r/StableDiffusion has a thread asking users what the one image their inscrutable gacha machine created for them they value the most is, and the answers are even more cringe than you expect.
It's really fascinating to me that this is what people make when the barrier to artistic creation disappears. It reminds me of some Youtuber books - they're written by people with no literary skill or experience, but they produce them because they've gotten popular enough that the books are a profitable endeavor regardless of quality. Until you read a Youtuber book you don't consciously realize what is necessary to write a book, because usually, mostly, only people who have that ineffable something do write novels. And here: you don't realize what is needed to actually create art and not just images, until you see people with no artistic literacy or skill produce what they think of as art.
Visual art and literature are windows to the soul, and normally only a certain type of person goes through the effort to open that window for us. Here, and in Youtuber books, you can see inside a completely different type of person. And their soul looks like waifus and cowboys.
People have been making boring, soulless art by hand forever too though. Hollow pet portraits and reddit-favorite photorealistic copies of celebrity photos for example. You're right that stable diffusion has removed a barrier to entry but they're just joining the glut of skillful but completely uncreative human 'artists' already out there in the world.
because usually, mostly, only people who have that ineffable something do write novels
People have always been writing terrible fiction. Trawl the depths of AO3 and fanfiction.net, look at the great mound of rejected novels by aspiring authors. Artistic mediocrity is a part of the human condition the same as artistic excellence.
For the most part, the "ineffable something" required to write a good book is years of practice, an editor and the barrier to entry that is convincing a publisher to take you on.
Rick Beato is a music YouTuber and overall insufferable dipshit and borderline child abuser. He started plugging a self-published "book" several years back that was supposed to be a self-contained songwriting and music theory course, but it's mostly just gibberish and copy-pasted scale/chord finder/circle of fifths diagrams yanked from Google Image Search.
Oh this guy!!! When I was in uni, one of my music teachers recommended an episode of his podcast where he talked about the human element in music or something. Like how when producing music on the computer you should always adjust the timings or amplitude of each note to make them slightly different, to sound like it was played by a human, to make it more emotional sounding. And I can get the idea behind that - like many things in music production, it's a cool trick to add to your arsenal - but Rick Beato was obsessed with it. Like he said you should use this trick every time or else your music doesn't count as music because it's not emotional enough! Like, no, I've cried to EDM before. It seemed like he had an opinion on the types of music he liked and was pushing those as fact rather than his opinion.
Also on the same episode of that podcast he shilled cryptocurrency.
This is exactly what bothers me about these people and for me it's especially exemplified by the one person who posted the astronaut lady with the dogs.