#36: Will AI replace artists?

AI is in the spotlight again. Here's why I don't think artists should fear it. Plus, my 7 predictions for 2023.

Listen to The Andrew Price Podcast:

-----------------------------------------------

Follow me:

[victoradeyeye]

If this continues, no one will create anything anymore. People will be inundated with AI images and the value of art will be non-existent. No, no one will buy your AI art. No one is going to buy your prompt. Writing a prompt isn't a skill, because literally anyone can do it. All this will do is destroy human creativity, because no one will have the incentive to create anything new. And the people who do something original will be lost in the noise and unable to support themselves. There is no future for humans with AI art. It's not "just another tool, " it will outright replace humans entirely. They made an AI art director in Japan a few years ago that won out in a contest against a human art director. Maybe you feel like you need AI, but AI doesn't need you.

[Rat_Lord]

People mention stuff like the benefits for indie game developers a lot. I wish I could see it that way. As someone developing an indie game, I considered my 3d skills an edge because I notice a lot of other small devs forego the 3d modeling and use premade assets. With people being able to just generate 3d assets, well my "advantage" that I took time to cultivate is gone and the market gets flooded with games and actual opportunities to make money on them probably disappear. Programming and gluing the pieces together in a game engine is the least fun part of the process, I still enjoy it, but not as much as the actual art aspects. None of this sounds like a benefit for me. I really think lowering the barrier to entry will just make it so even fewer indie developers can have any success. I understand there is nothing we can do to stop it, it's just a shame the only thing I'm really passionate about may not be possible because of this technology. I really hope I am wrong.

[guksack]

An animator friend of mine needed some painted backgrounds very quickly. He drew some quick flat-shaded images and then used AI to implement his own painted style on to those, which he then painted over to neaten things up etc. It was a perfect use of AI in my eyes, turning a day-long job in to 30 minutes and all using his own work at its core. I hope we see more of this and less of the exploitation and genuine laziness from AI "artists"

[fust]

Much of the talk how 3D artists should now look forward to working with AI in excitement is totally like saying in the 1850s that trained professional painters should instead work for photographers and clean and enhance their images for fraction of their former pay.

[ayoaye]

it's always the worst artists that are pro ai

[mertbaskoy]

I personally think that the manual labor of creating an art is important for creativity. Yes, it is a slow and painful progress but that is the thing making the art yours alone. I don't want to input text on how I want my art to look like, I want to painstakingly draw every single line and paint every single color instead of getting my work done by a machine.

[kleyyer]

Honestly, your opinion is very much aligned with what I think and have been seeing from this whole AI shitstorm. I've been listening to a lot of opinions from artists and "tech bros" and it pretty much seems like it's going in the direction you're saying. I think a lot of people will be hit really hard by this and will have to jump the ship of the still image market. The value is already dropping a lot with these AI's out there, and the majority of the clients who commission this type of art simply don't care about the artist and are only looking for the end result, competing with AI is gonna be extremely hard. That's not even considering the saturation and noise AI will bring with its deluge of images on the internet. It's gonna make standing out A LOT more difficult, especially for the most vulnerable and largest group of artists, the beginners.
Now, I believe there will be an increase in appreciation for human-made art, but will that be enough to absorb all those extra artists who will probably lose their income? I don't think so. Who knows what is gonna come next... in my case, as a sculptor, I am thinking of going more traditional (clay), there's a lot of appreciation for handmade stuff, especially with Social Media these days. I think more than ever artists need to become more business savvy. There are a lot of unexplored niches out there, but during that shift a lot of artists caught "with their pants down" and that can't shift quickly enough will suffer. For some, it might force them to drop art as a career altogether. I cannot even imagine what this whole thing will do for the next generation of artists... It's a sad thing but the genie is out of the bottle now, there is no going back...

[lazyleafcomics]

U don’t get it andrew. The fact that AI is sooo good at what it does is because it is built on professional artists work. The moment you train the AI on just non copyrighted stuff, the quality of the entire dataset would go drastically down. No artist worth their salt would agree to having their art be a part of these datasets. The part about referencing is that it’s small independent artists referencing other artists and making a living compared to a monopoly on art. This argument is so stupid…it’s like people are willing to give everything away, private data, copyrighted data in the name of progress.

