I started using AI art programs about 4 years ago with DeepDreamGenerator and then found ArtBreeder earlier this year. Both of these are websites which let you make pictures with artificial intelligence (AI) art programs. Also this year Dall-E and Mid-Journey exploded into our internet world. These have caught on like wildfire with their text to image capabilities. You type in a prompt of a picture you want and the AI reads your prompt and makes a picture for you. This allows anyone regardless of artistic ability to make beautiful pictures, and thousands if not millions of amazing results are out there on the internet for your viewing pleasure. I encourage you to try it if you haven’t already because you may have a lot of fun like millions of people are. The difference with Stable Diffusion is that it has been released openly for people to be able to run it on their own computers, and many brilliant people around the globe have been making it more and more capable. I have been wanting this for 4 years and am delighted to have Stable Diffusion on my desktop computer. These AI art programs have stirred debate about art and who is the artist when AI is involved. Someone put up a post about it being “the end of art” I believe. How can empowering people to make beautiful pictures themselves be a bad thing? Throughout history artists have always adopted any new tools that have come along like the camera obscura, photography, Photoshop, Blender and other 3d graphics programs, and the list could go on. For the last few years my process has been to use the AI art program to generate many (e.g. a couple of dozen) images until I see the possibility for a picture I’d like to make. I then choose a dozen or so which have elements I want to use and bring them into Photoshop. Then there is hours of work to put together elements from different images into a coherent picture, and then some more hours of finishing touches. So have I become less of an artist in the last few years since I have been using AI art programs? The 2 pictures for this post are “Burning Bones Forest of My Brain” and “Spinal Diffusion,” and both came from the same large set of images generated one day with Spinal Diffusion.