[meta] I got five hundred responses. Many were AI, scammers, or bots

I posted an ad on here (different account), for a $250 budget piece. Five hundred plus responses came in through discord and email.

Most of them were simply low quality responses, people who had no experience doing the work I was looking for, asking to be given a shot anyways. Portfolios with nothing but unrendered sketches of anime girls, furry art, of very basic graphic design that looked to be made with a free iPhone app. I don't want to be a jerk, but if I advertise looking for a mature, dark fantasy style and you send me nothing but art you did for toddler books, or furaffinity profile pictures, what am I supposed to do with that when part of the project I'm looking for is a stylized drawing of a fantasy map? A lot of people asked me exactly what style I was looking for (even though I had said what I needed in the post), and claimed they could do "any" style I wanted. These jack of all trades, masters of none (or I say should say beginner levels of none) made up a lot of the replies and I got to say: If you wholeheartedly think you can copy any style, the odds are very likely from what I've seen in my DMs that you need to go practice your fundamentals.

Worse, I had roughly eighty scammers message me. The easiest way to spot them was if they didn't have any socials or portfolios and just sent images on discord. I began to realize these were scams when I saw several of them turn in the exact same shitty drawing of a hiker, but the nail in the coffin was a person who turned in the cover of Brandon Sanderson's Words of Radiance, claiming he made it. Oh, and someone was turning in random comic book pages of Artemis from Red Hood and the Outlaws (when questioned he admitted the art wasn't his but his art looked a lot like that, really!).

I don't even want to go into the amount of people who showed me AI art. Worst of all, I've experimented with AI art (and quickly realized it was soulless) and I could produce much better AI than what they made. Most just used Bing's Dall-E and didn't even bother to turn in AI slop with good hands or eyes. And I have reason to believe that a lot of the worse artists who applied without portfolios did a trick where they would show me a mixture of their own really shitty art combined with art they found off of Pinterest. Sometimes I would get a DM from a person whose art I really liked, only to reverse image search and discover their art belonged to someone else. When confronted, most denied it or ignored it, begging me to just give them a chance.

There was roughly fifty artists who applied who were amazing. Out of that fifty I ended up commissioning three people each for $250 because their work was truly phenomenal. My advice to commissioners is this: reverse image search the art to make sure it's their own work. If they send you their socials, ask for proof that the profile they sent over belongs to them. Please stay smart, and sorry to all the artists who have to deal with this terrible AI market

Edited to separate into paraphraphs.