Why the growth of AI in making art won’t eliminate artists
Why the growth of AI in making art won’t eliminate artists
https://www.geeksaresexy.net/2023/09/04/why-the-growth-of-ai-in-making-art-wont-eliminate-artists/
Will AI replace artists? On one hand, the answer to whether AI will replace artists is no.
Generative AI is a powerful tool that can expand the possibilities of art making and will still require the guiding hand of a human artist. As with any new technology, some creative processes will become both easier and less time-consuming with AI.
it's basically just a really powerful brush helping you to translate your thoughts to a canvas more efficiently. What the art contains, the artstyle, composition, colors etc are all still decided by the artist.
I think the biggest effect of AI will be that it will increase the scale of art. Instead of doing a paintinf a year, you might be creating a city sized art piece a year.
Basically artists will transistion to becoming more like art directors.
Projects that are done with potentially hundreds of people today (like a movie or a video game), might be done with just one person. And future projects with hundreds of people will instead have 100 times the size/detail.
You're basically taking the manual labor out of art, but not the art out of the art.
I'm aware of where I'm posting, but the joy of making art is as much in the process as the result. Give it a short while and we'll have ai that makes prompt generation even easier. Then even less of the individual will be in the work. At what point do we say, "you're barely doing anything here"?
I think people will still find joy in it, just of a different sort. As an analogy, used to be that you had to program a computer with assembly language, and it was rather painstaking to do. There were some real wizards doing that sort of work, like in the Story of Mel. Nowadays though, we've got high-level languages with compilers that do all the grunt work of actually writing assembly for you. Some people still worry about assembly specifically, but the vast majority of programmers don't. The joy is no longer in writing the absolute fastest bare metal assembly you can for most people, it's in using the right algorithms to solve a problem. You can write a few lines in Python that would've taken someone weeks to write in assembly.
Something relevant to note in the above is that smarter compilers eliminating the need for people to write assembly directly didn't mean the end of programming as a profession. There's been an explosion in programming jobs, exactly because each person can do so much more than they ever could before, opening up new possibilities that weren't there with everyone writing assembly.
Likewise, I suspect the scale will change here. I admit I'm not an artist, but wouldn't it be cool to see your artistic vision across an entire game? You could create an entire virtual living breathing city on your own without having an army of artists working on the grunt work like the exact concrete texture. If you decide to tweak the feel of the art, you don't have to spend weeks redoing all the grunt work. Alternatively, if you draw a landscape that you get just right, imagine being able to experience it by having the AI generate a virtual world for you to walk through based on it.
I have a wife with an art degree, and we talk about this extensively.
People said the same kinds of things about photoshop. "Well how are artists going to keep making things unique when just anybody can use a photo manipulation software?" The fact is that art adapted and physical mediums became more appreciated for what they are. People realized photoshop is just a tool.
Lots of people once thought that cameras captured your soul. Once the hype died down, most realized how revolutionary the ability to capture reality in a moment really was, not the least of which how useful it is to other art. Photo capture technology is a fantastical tool that most of human history could only dream of, which we wholly take for granted today.
AI generation is a tool. Nothing more, nothing less. The fact is that AI generation very often doesn't produce good art, and like any tool, you have to be proficient in it to know how to create something good.
Or, if you're like my wife, you use it as an incredible tool to generate references to create and enhance your own style. AI generation is highly sophisticated and maybe even intimidating, but it's nowhere close to replacing the artist.
Human artists would do live paintings to prove that the painting is man-made. They would also have paying patrons with exclusivity contracts, creating scarcity for their paintings.
If you have a company with a graphics department of 10 artists and a new AI comes along that allows the needs of the company to be met with only 1 artist in that department those 9 other artists are going to get fired.
This is the same 'cars won't replace horses' argument.
Seriously I've seen the backlash get nasty. An artist in a discord I used to talk in would use AI to map out ideas real quick and then they would get people to commission art based on them.
But people would just spam hate like "you're not a real artist" ... but at the end of a pricey commission, they would have a hand-painted oil on canvas painting based loosely on what the AI was creating.
Use it as a tool!