I know you were just referencing relevant work examples, but working on both Invincible AND Blue Eye Samurai is a HUGE FLEX 💪 And it adds a ton of validity to your teaching chops! Congrats on playing a crucial role in some super successful animated series!
Milt Kahl may have been one of the most hyper-elite animators of all time, but even he needed reference. He avoided it heavily during The Rescuers as that was his final theatrical debut, but Madam Medusa's design was still based off real reference (his ex-wife).
There's so many ways you can use references. 3D models, photos, other art, real life etc. You can use action figures and a ton of other cool stuff. I also like using more abstract ideas like clouds to get ideas. I really do think using references is a must as you don't know what everything looks like in your mind. Though I suggest making changes to your art so your not flat out copying. That is how I like to do things. Take what ever I can find. I do agree with not using ai. It looks fake and if you use that as refence. It would not look right. Of course you can always draw from imagination. Though that is harder for anybody. I think using both imagination while simultaneously using reference is a great idea
I love what you said at the very end. too many people out there like that. I definitely listened to people like that when I was a little kid and it set me back for sure.
Reminds me of people also using different thicknesses of cloth around their fingers for cloth folds that apply to bigger objects, like limbs or anything.
You deserve more views and subscribers you have a great amount of resources and skills for people like me entering the world of finding work in animation or just looking expand a skill base within the world of animation 😊
That was my problem as a kid. People around me said that "copying" from other things is bad, you're better if you dont do it. So I never used references when drawing, so I never learned shit and never really became good in drawing, lol.
oh... i forgot to mention. there's some modeling apps that have several different models you can pose and move around. easy on the play store even for mobile.
I remember in primary school, art exams don't allow you to use reference because it's cheating. I thought that was stupid back then but just ignored it because maybe I was too young to understand what they're talking about. I have now finished secondary school with more experience in art and I still have no idea what they're talking about.
"If your still reading: As a female talking in Utube chat rooms, male psychiatrist mislabeled 'Penis envy' with a concept called ' pick your winners and your loosers',...that's when a male or group of males discredited a female comment so that male or group of men can lie about where the comment occurred and use it to treat a competitive male like crap. The news and few music AMVS , males have chosen this bizarre behavior with me recently. In the arts, that's seen to me as politically motivated and I'd refuse to put up with it."
Haha yeah fair enough, always liked what you did and at least for public face, you always seemed like one of the more reasonable types, though i guess kinda in 2024, there's a sliding scale and sometimes what's taken for granted in another area might just be a high bar in another place where the floor is. XD. Anyone who was in the arts community might kinda want to see what happened to like Ergojosh, guy was a nice guy but i swear, keeping AL out of the titles seems fair, it's just a hot topic and i swear there's like so much internet toxicity around it. I'm still coming out of Dragoneer's death going into -27k-240k medical debt and people saying his 1k urn and funeral service took away from artists next to watching the SonicChu / Deviantart / Chris/tine chan police bodycam arrest footage. Stuff is surreal in 2024 and a lot of nerves are on end and i think it's a fair stance for anyone to take a breather. I got into the arts with art trading and at first i just was grinding a game. I had some game friends who were trying to set up art shops back then who were getting no orders for weeks. I never treated art like a addiction but my origin story was basically going "Hey, i just like grinding items for fun." "nobody is buying anything" "well, i don't want to underpay, but whatever this rare item could buy, i got a spare if you want!" :D And then i expected a headshot but got 3 fullbodies instead and like i was like a mini merchant then, nothing of value irl today. I guess 100% optimized it could be like maybe a bandos chestplate in osrs today. If you had all the optimized gear to grind it, it took 2-4 hours, but if you didn't, it might be a 10-100+ hr journey. Just economics. Anyways i got into art purchasing for that, at first it was to support friends, spend times with people, i owned a fair amount of art, but then i ran into people who didn't have art. They screamed that those that had stuff were entitled and spoiled and didn't know what it was like to have nothing. So i briefly tried to draw for them for a while, but i had to earn a 3.8+ scholarship and i was a bit too much of a people pleaser then. So i tried to make everyone happy and sleep deprived myself instead and then went into angry grumpy old man mode and saw dragoneer die as well and even with the dark stuff people just rubberbanded to expecting like 100x more and custom ocs and i was just like freaking done with it all lmao. I was like "yo f all this crap, im DONE, IM FUCKING DONE" and just quit lmao. One side did a demonizing campaign and the other just wanted unlimited popcorn and 1-4 hr custom inpainted oc sparkledogs lora and was like "i can buy this" and i was like "please fucking do, i am not inpainting 1-4 hrs for a unpaid request" and like i was done and doing college and i was just done with the arts industry and i had like normal friends who just invited us for dinners, like korean bbqs, pool parties, volleyball! I felt like if i spent 1-10 hrs on visual mediums, i would get 0-1000 silent views and maybe 1 "would tap" comment or complete silence. If i spent 2 hours on people irl, we got to eat roasted steak over a bbq with all the bimpibap and gochujang and hoisin sauce and teriyaki roasted beef and steak and rice bowls and laugh and then go swimming in a pool. Not to mention internet rabidity and like the weird absurdity of the internet where chris chans irl could be undisputable reddit mods with right click beans on the net, and absurd wtf irls lol. That's probably just me rambling though, internet drama is bad this year and anyone on a named account avoiding is probably sensible. I still love having a anon account where i can go old man mode and just go. "Im here to enjoy life, with or without YAS! NOW GET OFF MAH LAWN!" Lol. XD
