Question and opinions

I never thought I'd be making a post like this because honestly I used to be one of those people who constantly talked about how I'd never use AI for art.

Lately though, I've been thinking about it differently and I wanted to hear what other artists think.

For some context I have hypophantasia which basically means I have a really hard time visualizing things in my head. I absolutely love writing stories, and my dream is to draw my own manga with my own original characters. I already have character sheets of my OCs so I know what they look like from the front and back. My biggest struggle isn't designing them it's drawing them consistently in different poses, angles or facial expressions. I know what emotion I want them to have but I can't actually picture it in my head well enough to draw it from scratch.

The workflow I've been thinking about is something like this: I'd take my own character sheet and use AI to generate my own OC in whatever pose or expression I need. Sometimes I'd use a text prompt and other times I'd give it a pose reference and ask it to put my character into that pose while trying to stay close to my style. Then I'd take that image and sketch over it myself. I'd remove the background, fix the anatomy if something looks weird, clean up the proportions, change anything that doesn't look right. After that I'd do all the clean line art over the sketch I did, coloring, shading and everything else myself.

So the AI wouldn't be my finished artwork. It would basically just be a starting point or a reference because I genuinely struggle with visualizing those things on my own.

I guess what I'm wondering is... does that seem like an okay workflow or would you still consider that crossing a line?

Part of me still feels weird about it because I spent so much time criticizing AI art and saying I'd never touch it. I honestly didn't think I'd ever change my mind. But the more I thought about it the more I realized it might actually help me work around something I struggle with instead of replacing the parts of creating that I actually love. I'm genuinely curious what other artists think. Would this bother you? Does it seem like a reasonable accessibility tool or do you think it's still too much? I'm not looking to argue with anyone I just want to hear different perspectives.