Edit: I'm not giving up. I'm literally still drawing. Stop acting like I am and not understanding the entire point of this post.
I don't even know if i'm pro ai anti ai neutral idk, probably ai sympathetic at this point even though I stubbornly refuse to use it despite not enjoying drawing in the slightest but struggling along anyway.
Anyway, The reason I hate this image is because it's not fucking true. It gives false hope. I started drawing nearly a year ago now and it has been one of the worst experiences of my life. I genuinely came into drawing believing that it would be extremely easy to learn and that the only hard part would be building the necessary motor skills. I have never struggled to understand things conceptually whenever someone explains something to me I've always been able to understand it pretty quickly and then just need to practice.
It took me over 2 dozen times over the past year where i sat down with tutorials and put my all into trying to learn for several hours of how to draw a basic cube in one point perspective. Finally, I learned it when someone spent 3 hours with me walking me through it step by step. The most basic of the basics took me 10 months to understand on a conceptual level leading to many crashouts as people told me "just practice it" and "even children can learn one point perspective."
What's most frustrating about all of this is I basically see it as there are 3 types of gen ai users. Scammers, casuals, and those who want to achieve a creative goal. Scammers dont need to be explained, casuals are basically when your parents go, hey look i made a funny image of your grandma with ai haha. But a lot of people are writers or similar with tons of ideas who wish to realize it but haven't had the patience skill money or time to become good at art in order to achieve goals like manga, comics, videogames, visual novels, etc. I fall into that category and I've come to view Gen Ai as being akin to steroids. I used to watch a lot of those speedrunner cheater videos and i never got why good speedrunners who were top 10 or so would cheat until one time it was said in one of these videos "good speedrunners don't cheat to get a better time. They cheat to get a better time faster." Which is basically what gen AI represents to me the ability to skip all the struggles and achieve the end goal which is all i care about.
It's also frustrating how I really just don't enjoy drawing at all but I'm incrediblyl stubborn and I want to realize my creative ambitions and take my writing and make visual novels. (I'm not one of those oh i have so many ideas and nothing written people. I've written over a thousand pages across multiple projects at this point.) But I can't use AI because people won't play my visual novel if it has AI in it but they tell you "if you hate drawing, don't." But also don't use Ai. Well actually just spend 10,000 dollars hiring real artists. Yeah, let me just go ahead and do that real quick. But the worst is when i'm asked "why don't you just be a regular novelist then." Because I don't want to. Why don't you, an artist, become a comic writer then? Yeah. Probably have the same answer. (and it's funny because so many of them will unironically not want to learn creative writing because of the fears expressed in this superman image. They're scared of being bad at writing then tell new artists not to be scared of being bad at drawing)
And then I can't stand when people try to patronize me and tell me actualy your drawing is good. My lines are shaky and unconfident despite 10 months of daily line practice. I've far exceed the recommended 20 minutes a day that people say is all you need to become decent (often hitting 4-5 hours a day). I've focused heavily on the fundamentals and only understand the basics of shading and color theory. I can't draw at all without references, except for cubes now i guess. And i've stalled my wheels incredibly hard not being able to complete a single visual novel in 2 years despite having 3 finished scripts for short games, and 1 incredibly long script in its 4th draft state (over 400 pages. and i've even spent thousands getting art for it and drained through my savings so i can make a demo by the end of the year hopefully and get a kickstarter that probably won't be successful.)
All of this is to say that I hate when artists try to lie to people to get them to draw. I don't want to be lied to. I only grow when you give it to me straight and save the bullshit. Don't coddle me like a child, give me the hard truth so I can channel my stubborn determination and push through it. I'm not more talented than I thought, I'm 10x less talented like I said I genuinely thought I'd be able to design my own cool looking anime characters by now and actually finish making a VN. Hah. I'm done. I'm not gonna use AI so save your breath please.