My feelings about AI are similar to my feelings about tracing.
Tracing can be a handy tool for an artist to save time. If you have the rights to trace what you're tracing, and the output you want doesn't need to be expressive, original or accurate, simply to recreate something with enough accuracy and detail that it looks like that thing, tracing can be really handy. I use tracing of 3D models on backgrounds because drawing an entire perspective grid every time would take too long when making a comic.
The weaknesses of tracing are that it's often used to steal the work of other artists, which isn't cool, it can't really create anything new because you have to work off things that already exist, it tends to feel a little "dead" compared to a drawing because you're laying down lines mechanically based on where lines are, not constructing the lines with an understanding of what they represent as boundaries in space, so it tends to lack tension, expression, or other important choices a good artist makes while drawing lines. Another issue is stylistically, traced characters in comics may look very inconsistent, or have expressions that aren't really right for the panel if the artist is tracing art of characters from other comics, since they can only go with what the artist they're tracing has drawn, not draw what's appropriate for their own comic. Finally, it'll tend to get inaccuracies because of the lack of purpose to the lines, and the fact they're being drawn without paying attention to what they are, simply just as lines in positions. This means that if traces are made of traced art, over time, the image produced will get worse as these inaccuracies add up. These are all problems with hand tracing, and with auto tracing.
AI basically has all the same weaknesses. It could be a great tool for filling in busywork, stuff that takes a lot of time and requires more contextual understanding than something like the fill tool, like painterly rendering, or using an algorithm to quickly generate background structures, that sort of thing.
...But many existing databases are full of stolen art, which isn't cool, it's limited in scope because it can only copy common details in existing images algorithmically, it has a sort of "normalising effect" where by always going for what's the most common, it tends towards very dull compositions, very often placing the subject in the middle of the frame at a middle distance with a neutral expression and pose, often making backgrounds very symmetrical, and the rendering tends to be very mechanical and perfect, so you get technically solid, but also pretty dull art out of it. Plus that same problem as tracing from other artists of stylistic consistency; it's currently not great for comics, because it can't recreate the same original character consistently, and doesn't tend to generate just the right expression or pose; just something that at best might be close enough that maybe you can make it sort of work with words explaining the context... it's not really as good as just drawing exactly what you need! It also has errors, like weird things like hands with too many fingers, hair that merges into the shadows on faces, floating pieces of earrings, because it's copying things it sees without understanding what those things are....and then this leads to the latest issue with AI; if your database starts filling up with AI images, this problem gets worse and worse, as the computer copies the weird mistakes of other computers, this "model collapse" eventually causes AI without carefully managed databases to produce unusable garbage.
So as a tool to help artists, I think AI might have some really handy applications, but the dreams of tech bros who can't draw of it replacing artists are pie in the sky, and the model collapse issue is definitely going to make AI models without very carefully managed databases unusable and make original artists a vital part of making a usable AI. I'd also caution people to be wary of the databases being used by AI, which is why places like Tapas have banned it for comics and novels for the time being; there's a lot of evidence suggesting it's using stolen art in databases. You wouldn't trace a panel from a manga and put it in your webcomic (or...you shouldn't), and taking a panel to trace that you randomly found online without knowing what comic it's from wouldn't make that right, and that's basically what using AI without knowing what it's trained on is like.
