Illustrator, ecology nut, and a bit of gardening (zone 4b in USA). Nice to meet ya!
I use mine consistently, and the presence of one will be a dealbreaker when I choose my next phone. I use it with an AUX cable in my car, wired headphones I already own, and (most importantly) with a Square point of sale thingamajig at shows. Bluetooth options exist for the last thing of course, but they have their own disadvantages- and I’d rather be able to use both options than just one!
Popped in here to say FTL and was delighted to see someone had already mentioned it. Absolutely love that game.
I found it extraordinary- I’m unsure if another movie has made me feel the whole gamut of emotion like this one did, and each heartstring was tugged differently. Skillful stuff.
I’ve never been able to budget in the literal sense due to how utterly unpredictable my income is (artist sole proprietor kind of thing- don’t do it, kids!), and how wildly the structure of my months vary…but getting wise to tracking all incoming and outgoing transactions on my own spreadsheet has brought such peace of mind.
It came naturally after dealing with self employment income records, so it’s frankly silly that I never applied the same ideas to my personal finances.
For me it’s mostly the ease of it. I’m the type to get very bogged down by (perceived) steps, hurdles, and visual overstimulation. An illustration:
Notebook
Tablet/Etc
Now, there are certainly benefits to writing things out digitally, especially when searchability is key. Any important info in any of my booklets that I might need to find later on gets typed up or entered into a spreadsheet where applicable. Not the most efficient way to do things, I suppose. 😅
In general though: I just like being able to look down and see a thing I’ve written, rather than needing to wake up a device, open a program, or otherwise fiddle with a screen, especially while multitasking.
Speaking as a professional artist myself, I’d wager that many of the responses you’ve run into are emotional ones. Supporting oneself as an artist was already difficult, and AI generation is an astoundingly powerful tool. For a long time there was a sense of financial security in quieter/grunt background and asset design work such as the WotC backgrounds in this situation. WotC in particular was touted as “one of the companies that actually pays artists to make neat things” in fantasy art circles, and so their fans and artist clients (often one in the same) feel betrayed.
I’m personally a sad-bitch about it because my peers and I have been posting art for one-another and fans online since 2002, our work was scraped, and now people can click a button to ape the look of all of our work without having run across it organically, knowing our names, or being able to, like, say hello to us. I really don’t mean that out of self-importance or ego- the community I grew up in online was all about discovering working artists by word of mouth this way, and getting to know them. So it’s a weird (albeit unintentional) dismantling of a community and “a way that was”, so to speak.
More practically one of my specific worries regarding AI generated images: Illustration in the literal sense of the word means ‘to illuminate’, to make clear’. Think along the lines of technical illustration- biological in my case, but this extends to mechanical parts, manuals, diagrams, medical books. These are situations where clarity is seriously important, and I feel like the deluge of generated images (and the general public’s lack of information about how the image gen works and how to decipher them) will cause harm.
Hopefully that wasn’t too much of a ramble. 🫤 TLDR: It isn’t necessarily immoral, but people are emotional, it’s a big change, and it’s happening really damn fast.