Magic in what way? They sure are impressive tools but like all AI, they do not have an eye for finer detail. I'm really unsure most ML researchers have an eye for this oddly. But then again, most people I know that work in generative vision have no artistic hobby so I'm not sure how they can feel they can properly evaluate works. It's the subtle details that matter.
I should've been clearer, really. What made me feel the "magic" was not prompting Stable Diffusion. It was letting it iterate on art I had already done.
I did a lot of 3D-rendered illustration back in the 1990s and early 2000s, necessarily low-polygon stuff, but things that were supposed to be life-like scenes, with tons of textures, that took a very long time to render. Including what may have been the first and only children's book illustrated with Infini-D on a Mac IIsi.
So, feeding these old renderings into StableDif with 75% bias toward the original image and a couple of basic prompts, produced results that blew my mind. It was like seeing what my illustrations could have been if I'd had a team at Pixar Studios refining them. In the sense that it was still my character art and my creation, totally recognizable, but polished and refined to a level that would have been unimaginable in 1997.