I really wish artists could stop mentioning AI so much… I’m just so done. Can we just _not_ mention AI for once? It’s so stressful and it feels like it’s just everywhere and everyone is talking about it…
The more i talked with my fellow aniamtor/art friends the more i wondering how so social progressive groups can be so conservative in production methods. And how VFX fellas is crazy tryin to learn EVERYTHING what can improve their production even a millisecond per frame. So contradictional... Tbh i also not so often use refences, but simply because i'm Engineer and most of movement i can control inside my own head. Because it mostly physics and theoretical mechanics, and that books i learn... not so well but enough to understand how gravity and weight with friction works.
"The more i talked with my fellow aniamtor/art friends the more i wondering how so social progressive groups can be so conservative in production methods" Totally agree - as an "artistic person" i could never be in a cubicle all day with a boss telling me my drawing is "off-model" lol
I think to play a devil's advocate, a lot of people would love to sit back and relax but also want job security. But also as a satan's advocate, i've also had some pretty poor personal experiences, though i do not represent the animator. I think the concept of anti ai in the workforce and at least anti corporate ai 1000% for sure makes most workers capitalistic sense. As for my own personal pov, i think i've met some friends or the artless who were working 2-3 jobs to try and feed their kids im my story. Their friends rped or had chars, so they wanted to play too and had no money. So their choice was to color a base after coming home from 6 am to 7 pm shifts and eating 7-8 and then being called lazy 8-10 pm and then having it called ugly, or just asking for a piece while trying to feed their kids. A fair amount of people just to be frankly honest did turn out to just be well.. Not those kinda people tbh, just kinda like people watching the tv. I think there's this scapegoatism going on where people in anti ai are rabid, look at ergojosh. I think there's like a targeted harassment sub like r/artisthate where a bunch of 13-30 year old people try to harass people who aren't fully demonizing it for 1-3 days until the next target. Like look at Ergojosh, guy spent 10+ years on art, touched it once, and they demonized the guy. So you're in this potential spot where if you aren't a raving lunatic, a bunch of people from twitter/reddit try to ruin your life, but they don't go after the corps who cause mass layoffs (hello Pixar/Activision blizzard declaring billions in profits and then laying off staff) Ironically, Overwatch 2 has started technically been getting (at least imho, better looking/more creative but less thematic skins like Anubis Reaper, skull roadhogs, mecha anas, vs pink mercy, green mercy, yellow mercy, and second pink mercy from the human era.) Meanwhile hearthstone may or may not have tried a ai dragon skin for Celeste, and it just was a complete fiasco. The whiskers detached from the face. Most hearthstone characters are too unique for ai to work well on them. There's this massive potential drama that's imho best avoided on a public account. People literally just keyword search "Ai" in the youtube title and respond to every comment 24s old on the groups. I guess the concern isn't labor saving, it's that if a corporation could try to replace you (even though even as a non rabid/annoyedly neutral for A REASON) person, there are quirks with ai. It sucks at ocs (literally every requested character), it needs controlnets/loras to do multi character scenes, text is garbled. But it does make 1000$ quality renders for 0$.. if you're alright with generic stand ins. But it genuinely does give me motion sickness. ai animation just isn't there. But i do feel like there's a lot of virtue signalling. I also think artisthate might be running potential -27 / + 27 downvote/upvote bots. You go to a sub that gets 5 comments and +- 7 votes normally. Artisthate will brigade it and every anti ai comment will get seeded +27 and critical -27 votes. Then people trickling in will help make them 27 to 57. Look at what Ergojosh went through. Guy just touched it and all this drama came, nonstop sludge and wishes of harm for 3 days, then they moved on. The whole thing is just a toxic sludgepit and opinions are my own, not video makers at all. But imho, as a former commissioner, i used to just like the casual group hangout feeling. Art wasn't about the picture but a positive social experience. People made things, you had fun. Words are worthless but i used to be one of those "omg, your art looks so good!" "i love how you do the fur detail" people, then after "GO TO !@#!@# HELL YOU !@##!@#!@ INGRATE!" I kinda became one of those.. "....." "Go take yourself to HELL" people. I think being mobbed can fundamentally affect how you perceive art. I no longer enjoy it or have a appetite for it, it's the same way you might lose your taste for donuts if after a lifetime of eating tasty ones, you were force fed rancid and rotten ones with mold spots all over and then expected to climb over nails for them. I'm not here to bring the heat, nor do i represent the animator. But just my personal experience is, im not sure if corps are gonna represent our interests, but i've had 20x worse experiences with the ai debate than the abortion debate and im at a honest point where if everyone got into a trolley problem that drove them to mars. I'd sink the line back and enjoy the rest of my day.