[quntface]

I think you'll have to prove you made your artwork in the future, much like how you have to do CAPTCHA to prove you're human. I've already seen some cases where traditional artist who upload their work online are being accused of generating it using AI. It's going to be a weird dystopian Blade Runner-esque landscape where you don't what is real and what isn't.

[NovanByworks]

I don't like the idea of seeing AI as "inevitable". That's a very passive attitude and we really ought to be more proactive in how we develop and regulate new technologies. They must adapt to us, not we to them.
"Man must shape his tools lest they shape him."
Besides which, the real issue in regards to AI replacing artists is that the corporations who employ them in the first place don't care. They don't care if artists better understand fundamentals and techniques because today's average consumer is happy enough to accept the bare minimum. They are not discerning enough to distinguish quality and so corporations are being given the keys to provide for them as much and as fast as possible.
This is a specifically ethical and moral issue. There is no other way around that.

[heroiam]

No surprise from the same guy who was siding for NFTs a year after they were already dead by everyone’s account.

Congrats man, and no wonder the concept artists you talk to agree with you if they are Lord Genius-Take himself Shaddy Safadi who has never had a good take in the last 20 years.

[ywlumaris]

AI NEEDS regulated. I don’t like that my personal art is automatically opted into these data scrapers, it’s demoralizing because they’re profiting a shitload off work like mine. Copyright free based AI is the best way to go forward. (Also China is trying to regulate it- they just mandated all ai have to be labeled or it’s banned. They know the power of ai can harm them just as much as all of us, and letting it run amok is not in anyone’s best interest.)

[TheMageesa]

I had an intern who couldn't draw her way out of a paper bag. She drew in a copycat 'anime' style, and had never developed the skill in college to look at things in the real world and record them. In the future, this ability (like the ability to memorize things) will atrophy. When flat vector illustrations flooded the royalty free sites, a lot of people used them because it meant more profit, and they became a trend because they were everywhere. At the end of the day, a client doesn't want the best, he wants the cheapest thing that will get the job done. Nuance and metaphor will become noisy artifacts, there's been a decline in that type of thing over the decades in any case. Like climate change, I'll be retired (or dead) before it all shakes out, but random images will be good enough for most clients. Sometimes the technology drives the culture, and not always to a better place.

[spkn]

In my opinion, art is somehow also time, so you can measure art by how much effort and thought you put into something, in that sense ai will never be able to replace human art.

[kozzietea]

Us using a reference is not the same the AI image merging, I disagree with that 100%. I can't take your art and mimic it's attributes to another person's art work and have a merger of two or more acutal images with accurate application. My skill, style and method will always be different and will never fully match your work, AI is more than a "reinterpretation" of the same piece of work. It's taking elements from each literally and applying them digitall to a "canvas." I do hoard images on my computer but taking inspo for LOTR isn't hypocritial...it's something that gets you drawing. The more you draw, the more you develope your own style. No one owns a genre. But art "style" or "identity" that clearly when someone sees it they see your work, that's not it for me. Especially without consent.

[sickle]

Once "AI" models could do most things better than humans, I always wondered if people would (A) stop living in denial or (B) bury their heads deeper in the sand or (C) rage quit. It appears the answer is B and C.

[pwnomega]

I hate AI so much, it's a trend like NFTS and crypto but the problem is that this time around it's going to gain a hell of alot more ground than NFTS and crypto did because there's been big boys in the game since the start (Google, Facebook, various governments and research companies, etc.)

Is it really not possible to advance humanity and dodge this "singularity" I've heard about without removing the human aspect of our society? Because that's what if feels like they're hellbent on doing... It feels like a sick and twisted idea of progress where WE are in the way...

From creating a hedonistic """Utopia""" (Wich is more likely to happen) to even in the late game it is predicted that an ASI will eventually emerge (that being God in the form of AI, an AI god)

[SaintMatthieuSimard]

About references: Honestly, using generated and unique AI images as reference material is much better than using pre-existing images as reference material.
You can generate a forest, see that it resembles a forest, then use that forest in a collage and make a greater project out of it.
AI literally generates unique reference material that might be trained on everything nice that exists, but will give unique results.
So someone who is mad that someone else wants to draw characters the way he do don't have to be grumpy anymore because people can train on unique results from an AI muse.

[piotr]

Argument that AI can be a tool is really not resonating with me. If this gets really better there wont be much to do for an artist, more to art director.

[andersharaldsson]

Computers can DO everything, but they don’t WANT anything.
That is our thing.