AI will certainly be a tool that artists use, but non-artists will use it too so very few will ever have the need to pay an artist for their work. The only work artists are likely to get will be cleaning up AI output, and I doubt they'll find that to be very fulfilling or that it pays them well enough to make a living.
When it's harder to make a career in the digital world (where most of the art is), it's more likely that many artists will never get the opportunity to fully develop their artistic gifts and personal style at all.
If artists are lucky then maybe in a few generations with fewer new creative works being created, AI almost entirely training on AI generated art will mean that the output will only get more generic and simplistic over time. Perhaps some people will eventually pay humans again for art that's better quality and different.
The big question is what happens when the human training set for art stops being generated? Will AI art stagnate, or will there still be enough humans making art without financial reward to continue to supply models with better data?
Today, only a highly privileged slice of the population can make a living making art. Nearly everyone who enjoys making art can't make a living off of it, and even the vast majority of people trying to do it full time still can't make ends meet (hence the cliche of the starving artist). But everyone can make art as a hobby if they'd like, that's what almost all artists do, and that will continue to be true as AI advances.
So I don't see AI art as changing careers much. Even if AI fully replaces human artists, all that means is the 0.1% of people who make a career off their art will have to join the rest of us 99.9% who only do art for the fun of it.
AI will just be another tool that artists will use.
However the issue is that it will be much harder to make a career in the digital world from an artistic gift and personal style: one's style will not be unique for long as AI will quickly copy it and so make the original much less valuable.
Yeah, but professional artists rely on people finding value on their artistic production. If AI can produce such a high quality output, then this is going to devalue their skills. Sure, they can still do it for the pleasure of producing art, but that's more like a hobby than a job.
Not exactly everyone. I will continue to pay artists for their art. Once the AI will train mostly on derivative works produced by itself, with most artists whose work was used without asking to originally train the AI out of business, it will be very fun. Those who will be able to use all that stuff as a new kind of raw material to create pristine art will be a tiny minority, and it will really be a new chapter in the art book. For everybody else, the marvellous AI will be in the hands of the lords of social media, producing an infinite stream of uninsteresting stuff you love watching while scrolling the infinitely long page depicting the sterile desert we contributed to create teaching the machine what we like and what we don't. Very fun, indeed. An AI generated mirror of our mediocrity, with no way out. And please, don't start telling me that our brains work the same and that every piece of art is derivative work. Human beings are a little bit more complex than a neural network.
Being a painter, a photographer, a musician, an actor, a freelance artist in any medium, has never been a viable career for any significant fraction of the people that want to do so. It has always been a hobby that some very small percentage of people manage to make enough money from to scrape by, and some infinitesimal percentage make enough money from to be wealthy. AI is unlikely to change that, because there will very likely still be a demand for celebrities that some infinitesimal proportion of lucky aspirants will fill, and the vast majority of the industry by numbers will be hobbyist or hobbyists-in-denial who think their small business drawing commissions for some normies & wealthy furries on Twitter will be an economically sustainable career for all the people that want to do it. The most likely outcome of AI in the long run is that a lot of these people produce significantly more work of equivalent quality without being paid any more because demand won't rise (there is already massive oversupply of art, demand is the limiter for financial feasibility), a lot more hobbyists are making art because of the lower barrier to entry, and animators + VFX artists have their productivity go up by a lot and can maybe trade that into real gains in conditions if they're willing to unionise.
That may be true of the kind of art that people go to galleries for, or hang on their walls and admire. But most professional artists make a living off of commercial work. If AI image generation advances far enough, many of those people could be out of a job. The purity of art won't save them.
Many successful artists don't paint, sculpt or build anything. It's not about the technique. Art is about sending a message, it's about what the artist is trying to say. It's about what the public feels and thinks when exposed to their work.
AI has a place as a tool to produce content in a fast and cheap way. And yes, as a result of that certain jobs will likely disappear. But art will continue to exist and great artists will still be followed and admired by the public.
Yeah, this is the direction I worry about. Why bother being creative when the AIs "do it better"? How many people will bother paying for human art when AIs "do it better"? Will human creativity be relegated to a tiny niche in a sea of AI content? Will this all but erase paid human art except for highly specialized and narrow niches? Am I too pessimistic?
Less feasible to be a professional artist with a good chance of having a large audience yes. But I wonder if it will be like with hand-sewing and become a hobby. Or there will be a sizeable audience that will demand human made art for whatever reason. We still have live music and theatre despite recordings existing. Or maybe AI will never become good enough to replace the best humans.
That's the future of AI art - but is AI art the future of art? if AI artists can't maintain any profit from their work, how are they going to afford the compute time?
Exactly. Art as an economic industry may die out. As a career, it may be reduced to a much smaller scope. But we'll always be able to express ourselves artistically - maybe even more so if AI frees up more time in which to do so.
It's never been about the craft. A lot of people can draw and paint in this world. People pay more money for art because of the individual behind it and its provenance. AI generated content will probably remain relegated to stock imagery or cheap mass produced prints sold at retailers.
This is why there will still be a market for human-created art, but it'll likely be very niche, for people who care. When it comes to sheer quality, the AI should be able to surpass us at some point and create masterpieces we can't even think of.
Most professional artists will be unemployed and hobbyist artists using AI seems to be kind of against the point of creating art for the art of creation.
But for one-click self-expression, AI tools will certainly come in handy.
The old excuse from AI researchers was that once AI takes all the mundane jobs, people will be free to become artists. Ask artists now what they think about AI. A whole lot of them aren't very happy about it.
I can't see AI putting artists out of business. Artists are and will remain much more cost effective than the expense of training machines, because most of them work for peanuts or free. The most we will see is artists using AI as a medium ('Show me a dog with an apple on its head. Now make it greener with more neanderthal.').
When it's harder to make a career in the digital world (where most of the art is), it's more likely that many artists will never get the opportunity to fully develop their artistic gifts and personal style at all.
If artists are lucky then maybe in a few generations with fewer new creative works being created, AI almost entirely training on AI generated art will mean that the output will only get more generic and simplistic over time. Perhaps some people will eventually pay humans again for art that's better quality and different.
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