Oh man, that's just part of the gig though! You never really know what you're getting into until you start.

Actually, horsehair brushes are for oil paints.

Honestly had the same take at first... thought it was just a cheap shortcut. Then I watched a guy in my online art group stream his work. He'd make these weird, broken AI generations on purpose, just to get a cool texture or a strange shape he liked. He'd then take that one little piece and paint a whole new scene around it in Procreate. It wasn't about the AI making the art. It was about him using it to find a spark he wouldn't have thought of on his own. Totally flipped a switch for me.

Yeah they saved time for the guy who installed them, but they just push the real work and the risk down the road. It's a lazy shortcut that makes every future job in that panel harder and more dangerous. I've seen too many loose connections and melted plastic from those things to ever trust them. They might hold until the next time someone breathes on the wire wrong. It's not worth the few minutes they saved some guy fifty years ago.

But what if the template itself is the problem? A lot of people see a format and just fill in the blanks without any real feeling behind it. Maybe the real work isn't just getting eyes on it, but making something worth looking at in the first place. If the core message is weak, no amount of views will fix that. You can have the best distribution in the world for an empty box.