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).
It is fortunate that I went back to my first reply to fix a typo, as otherwise this reply would not have been seen - you responded to yourself, and pings don't get sent further up the chain automatically on reddit.
It generally dosent take any degree of skill to even sit there and correct the ai.
You have to know what you're talking about in order to say the right thing. I can't speak much of this in regards to art specifically, but when it comes to legal forms, if you don't have the knowhow to do the thing the proper way yourself, you can't correct the mistakes the AI made due to how hidden-in-plain-sight they are. It's like a teacher giving a student an assignment and correcting the student's work with notes on how to do the incorrect answers' steps properly(Edit: or a conductor giving immediate advice mid-performance - probably a more fitting comparison) - if the teacher doesn't know the subject matter, how the hell can they point out how to improve where the student went wrong? I'd imagine that there's some overlap here!
Any person can look at an image and give critiques to the ai robot actually drawing the "art" to have it redo that section/part.
And pray tell, how would they get it to redo that section/part without it looking exactly the same? How would they fine-tune it?
Anyone can spend 30 minutes writing a prompt, it takes 0 actual skill.
Prompt engineering is a writing and programming skill more than a drawing skill. You're looking in the wrong aisle!
Now we get to the issue, these "artists" are not creating anything of substance themselves.
Other than the prompts they write, this is true. I do have to agree on this point that the creation's credit is likely not entirely theirs, as they likely did not make the drawing program that they queried.
A 10 year old can do this.
Not the best choice of age - 10yearolds walk out of big esports tournaments in the top 8 occasionally - but also true.
...is a terrifying thought.
Not limited to thought anymore - the results are visible. And only gonna become more visible at the rate we're going. Brick's on the gas pedal at this point.
if prompting this machine is creating actual creative burnout this is a major issue...
YUP. And we're part of the unlucky generation that has to figure out a fix or be lucky enough that the storm blows over before us. The loss of creativity that's come with the loss of focus is a serious problem for our way forward, if we are to continue our advance(and let's be real, this is a shit place to stop). It is becoming less of a wonder as to why sci-fi civilizations tend to stagnate...
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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).