue that both are styles. You could also argue that both are the same. You could also argue that there is no AI necessary for comic art to be controversial.

Finally, there simply isn't a market for quality art at this level. Those who make it anyway suffer. As far as I'm concerned, if a talented artist can make things 50% better with AI, we should buy him two AIs. Whenever the stuff isn't steered by humans it's ghastly and when it is, it can be pretty cool.