Most Ai stuff I have seen is also just conserving and re-mushing the same images and stereotypes over and over again. it is super conservative if you want so. like... if you ask for the image of a doctor, in the majority of the results the doctor will probably white and male, while if you prompt a nurse it will probably showing you a bunch of women. If you asked for example for a interracial asian- black couple older woman, younger man. it struggles. not only with making the woman older than the man, but also with making different iterations that fit the ethnicities. And that would be just one image. not an image sequence. AI also has problems with more ambiguous storytelling or nuanced emotional expressions, depictions of gravity, objects touching and flow. if you look at the AI images on pinterest, there's just a bunch of ladies with a blank expression. If you have to clean up all that anyway or make it fit your purpose you can also just find/make a reference that fits your purpose better from the beginning or one that gives you less of a concrete image so it's easier to fill in the the blanks on your own. I also think there is a difference between making things look "correct" physics-wise and depicting mood and tone or also a human body that hasn't perfect proportions and how they move. I really enjoy figure drawing at the moment to see how different models are in their physical ability and how their body shape differs...you can ask AI that but, it would struggle with it. especially when it comes to stuff like fat deposition and muscle imbalances. seeing how other artists solved problems and stylise things can also be very useful to finding your own solutions when it comes to your art but it can also help you just get better when it comes to imagining stuff that looks pleasing. especially if you only have a vague idea what you want yet. AI often lacks the overall intention when it comes to narration and specificity in my opinion. it doesn't *want* to tell a story or convey something, because it can't want things in general... it's just a tool. if you take artists/filmmakers/photographers as references you can also take in different underlying narratives and learn from that, you can learn from their decisions they made, because they actually decisions.
“And it’s not Ai” Well I’m sold! This is the content I love!
The intro is what i needed today
I know you were just referencing relevant work examples, but working on both Invincible AND Blue Eye Samurai is a HUGE FLEX 💪 And it adds a ton of validity to your teaching chops! Congrats on playing a crucial role in some super successful animated series!
🙄🙄🙄🙄
damn dude i was not expecting you to shoot Milt Kahl at the start of this video
Milt Kahl may have been one of the most hyper-elite animators of all time, but even he needed reference. He avoided it heavily during The Rescuers as that was his final theatrical debut, but Madam Medusa's design was still based off real reference (his ex-wife).
The Time Crisis Reference is so peak
Concept art from games is always inspiring 👌 Thank you for sharing the websites!
Is no one gonna point this out😂 0:50
He did it intentionally
Love your content Toniko! Where was this when I was young??? Young artists nowadays are so lucky to have you :D
There's so many ways you can use references. 3D models, photos, other art, real life etc. You can use action figures and a ton of other cool stuff. I also like using more abstract ideas like clouds to get ideas. I really do think using references is a must as you don't know what everything looks like in your mind. Though I suggest making changes to your art so your not flat out copying. That is how I like to do things. Take what ever I can find. I do agree with not using ai. It looks fake and if you use that as refence. It would not look right. Of course you can always draw from imagination. Though that is harder for anybody. I think using both imagination while simultaneously using reference is a great idea
Damm that youtube shortcut is a hidden gem
10/10 times I use references my art is exponentially better than it could be just on my own. Art is references!
