This comment is right on the money in making the distinction between illustration/stock images, and fine art, let alone installation or performance art. It's a distinction not made often enough in these conversations. These functions are performed by different people, for different reasons, and they're used in different ways.
Sadly, the market for the kind of art that the these models cannot disrupt is relatively small compared to the kind it can. There aren't a lot of people making a family-supporting living doing installation art. Most people I know with art degrees do illustration, photography, or are part of a video game or film asset production pipeline (or they draw tattoos, but that's a different matter). If I were them, I would be looking at the next generation of this technology as a potential threat to my livelihood. I don't want to be alarmist, but it is a possibility, and it'd be weird to dismiss it.
One other thing I'll tack on here is that I find it fascinating that the kinds of skills required to be "good" at using these image generation models — "prompt engineering" if you like — are largely different than the ones required to create art from scratch. You can be a great studio painter, but not be able to "talk to" Stable Diffusion at all. Likewise, you may have zero artistic ability in the traditional sense, but be a prodigy at getting the computer to spit out what you are imagining, or something even better than that. If AI generated art is determined to be a kind of art (as I believe it will be) the parameters of what we call artistic ability may change.
> You can be a great studio painter, but not be able to "talk to" Stable Diffusion at all. Likewise, you may have zero artistic ability in the traditional sense, but be a prodigy at getting the computer to spit out what you are imagining, or something even better than that.
I'm not so sure about this. Both require visualizing something upfront, evaluating the resulting images and understanding what needs to change.
It's a bit like digital and analog photography. Digital makes the skills of getting a good exposure less relevant and allows post-processing. But a photographer still needs to know what makes a good photo.
This doesn't invalidate the original point though. Making a living as a photographer became harder with the advent of digital photography.
> I find it fascinating that the kinds of skills required to be "good" at using these image generation models — "prompt engineering" if you like — are largely different than the ones required to create art from scratch. You can be a great studio painter, but not be able to "talk to" Stable Diffusion at all. Likewise, you may have zero artistic ability in the traditional sense, but be a prodigy at getting the computer to spit out what you are imagining, or something even better than that.
But then, if you're a great studio painter, SD doesn't threaten your livelihood in any meaningful way, whereas if you're the sort of artist that produces video game assets, you've probably already got a keen eye for spotting rendering issues, and prompt engineering and inpainting and producing concept images AIs can work with are all likely to be skills you pick up considerably better than the average person... and then it's just another tool.
> One other thing I'll tack on here is that I find it fascinating that the kinds of skills required to be "good" at using these image generation models — "prompt engineering" if you like — are largely different than the ones required to create art from scratch.
As someone intimately-amateurly involved with AI artwork over the past six months, I've come to disagree with the term "prompt engineering" as a description of the skillset. It's not just feeding it a good prompt (which is not that much of a puzzle once you get into it, and is close to being a solved problem in my book), but instead a whole iterative pipeline of human-in-the-loop hacks and touchups in order to make up for the tech's existing faults and unwieldiness. Many aspects of this pipeline, interestingly, are already familiar to digital artists.
I think the specifics of this pipeline will continue to change on a weekly basis until we reach a plateau in the technologies. But, novelty lies at the heart of all art: I don't think the pipeline will ever be replaced by one-shot, completely automated and brainless txt2img processes. Even if the difference between "beginner artist" and "expert artist" shrinks to a hair's breadth because of access to AI, it goes back to that xkcd quote, "Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit." We will continue to instinctually desire and respect the efforts of people who go the extra mile to create something just a little more perfect or a little more original.
Sadly, the market for the kind of art that the these models cannot disrupt is relatively small compared to the kind it can. There aren't a lot of people making a family-supporting living doing installation art. Most people I know with art degrees do illustration, photography, or are part of a video game or film asset production pipeline (or they draw tattoos, but that's a different matter). If I were them, I would be looking at the next generation of this technology as a potential threat to my livelihood. I don't want to be alarmist, but it is a possibility, and it'd be weird to dismiss it.
One other thing I'll tack on here is that I find it fascinating that the kinds of skills required to be "good" at using these image generation models — "prompt engineering" if you like — are largely different than the ones required to create art from scratch. You can be a great studio painter, but not be able to "talk to" Stable Diffusion at all. Likewise, you may have zero artistic ability in the traditional sense, but be a prodigy at getting the computer to spit out what you are imagining, or something even better than that. If AI generated art is determined to be a kind of art (as I believe it will be) the parameters of what we call artistic ability may change.