Have you ever tried doing that? In my experience, art students don't like to work for "little money" and "professional reference" and stablished artists don't like when you try to pay "little money" to students.

Just a note about language: when folks say they "don't have the money" or "don't have the time", it's almost never the case that they don't have any of the resource in question...it's about priorities. What they are saying is that there are far more effective ways to spend their money than incidentals like this, especially when cheap alternatives exist.

In year 2026 you are likely going to pay for a meat proxy who would still use the same model just without you controlling the prompt.

These days a cheap designer is just going to be a meat proxy for AI anyway.

AI, at least for now while it's still free/very cheap, enables producing a lot of very low-value content that in the past you never could have justified spending money and human labor on. The cost or time needed to make a poster or a flyer acted as a value-based gatekeeper. Today, it costs nothing to make an AI slop image and blast it out on social media, so we're drowning in it.

What is your experience with design done by students? Because mine isn't great. It's not bad either, but it's just... mediocre.

Depends on which economy the buyer and the seller respectively come from.

the problem is that AI does better than those students, especially if you don't know what good design looks like... which is most people

but of course this means the entire market will dry up because no one pays students anymore