TONIKO YOU'RE THE GOAT
I love what you said at the very end. too many people out there like that. I definitely listened to people like that when I was a little kid and it set me back for sure.
shout out to body-kun and body-chan. all the dynamic posing you could want literally in the palm of your hand
I do struggle with this, along with backgrounds and shading. Thank you for making this video. This will help me out a lot❤😢
holy shit that time crisis bit unlocked a weird core memory lmfao
I did try using Ai for reference but its actually terrible for it, its anatomy makes no sense and its little details are always distorted
Best intro to a youtube vid I've seen in forever
This is the video I always needed! Thank you so much!
Reminds me of people also using different thicknesses of cloth around their fingers for cloth folds that apply to bigger objects, like limbs or anything.
You deserve more views and subscribers you have a great amount of resources and skills for people like me entering the world of finding work in animation or just looking expand a skill base within the world of animation 😊
Even as a 3D guy, these are super cool sources to know. Thank you!
Thank you so much! I love 'Yes, Madam!' movie, please publish this work,. It's amazing!
nice vid bro
Great video Toniko!
You have worked on invincible AND blue eye samurai? Your portfolio is racked
Good video man by the way nice animations Hella smooth
I've been lucky that never had anyone criticize for using Reference. Always had people reprehending me for NOT using reference.
Very nice video, lifesaver
TrueRef is an exciting new reference maker
time crisis intro was peak LOL
What an opening 🔥🦅🦅
Well damn. You just saved me a bunch of time with that comma/dot key tip!
thanks
That was my problem as a kid. People around me said that "copying" from other things is bad, you're better if you dont do it. So I never used references when drawing, so I never learned shit and never really became good in drawing, lol.
I always feel like I’m not doing anything when I animate from reference. Especially when I just copy the reference video
Thank you for the video!
I literally made a video on this too, a while back :D
i love that intro 🤣
oh... i forgot to mention. there's some modeling apps that have several different models you can pose and move around. easy on the play store even for mobile.
where I live cafe drawing really doesn't feel like an option, there's barely any people around and if there are it's not for long.
YO MARVEEELLLLLLL BAYBEEEEEEE
The best reference is YO MAMA
Where'd you get the grey figurine?
I remember in primary school, art exams don't allow you to use reference because it's cheating. I thought that was stupid back then but just ignored it because maybe I was too young to understand what they're talking about.
I have now finished secondary school with more experience in art and I still have no idea what they're talking about.
Technically we all use reference wether we like it or not lol
Like for using Time Crisis in opening ❤
where can you buy this kind of figurines toys?
Lmao the intro 👍🏻
I'd rather have free references because of keeping it simple. In Cleveland, Ohio;the zoo, libraries, and sewing stores don't offer free references_ they charge to look at information that's visual. Technology can hinder the creative flow, if you don't have the right animation- references that are moving like video,however photos of still lifes only captures details like shutter speed lines ,and object details.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is, if your just starting out at animation college, reference photo libraries are predatory like getting loans now.Submissions are harder because of ©️, ™️, and Patent laws.
"If your still reading: As a female talking in Utube chat rooms, male psychiatrist mislabeled 'Penis envy' with a concept called ' pick your winners and your loosers',...that's when a male or group of males discredited a female comment so that male or group of men can lie about where the comment occurred and use it to treat a competitive male like crap. The news and few music AMVS , males have chosen this bizarre behavior with me recently.
In the arts, that's seen to me as politically motivated and I'd refuse to put up with it."
What kind of action figure do you use as reference? Where did you get it?
Pilipino? :0
Also great tips, thank you so much!
Haha yeah fair enough, always liked what you did and at least for public face, you always seemed like one of the more reasonable types, though i guess kinda in 2024, there's a sliding scale and sometimes what's taken for granted in another area might just be a high bar in another place where the floor is. XD.
Anyone who was in the arts community might kinda want to see what happened to like Ergojosh, guy was a nice guy but i swear, keeping AL out of the titles seems fair, it's just a hot topic and i swear there's like so much internet toxicity around it.
I'm still coming out of Dragoneer's death going into -27k-240k medical debt and people saying his 1k urn and funeral service took away from artists next to watching the SonicChu / Deviantart / Chris/tine chan police bodycam arrest footage. Stuff is surreal in 2024 and a lot of nerves are on end and i think it's a fair stance for anyone to take a breather.
