Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Second, we need the ability to persist a design. I See yesterday's Stable Diffusion article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32643564
I haven't had a chance to try it yet, I'm optimistic but skeptical that it can have true persistence like I'm referring to. Especially since it requires training your own model which requires multiple images of the same asset/character/object/etc.
I think that thing will neccesarily contained representations of dimension, behavior (physics/bones), and "style". Without the "ai thing", if only using an image/text, the character would have to be impossibly represented in the model, so it could guess all of these things predictably. For example, what that character looks like from a side profile, or behind. What if it's an alien, and its arms should always bend backwards? Could a text representation ever be made to completely describe this, with good reproducibility? Probably not. But, I assume some non-human representation would have a better chance.
As is, if something known is required, I think the behavior of these models can be considered "destructive" to the input image, more often than not. For this reason, I think artists are safe, for the time being. :)