It's difficult to create a lamia in Photoshop

It's really difficult to create a lamia in Photoshop. This is mainly because it's hard to find images that fit together.

It's much easier for a mermaid. I've been using the same image of a fish for my mermaids' tails for years. I can bend and distort it in Photoshop to fit the model. Then I add the lighting.

Achieving the same for a lamia is almost impossible, or it would severely restrict the snake's posture. A snake's body can twist in so many more directions. The number of degrees of freedom is too high to apply the same routine as with a mermaid.

I painted something, very roughly; it only took a few minutes.

Then I asked ChatGPT to create a photorealistic image from it.

This was literally the first attempt. The first attempt at generating this image. And indeed, my first attempt at generating anything at all from scratch. (From scratch? I gave it a rough template...)

At least I had artistic input on pretty much every aspect of the image. I didn't just write a prompt and see what happened. Using my reference image, I determined how the body posture, surroundings, and even the lighting should be.

I will not stop making handcrafted photo manipulations! This was just an experiment. It isn't even in my gallery.

It's simply frightening how easy it has become to produce images of this quality.

Any opinions on this?