1. No.
   I don’t follow any Steemit witnesses closely, nor do I follow other Steemian users. I just go with the flow, seeing where my explorations take me, looking at the authors I’m reading, or the communities I happen to be in at the time.

2. For years, I’ve been promoting, sponsoring and funding all sorts of competitions, and it’s starting to wear me down. I did this for CCC a few years ago, then for freewriters, and I sponsored Art & Artists for a while, as well as competitions held on Knack4buzz and Steem for Betterlife.
   Now I mainly organise competitions myself, and I feel that is enough. After all, no one sponsors me; often I have to write frantically, even backwards, for less than 50 cents, and can only pray that I’ll scrape together enough for the prize money. Incidentally, there are quite a few people here whom I once helped; now that their wallets are bulging, they’ve become particularly stingy and have never sponsored a single competition out of their own pockets. Interestingly, many of them have quietly left the community.
   In this respect, the social aspect of this platform is virtually non-existent. Alas, this also explains why my growth is so much slower than that of those who write far less, rarely leave comments, yet consistently withdraw 50% of their Steem.
   I think both my own contests and @solperez’s are good. Creative writing is an art, and very few people truly understand it. Incidentally, diving straight into the story is also an art, but hardly anyone can pull it off. Clearly, people struggle to grasp that you must capture the reader’s attention within the first few lines—and it absolutely must not be one of those clichéd openings like ‘Made with Canvas’ or ‘I am… from…’.

Incidentally, I also enjoy photography contests like the #photochain organised by @davidesimoncini. It’s actually quite nice to stretch your brain every now and then and head out with a camera to snap a few shots. Furthermore, to produce creative work, you need to learn to interpret prompts from different angles.

1. AI-generated images.
   We’ve discussed this at length, and I believe they are acceptable. You can learn a great deal from them; when the Italian community held a competition asking participants to generate AI-generated images based on prompts. You can also learn to scrutinise such images and spot what’s wrong with them. This, too, is a form of creativity, and creativity is sorely lacking on this platform. It’s always the same old story here, full of mediocre, dull diary entries, poorly written, not to mention those titles.

Incidentally, on free image websites such as pixabay.com, there are also vast numbers of AI-generated images that have been included in their collections, complete with attribution. This means the images are owned by the individual, not the company that owns the tool.

@blessedlife @almaguer @bambuka @gektor What are your answers to the three questions above?

I hope you won't steal the ideas of the contests others are hosting?