I got into the arts with art trading and at first i just was grinding a game. I had some game friends who were trying to set up art shops back then who were getting no orders for weeks. I never treated art like a addiction but my origin story was basically going "Hey, i just like grinding items for fun." "nobody is buying anything" "well, i don't want to underpay, but whatever this rare item could buy, i got a spare if you want!" :D
And then i expected a headshot but got 3 fullbodies instead and like i was like a mini merchant then, nothing of value irl today. I guess 100% optimized it could be like maybe a bandos chestplate in osrs today. If you had all the optimized gear to grind it, it took 2-4 hours, but if you didn't, it might be a 10-100+ hr journey. Just economics.
Anyways i got into art purchasing for that, at first it was to support friends, spend times with people, i owned a fair amount of art, but then i ran into people who didn't have art. They screamed that those that had stuff were entitled and spoiled and didn't know what it was like to have nothing. So i briefly tried to draw for them for a while, but i had to earn a 3.8+ scholarship and i was a bit too much of a people pleaser then.
So i tried to make everyone happy and sleep deprived myself instead and then went into angry grumpy old man mode and saw dragoneer die as well and even with the dark stuff people just rubberbanded to expecting like 100x more and custom ocs and i was just like freaking done with it all lmao. I was like "yo f all this crap, im DONE, IM FUCKING DONE" and just quit lmao.
One side did a demonizing campaign and the other just wanted unlimited popcorn and 1-4 hr custom inpainted oc sparkledogs lora and was like "i can buy this" and i was like "please fucking do, i am not inpainting 1-4 hrs for a unpaid request" and like i was done and doing college and i was just done with the arts industry and i had like normal friends who just invited us for dinners, like korean bbqs, pool parties, volleyball!
I felt like if i spent 1-10 hrs on visual mediums, i would get 0-1000 silent views and maybe 1 "would tap" comment or complete silence. If i spent 2 hours on people irl, we got to eat roasted steak over a bbq with all the bimpibap and gochujang and hoisin sauce and teriyaki roasted beef and steak and rice bowls and laugh and then go swimming in a pool.
Not to mention internet rabidity and like the weird absurdity of the internet where chris chans irl could be undisputable reddit mods with right click beans on the net, and absurd wtf irls lol.
That's probably just me rambling though, internet drama is bad this year and anyone on a named account avoiding is probably sensible. I still love having a anon account where i can go old man mode and just go. "Im here to enjoy life, with or without YAS! NOW GET OFF MAH LAWN!" Lol. XD
I've used AI for colour pallete before
I think I just get distracted, Look at reference...Do something else, be lazy...
I really wish artists could stop mentioning AI so much… I’m just so done. Can we just _not_ mention AI for once? It’s so stressful and it feels like it’s just everywhere and everyone is talking about it…
i draw from my large language model.
no the computer does that. You just post it 😊
The more i talked with my fellow aniamtor/art friends the more i wondering how so social progressive groups can be so conservative in production methods. And how VFX fellas is crazy tryin to learn EVERYTHING what can improve their production even a millisecond per frame.
So contradictional...
Tbh i also not so often use refences, but simply because i'm Engineer and most of movement i can control inside my own head. Because it mostly physics and theoretical mechanics, and that books i learn... not so well but enough to understand how gravity and weight with friction works.
"The more i talked with my fellow aniamtor/art friends the more i wondering how so social progressive groups can be so conservative in production methods"
Totally agree - as an "artistic person" i could never be in a cubicle all day with a boss telling me my drawing is "off-model" lol
I think to play a devil's advocate, a lot of people would love to sit back and relax but also want job security.
But also as a satan's advocate, i've also had some pretty poor personal experiences, though i do not represent the animator. I think the concept of anti ai in the workforce and at least anti corporate ai 1000% for sure makes most workers capitalistic sense.
As for my own personal pov, i think i've met some friends or the artless who were working 2-3 jobs to try and feed their kids im my story. Their friends rped or had chars, so they wanted to play too and had no money.
So their choice was to color a base after coming home from 6 am to 7 pm shifts and eating 7-8 and then being called lazy 8-10 pm and then having it called ugly, or just asking for a piece while trying to feed their kids.
A fair amount of people just to be frankly honest did turn out to just be well.. Not those kinda people tbh, just kinda like people watching the tv. I think there's this scapegoatism going on where people in anti ai are rabid, look at ergojosh.
I think there's like a targeted harassment sub like r/artisthate where a bunch of 13-30 year old people try to harass people who aren't fully demonizing it for 1-3 days until the next target. Like look at Ergojosh, guy spent 10+ years on art, touched it once, and they demonized the guy.
