But if I want a good picture of an owl, I Google "owl" and get many more options than I could possibly ever have time to pick from. Stable Diffusion is essentially doing the same thing as Google, except presenting a kind of average result instead of showing me all the results in its DB.
Now, this may actually be helpful in that it gets around copyright claims - but that's the only real difference.
And you are free to search through the whole catalog of google results until you find an owl that looks exactly like you want. Though this is going to get harder as you want something more specific than a simple owl.
But the approach for stable diffusion is just as easy whether you want just "an owl", or "an owl in X's style with A, B, and C"
Changing the prompt until it generates what I want is not that different from changing my search terms until the result I want is closer to the top.
Now, I should of course note that search engines already employ ML techniques to actually interpret search terms, so to some extent the point is moot - ML is important to actually solving this problem.
Not a very wide range of what I could do with the idea in terms of composition, but just some variations of finishing touches/intermediate steps. I achieved this with some human-in-the-loop iteration and inpainting, but it was no more than 15-30 minutes toying around with it, and I'm no artist.
If you have a semi-decent graphics card and would like to experiment with a bunch of extra settings and tools than are readily available online, this is a good repo for that: https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui
Now, this may actually be helpful in that it gets around copyright claims - but that's the only real difference.