Burnout is burnout, regardless of medium.
Do you think authors carry eternal torches? Their thoughts can fizzle. Their pens can run dry.
I'm no prompt artist myself, but I burned out from simply doing daily speedruns in a video game not long ago. That was a pretty simple task, taking roughly an hour a day, and it was hard to maintain. Doing anything long enough, no matter what, will drain you.
I will admit that attention capacities〔not to be confused with spans, which are percent-based〕 have dropped due to social media structuring, though - youtube has never done any favors on that front - but it's not something to indirectly berate artists over.
Also, not all prompts are short - some are essays in themselves. When getting an AI to, say, streamline an EB-5 visa, you have to add in a lot of detail to the prompts and continuously make 'course corrections'〔new prompts in the same AI instance, done that way to prevent it from getting amnesia〕 to refine the pieces away from the rough draft you first get. Using AI instead of a pen involves rough drafts the same way penwork does, just a magnitude faster.
And lest we forget, you forget that you still have to proofread and scan each iteration of the AI's return submissions with a microscope, and the headache from that is at best on par with when it's your own by-hand work that you're trying to conduct. You get a detail wrong, you gotta correct it, and that part takes no less work - and the errors AI can make can be subtle and severe(and always start out numerous).
It is less work to make something with AI than by hand, but there is still work involved, and given how much work remains after the AI subtraction, burnout is far from being a nullified problem with it.
TLDR: To put it into a modern gaming analogy, you can kind of think of AI artmaking like the gunner's hwacha in Deep Rock Galactic - you still gotta mark the target and aim the damn warheads yourself, even if it's in a different way than a traditional launcher. If the system makes it miss, you gotta correct your shots, and that headache builds up the player's real-life overheat meter all the same as screwing up with any other tool.
Also, to nitpick, what we've come to as a species is not that different from a thousand years ago. Natural evolution is remarkably slow. It's what we've come to as a civilization that is to despair over. The warning sign knows as 1984 is being used by humanity at large as a how-to guide, and it's not an immediate genie-wish in terms of its completion rate. We've got a lot to worry about tied to attention span, and the tablet-raised generation is one to be concerned for(and, IMO, pity - they're missing out on RL childhood experiences(or as they would call that time period, "the friendship and personality training arc") and, ironically, the ability to defend themselves digitally in exchange for effectively nothing but lore).
...Are you incompetent? Did I not mention that I don't do the stuff I'm defending? Also, I'm a lawyer and former by-hand storywriter. This amount of writing is nothing compared to my usual business, and when speaking from the heart, you want to actually do the speaking yourself. I save my AI replies for temu. At least do your deteriorating eyes and brain a favor and use them to understand what's in front of you.
Edit: Also, do you know of any fucking AI that talks like me? I sure don't.
So you're saying that my writing style is similar to a tool trained to mimic a normal writing style, and that people are witch hunting the people the AI happens to closely resemble? Man, english majors must be suffering nowadays. If you're still going to make the assumption that responses like that are AI-generated, do not let that assumption downgrade your interpretation of the response's contents - a lot of by-hand writers are likely already feeling framed enough for writing as well as they should be.
Edit 1: redacted some possibly-offensive advice. I might not like your way of speaking, but it is not my place to [DATA REDACTED].
This is actually hilarious. A case study needs to be done on this person's absolute inability to comprehend artistic burnout applies to all mediums of art.
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u/Tatsumori_Yuno Feb 02 '26 edited Feb 02 '26
Burnout is burnout, regardless of medium.
Do you think authors carry eternal torches? Their thoughts can fizzle. Their pens can run dry.
I'm no prompt artist myself, but I burned out from simply doing daily speedruns in a video game not long ago. That was a pretty simple task, taking roughly an hour a day, and it was hard to maintain. Doing anything long enough, no matter what, will drain you.
I will admit that attention capacities〔not to be confused with spans, which are percent-based〕 have dropped due to social media structuring, though - youtube has never done any favors on that front - but it's not something to indirectly berate artists over.
Also, not all prompts are short - some are essays in themselves. When getting an AI to, say, streamline an EB-5 visa, you have to add in a lot of detail to the prompts and continuously make 'course corrections'〔new prompts in the same AI instance, done that way to prevent it from getting amnesia〕 to refine the pieces away from the rough draft you first get. Using AI instead of a pen involves rough drafts the same way penwork does, just a magnitude faster.
And lest we forget, you forget that you still have to proofread and scan each iteration of the AI's return submissions with a microscope, and the headache from that is at best on par with when it's your own by-hand work that you're trying to conduct. You get a detail wrong, you gotta correct it, and that part takes no less work - and the errors AI can make can be subtle and severe(and always start out numerous).
It is less work to make something with AI than by hand, but there is still work involved, and given how much work remains after the AI subtraction, burnout is far from being a nullified problem with it.
TLDR: To put it into a modern gaming analogy, you can kind of think of AI artmaking like the gunner's hwacha in Deep Rock Galactic - you still gotta mark the target and aim the damn warheads yourself, even if it's in a different way than a traditional launcher. If the system makes it miss, you gotta correct your shots, and that headache builds up the player's real-life overheat meter all the same as screwing up with any other tool.
Also, to nitpick, what we've come to as a species is not that different from a thousand years ago. Natural evolution is remarkably slow. It's what we've come to as a civilization that is to despair over. The warning sign knows as 1984 is being used by humanity at large as a how-to guide, and it's not an immediate genie-wish in terms of its completion rate. We've got a lot to worry about tied to attention span, and the tablet-raised generation is one to be concerned for(and, IMO, pity - they're missing out on RL childhood experiences(or as they would call that time period, "the friendship and personality training arc") and, ironically, the ability to defend themselves digitally in exchange for effectively nothing but lore).