As someone who has been doing a lot of work in SD, I just wanted to strongly second this. Stable Diffusion and the like are much closer to when photoshop first

As someone who has been doing a lot of work in SD, I just wanted to strongly second this. Stable Diffusion and the like are much closer to when photoshop first appeared than they are to than the completely automatic art generation machine people make them out to be. I remember well both digital cameras and photoshop receiving initial criticism from "real" artists... until they were both widely adopted by these communities. The critique of digital photography was that it's not really art because you can just take a bajillion pictures and then filter out the ones that don't look good. Photoshop users (especially web comic creators) got similar flack that it didn't take real artistic skill to make nice images in photoshop. For anyone young enough to always have photoshop and digital photography will likely be surprised that there was such resistance and snobbery around using these tools. There was also the same fear that these tools would ruin art by making "real" artists obsolete.