One question I have is that if two people use the same prompt, do they get the same result?
No. The entire process is explorative and iterative. And prompts are not at all straight-forward. One of my favorite prompts for framing an object that I want to use as an asset is ‘surrounded by mushrooms’, which has nothing at all to do with mushrooms.
AI art is largely about thinking about the context of what you’re looking for when it comes to digital media. It’s not at all like a star trek replicator that gives you what you ask for, it’s more like digging through a confused alien robot’s fever dream.
Personally, I absolutely find my experience of using it comparable in terms of effort and creativity to my use of photography and other mediums. It also nearly always involves actually manually drawing and editing things in my use case.
I think people who are totally sure they know what using AI art is like should go try it to make something actually usable. It’s one thing to use AI prompts to make silly pictures, it’s another to try to use them to generate specific usable assets that you can adjust and reiterate to get what you want out of them.