I am a working digital artist, my personal feed is filled with takes like this. I understand the crisis that artists go through currently and I understand their emotions. I've personally made peace with it already, but it will take time for everyone and there will be a lot of concern, rage and bargaining in the process.
All of us artists woke up in the world where the thing we were learning to produce all of our lives became 100x cheaper. I've been kinda waiting for this to happen for truck drivers or translators and was honestly surprised that it got to the artists first. But, there's nothing to do now.
There will be a lot of takes trying different ways to deny this reality. Like if we agree that this thing is immoral or anti-cultural it will go away and our potential customers will forget about it. I think that it's a waste of time
The industry is not completely gone, but it will go though a massive transformation. The basic hierarchy of artists will probably stay the same - people who were good in the pre-ai era will still be good working with the ai. If you've learned your basic skills right - they will still work.
I've personally already changed my workflow to use ai art for the sketches, ideas and references. And then polish them to commercial level using my old experience and skills. It's funny how this thing is so new, but I've gotten so used to it that it's already hard for me to come back to my old set of tools. And I do recommend all other artists to do the same and to try to find their place in the new reality - it really seems like there's no other way.
I believe that it already did, honestly.
The output and range of Dalle-2 and Stable Diffusion is unmatched by any human artist. I am not only talking about quantity and range - the best illustrations generated by Stable Diffusion are honestly unbelievable and could totally get on the front pages on artstation on their own. The digital paintings, the 3d renders, landscapes, portraits, concept arts, character designs - I've seen too many world class examples of those generated by AI. The best human artists can usually be world-class at a single style or a genre, while Stable Diffusion is world class at hundreds of them.
There's of course no way to judge art objectively. And there are at the moment a lot of gaps that AI is not the best at. Still, if there was a single human artist that could do the things that stable diffusion can do - he would be the best artist that ever lived, no doubt.
I feel that the illustrations are still at least somewhat in the uncanny valley. I don't think that the quality is already there. What you see is only a subset. Many creations are really bad, creepy and unbalanced.
I think this will change up to the extent that the majority of people won't care.
Wow, interesting. I’m an ML researcher creating models for music generation and I can say with certainty we are pretty far from generating human level quality music.
Depends what your benchmark is. As the AI stuff is getting better, things like MIDI and Autotune lower the bar to where it's understandable some might see the convergence coming sooner than later.
The bar is the same as with human music - if people pick it on Spotify without realizing it’s AI generated with zero human involvement then it’s good enough.
I think the bigger point is that while it might not be better, it could be "good enough" and 1000x faster/cheaper at the same time.
Instead of hiring 100 artists, you could have this 1 model generating images, and then 10 artists touching up AI's results to take them from 90% to 99% on quality.
I personally couldn’t care less about 99% quality. I want to see genius level work - of the same impact as Monet, Matisse, Picasso, Dali - something unlike anything else in the dataset.
All of us artists woke up in the world where the thing we were learning to produce all of our lives became 100x cheaper. I've been kinda waiting for this to happen for truck drivers or translators and was honestly surprised that it got to the artists first. But, there's nothing to do now.
There will be a lot of takes trying different ways to deny this reality. Like if we agree that this thing is immoral or anti-cultural it will go away and our potential customers will forget about it. I think that it's a waste of time The industry is not completely gone, but it will go though a massive transformation. The basic hierarchy of artists will probably stay the same - people who were good in the pre-ai era will still be good working with the ai. If you've learned your basic skills right - they will still work.
I've personally already changed my workflow to use ai art for the sketches, ideas and references. And then polish them to commercial level using my old experience and skills. It's funny how this thing is so new, but I've gotten so used to it that it's already hard for me to come back to my old set of tools. And I do recommend all other artists to do the same and to try to find their place in the new reality - it really seems like there's no other way.