Stable Diffusion animation
Maybe I can shine some light on the debate from an concept artist standpoint that works in VFX and advertising. I worked on feature films (3 of them in the imdb top 100), tv shows (like game of thrones) and hundreds of AD campaigns.<p>In the last 10 year the work of a concept artist changed dramatically we have gone from purely painted concept art to mostly "photobashed". Photobashed means basically that you rip apart other images and stitch them together to get the desired image. Some start with a rough sketch for the composition or make really rough grey shade 3d model and "overpaint" them. When it comes to "photobashing" the disregard for copyrights was always there and it's the worst in smaller studios and a bit better in the leading ones. Still most of the time everyone argues that if you only use really small parts of the images it is covered by fair use. There are some examples were studios got sued but mostly without bigger financial impact.<p>A few months ago I started working with "DiscoDiffusion" to generate the images I use to photobash. "DiscoDiffusion" can produce great "painterly" images but struggles with photorealism and is slower, not as coherent as "StableDiffusion".
Still the adoption rate in the concept art community was insanely fast. This all got topped by "StableDiffusion" in the last week. Ofc there are still people that want to do it the "right" way and not use AI but we had the same discussion years ago when "photobashing" came into place and some artists still wanted to paint the whole image. As concept artist you are mostly paid for your design thinking that means it is less about the process and more about the finished product. The turnaround time for styleframes got reduced from 3-4 hours while painting to 45 min - 1 hour when photobashing with stable diffusion me and my peers in the studio are now at 20-45 min per styleframe. When "photobashing" most people constrain themselves on their image library and ressources like Photobashing Kits. Not only does "StableDiffusion" cut the time in half it also gives greater freedom in composition and design especially if you are using  img2img.<p>So where does this leave us? For the work in fast paced art environments like VFX, games, conept art or advertising "StableDiffusion" is a welcome gamechanger. Tradionalists and Artists outside of the industry might feel threatened but for us in these industries it's a god send.