I find there is often very much a why with lots of the AI art I see. I often use it to try and visualize a dream I or one of my friends had. When I get the prompt just right it's sometimes striking how close I get to what I was seeing.

My friends will often use it for humorous situations that are happening to us in the moment. Overexagerations or putting one of us in a crazy situation. That's about as meaningful as using a gif keyboard, sure, but it gets a pretty good laugh out of me sometimes. There are recurring ones that have become a type of shorthand for us.

I've used it for highly personalized Christmas cards and anniversary invites for other people that they just otherwise would never have made because they don't have $500 to pay an artist and Clipart is too impersonal to bother with.

I've turned my mother's drawing into a beautiful realistic picture that she absolutely adored. I turned a baby picture from decades ago into a movie of a kid laughing which made my mother instinctively grab the phone from my hand with a big grin.

To me AI art is only about the why. It brings entertainment, comfort, hilarity and agency. I would never charge anybody for it I'm just doing it because I find it a neat set of tools to mess around with. And the tools aren't just asking chatgpt to make something. You can spend months refining the craft of it similar to learning something like Photoshop.