There’s ZERO evidence of that right now and little reason to expect it.

What’s dramatically more likely is that generative AI will be an incredible new medium, disrupting current arts and reshaping almost all art markets the way photography and sound recording each did a few. And its disruption applies to film, illustration, music, coding, writing, etc

That’s no small achievement and its an exciting thing to witness, but it’s not the same as replacing the arts that already exist. Arts have shown themselves to be cockroaches, that simply adapt themselves around these sorts of disruptions.

There will still be HUGE markets for human (and hybrid) arts even as they are smaller and differently shaped than what we saw in the 20th century.

I'm starting to wonder if this stuff is actually going to make real art "hand made" by real people more valuable in some ways because it'll stand out from the mountains of auto-generated trash. Problem will be finding it.

That's not even counting new tools like DALL-E or Midjourney, though personally I don't think we can write them off as uninteresting or low-effort. They're an exciting and powerful new tool, and like any tool they can be used to make art. Maybe as an artist making art that others could not also easily make is important to you, but that is not what makes art.

It's specifically why I've avoided diving too deep into "prompt engineering", because the kind of incantations required today just aren't going to be the way most people interact with this stuff for very long.

It's hard to look at what's happened in the last few months and not think of it as akin to the invention of the steam engine, but for art.

It's not perfect, as early machines had many flaws, were wildly inefficient, produced irregular output. But the innovation that followed created the industrial revolution.

But even ignoring that, we have barely even stared exploring what we can do with the technology as is. A lot of it is still just experiments living in a git repository or need more GPU than the average person has. Give it a few more months or years, and you'll have it integrated into every major photo and video editor software and optimized to run on normal consumer hardware. That simple improvement in accessibility will have very wide reaching consequences just by itself, even without improving the underlying AI drastically.

And no, you won't replace the professional artists anytime soon, after all somebody still need to have the final say into what goes into the game, but it will drastically transform how that artist will work and the amount of content they'll be able to produce.

> e.g., unless it's a very low effort, low quality game.

The output of Midjourney and Co. already looks spectacular, easily better than a lot of games out there. I could easily see that replacing or enhancing a lot of art in 2D RPGs, point&click adventures or visual novels.

Everything that needs animation or 3D meshes will take a while longer, but for 2D games it's already more than good enough. It's really more an issue with artists and game developers still needing to catch up on all the rapid new developments that happened over the last few months.

I for one totally embrace the latest AI tools and managed to leverage Stable Diffusion in several places. But I don't see it replace genuine creativity soon.

Years on, it's still a little hard to fully grasp the imminent, momentous impact this (has yet to have?) on commercial artists. I fear it will become pretty much impossible to make any sort of living off art in the next decade.

I mean: the outputs on the page are just awesome. Leagues ahead of the stuff we have now. And I'm already seeing old-gen generated AI images on corporate blog posts—everyone will jump on DALL-E 3.

Being in the profession right now must be very discouraging indeed. My heart goes out to those artists who will eventually be replaced by cheap, intuitive text prompts.

Commercialising art for corps was one of the last ways to exist as an artist in today's economy and get by. I fear the extinction of the profession will have a big impact on our cultural capital.

In addition to being able to create completely novel, high quality images, they can do so at speeds that no human could ever hope to match. And image models of this quality have only been around for a year, imagine where they'll be in five.

I empathize will all the artists who feel cheated out of these models training on all their data, but the sad reality is these AI models are just far too useful to ever go away. The world's standards for art and text have gone up faster than they ever have in world history over the course of the last 10 months

Starting e.g. an art education right now seems likely to be extremely nerve-wracking as your talents may very well be woefully obsolete by the time you graduate; the exception perhaps being those top-0.1% talents that will feed the models of the future with new material.

1. Im not sure about all the doom & gloom. This more or less feels like a digital revolution... working mostly in style-transfer space myself. While AI-generated assets are awesome/compelling/shocking, the utility hasn't simply extended into complete automation of meaningful outcomes; so much as accelerated/enhanced digital workflows. & I think "meaningful" outcomes/digital creations will simply advance to require new skillsets.

2. A lot of engineering is still required in the applied domains. e.g. apply real style of some modern artist in new, generated, ways is rather complex and super manual (like re-training models built on wikiart, creating artist-specific datasets, etc). Even for pure-ai creation, the best generated artwork still requires a ton of nontrivial configuration, trial/error, etc... basically a whole new knowledge domain and skillset to acquire. CLIP/alike with diffusions setups have made things seem super simple, but a lot of work still goes into anything meaningful.

3. AI is a utility right now, and probably always will be. Adobe's integrations into tools like photoshop have been suite value-adds for designers (harmonization, color transfers, the big one imo- Super Resolution, and Im in-painting seems to be catching big steam)... Software eats software, photoshop will continue to photoshop and new capabilities will arise as old become automated.

Assuming that current models' problems with, say, details and specificity, will continue on is equivalent to looking at 19th century automobiles and scoffing that they'll ever largely replace horses. Or looking at "smartphones" from the 90's and determining that they'll never see much uptake from the average consumer.

AI image generation models are going to continue getting better and better and better, and the flaws we see now will get less common and less severe.

What’s likelier is that ML-based tooling becomes a key part of the animation workflow. Used to generate assets, animations, backdrops, characters, etc, which are then combined by an animator/editor. The examples he cites in the article all fit this mold - the anime character generator he cites in the article uses separate models to generate the character then rig it from facial data.

After working in the self-driving car industry, I’m really skeptical of any claim that rapid advances in one modality or task mean we’re “just 3 years away” from all related tasks being done via ML models. Alexnet et al completely revolutionized perception in self driving cars - between 2014-2017 it was really common to hear predictions that we’d have end to end models driving our cars perfectly in “less than 5 years”. That reality never arrived because ML just wasn’t capable of handling more complex tasks the way it could with object detection. Lots of articles similar to this one talking about what we were going to do with all of the out of work truckers and Uber drivers.

And yeah obviously generative art is a different beast than autonomous driving. And I’ve seen examples from WIP text2video models. But I just want to caution that tons of progress in image and text doesn’t necessarily mean we’re just a year or two away from all related tasks being conquered.