[mediaman]

Tools to make art content have gotten dramatically better in the last 10 years. Systems such as Substance, which create algorithmic textures to replace manual texture creation in Photoshop, have resulted in at least a 10x increase in productivity.

Naturally, one may wonder if this has resulted in the labor market disappearing for artists. But it hasn't. The demand for high quality art skyrocketed because the tools economically allowed for it. (In some ways the market for artists has gotten smaller, because there is less appetite for low-skill Photoshop monkeys, but highly skilled technical artists are much more in demand, because we are starting to see dramatic differences in productivity between artists just like we have seen in engineering.)

So, yes, we will see AI in content generation, but it isn't going to be in the form of replacing art bottlenecks. It will manifest in new tooling for artists, who will become more productive, and there will be even fewer artists who have good mastery of these tools, and the demand of quality will increase further. Which would lead to similar bottlenecks to today, though I believe artists will be paid better, and it will become even tougher to break in.

[vkou]

> Naturally, one may wonder if this has resulted in the labor market disappearing for artists. But it hasn't. The demand for high quality art skyrocketed because the tools economically allowed for it. (In some ways the market for artists has gotten smaller, because there is less appetite for low-skill Photoshop monkeys, but highly skilled technical artists are much more in demand, because we are starting to see dramatic differences in productivity between artists just like we have seen in engineering.)

But are the artists treated better than they were a decade ago?

The wife of a good friend of mine is a digital artist. She works on films. The pay in her field is crap, as are the working conditions - meanwhile, competition for paying jobs is fierce.

When computers became an order of magnitude cheaper, the demand for, and the pay rate for computer programmers sky-rocketed. It doesn't seem like the same thing happened with artists.

[mediaman]

It's a good question. I don't know about film, but I do have visibility into the game artist market.

The pay is OK but not fantastic: generally in the 60-80k range, depending on experience. Many of the very low paying jobs ($15/hr types) have disappeared. And I do know decent artists that frequently get recruiter calls, albeit usually for a couple large poorly managed studios that have trouble filling positions.

I think it depends a lot on the exact nature of the work being done as an artist. If it's more technical, it seems to demand better wages, but in games there are still some fairly nontechnical roles that are either paid poorly or farmed out to offshore agencies.

Work conditions still aren't great, but this is mostly at bigger studios.