There will be at many points in your creative process opportunities to bypass the struggle of working and learning, but availing yourself of those shortcuts will gradually undermine your work in subtle ways that you cannot foresee.
So sure, go ahead and use generative fill to clean up your image. No one’s watching. I won’t tell anyone and no one will ever know. But you will pay a very small price in relieving yourself from the duty of learning some new Photoshop skills. You might not need those skills in this precise moment, but as you grow into your craft, those skills might come in handy in other ways that you do not presently anticipate.
While focused on people who do creative work, this video easily applies to everyone. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of letting the sparkles do something for you, and just as easy to prevent yourself from learning and improving because of that.
Even as someone who tries to limit and police my own usage of AI tools, I could see myself in a lot of these examples. Process isn’t only important to creative work; it’s important to our own personal development. AI can produce generic output that anyone else could, but only you, with your unique combination of skills and experiences accumulated over the years, can produce something unique.