Have you tried copilot? Honestly I've been very impressed by the art quality just with very basic prompts. Now if your going for a very specific look than yeah that takes a lot of work. But if you just want a cool npc portrait that puts an image in the PC minds, it is excellent for that.I use AI in three ways.
- As a suggestions box. "Give me ten random encounters in situation X"
- As a secretary "Rewrite this text in the voice of X" or "Rewrite this at a lower reading level"
- As an image generator. This is fun, but the results are bad. It takes hundreds of generated images to illustrate something specific.