So you're in this potential spot where if you aren't a raving lunatic, a bunch of people from twitter/reddit try to ruin your life, but they don't go after the corps who cause mass layoffs (hello Pixar/Activision blizzard declaring billions in profits and then laying off staff)
Ironically, Overwatch 2 has started technically been getting (at least imho, better looking/more creative but less thematic skins like Anubis Reaper, skull roadhogs, mecha anas, vs pink mercy, green mercy, yellow mercy, and second pink mercy from the human era.)
Meanwhile hearthstone may or may not have tried a ai dragon skin for Celeste, and it just was a complete fiasco. The whiskers detached from the face. Most hearthstone characters are too unique for ai to work well on them.
There's this massive potential drama that's imho best avoided on a public account. People literally just keyword search "Ai" in the youtube title and respond to every comment 24s old on the groups.
I guess the concern isn't labor saving, it's that if a corporation could try to replace you (even though even as a non rabid/annoyedly neutral for A REASON) person, there are quirks with ai. It sucks at ocs (literally every requested character), it needs controlnets/loras to do multi character scenes, text is garbled.
But it does make 1000$ quality renders for 0$.. if you're alright with generic stand ins. But it genuinely does give me motion sickness. ai animation just isn't there. But i do feel like there's a lot of virtue signalling.
I also think artisthate might be running potential -27 / + 27 downvote/upvote bots. You go to a sub that gets 5 comments and +- 7 votes normally. Artisthate will brigade it and every anti ai comment will get seeded +27 and critical -27 votes. Then people trickling in will help make them 27 to 57. Look at what Ergojosh went through. Guy just touched it and all this drama came, nonstop sludge and wishes of harm for 3 days, then they moved on.
The whole thing is just a toxic sludgepit and opinions are my own, not video makers at all. But imho, as a former commissioner, i used to just like the casual group hangout feeling. Art wasn't about the picture but a positive social experience. People made things, you had fun.
Words are worthless but i used to be one of those "omg, your art looks so good!" "i love how you do the fur detail" people, then after "GO TO !@#!@# HELL YOU !@##!@#!@ INGRATE!" I kinda became one of those.. "....." "Go take yourself to HELL" people.
I think being mobbed can fundamentally affect how you perceive art. I no longer enjoy it or have a appetite for it, it's the same way you might lose your taste for donuts if after a lifetime of eating tasty ones, you were force fed rancid and rotten ones with mold spots all over and then expected to climb over nails for them.
I'm not here to bring the heat, nor do i represent the animator. But just my personal experience is, im not sure if corps are gonna represent our interests, but i've had 20x worse experiences with the ai debate than the abortion debate and im at a honest point where if everyone got into a trolley problem that drove them to mars. I'd sink the line back and enjoy the rest of my day.
Most Ai stuff I have seen is also just conserving and re-mushing the same images and stereotypes over and over again. it is super conservative if you want so.
like... if you ask for the image of a doctor, in the majority of the results the doctor will probably white and male, while if you prompt a nurse it will probably showing you a bunch of women. If you asked for example for a interracial asian- black couple older woman, younger man. it struggles. not only with making the woman older than the man, but also with making different iterations that fit the ethnicities.
And that would be just one image. not an image sequence.
AI also has problems with more ambiguous storytelling or nuanced emotional expressions, depictions of gravity, objects touching and flow. if you look at the AI images on pinterest, there's just a bunch of ladies with a blank expression.
If you have to clean up all that anyway or make it fit your purpose you can also just find/make a reference that fits your purpose better from the beginning or one that gives you less of a concrete image so it's easier to fill in the the blanks on your own.
I also think there is a difference between making things look "correct" physics-wise and depicting mood and tone or also a human body that hasn't perfect proportions and how they move. I really enjoy figure drawing at the moment to see how different models are in their physical ability and how their body shape differs...you can ask AI that but, it would struggle with it. especially when it comes to stuff like fat deposition and muscle imbalances.
seeing how other artists solved problems and stylise things can also be very useful to finding your own solutions when it comes to your art but it can also help you just get better when it comes to imagining stuff that looks pleasing. especially if you only have a vague idea what you want yet.
AI often lacks the overall intention when it comes to narration and specificity in my opinion. it doesn't *want* to tell a story or convey something, because it can't want things in general... it's just a tool.
if you take artists/filmmakers/photographers as references you can also take in different underlying narratives and learn from that, you can learn from their decisions they made, because they actually decisions.
Lethal enforcers referance? Aww yeah