[cocokechun]

Totally hear your concerns!

There's this article "I Went Viral in the Bad Way" from a write from The Atlantic - https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/galaxy-brain/62fc502abcb.... He got criticized so hard for using an AI-generated in his newsletter instead of paying an artist to do the work. People's concerns are valid and real.

Yet, we can also imagine a future that "lower-level" artistic work can be achieved by AI, like blog article thumbnails, while higher-level artistic work will be done by artists, assisted by AI. Artists can get inspiration from AI artwork and reduce some tedious parts of their workflow.

[dwohnitmok]

> ...while higher-level artistic work will be done by artists, assisted by AI. Artists can get inspiration from AI artwork and reduce some tedious parts of their workflow.

I'm having a hard time seeing how increasingly better and freely available AI artwork doesn't just completely replace artists (and more generally how increasing AI capabilities don't just replace any career that does not involve some degree of skilled manual labor, at least until AIs get robust manual capabilities). In particular "higher-level artistic work" would seem to be that work which rises beyond what most artists do today. Prompt engineering is a far cry from making a painting oneself and there are likely many people who enjoy the latter who do not enjoy the former.

[tkgally]

> I'm having a hard time seeing how increasingly better and freely available AI artwork doesn't just completely replace artists

I agree that AI engines like DALL-E seem like a threat to many commercial artists, especially those whose name and personality are not closely associated with their works. Magazine illustrators are one example.

For some artists, though, the artist’s status as a human being with a unique identity is a big part of their appeal. That’s one reason why there’s such a huge price difference between, say, a painting believed to be by Van Gogh and a high-quality painting in Van Gogh’s style that is believed to be a forgery.

My daughter is a successful commercial artist, and I have been following the AI advances partly out of concern for her future. As it happens, she has been able to associate her name and personal identity even with her commercial works, and she is skilled at working closely with her clients to produce the kinds of illustrations they want. For the time being, at least, her business seems safe. I wouldn’t want to make a prediction about the long term, though.

[avian]

> she has been able to associate her name and personal identity even with her commercial works

Doesn't this just mean that her future former customers will add "in the style of [her name]" to their prompts?

[tkgally]

Possibly in the future, but not yet.

I just tried several DALL-E prompts with “in the style of [my daughter’s name],” but the results looked nothing like her work. Maybe OpenAI hasn’t crawled her website [1] yet.

Also, her commercial work usually includes lettering in English (and sometimes in Japanese), and DALL-E is not able to produce words or sentences yet.

[1] https://www.saragally.com/

[dwohnitmok]

> Also, her commercial work usually includes lettering in English (and sometimes in Japanese), and DALL-E is not able to produce words or sentences yet.

This is purely an issue of scaling and is no longer true. Other text-to-image AI have already gotten around that and produce accurate text. See e.g. https://imagen.research.google/

[cocokechun]

I can imagine a future that the artist could "license" Dalle-2 to generate art in their style and they actually get some commission for it. Like the AI can work as the artist's assistant to produce art at scale while she gets benefits too if it makes sense.

[avian]

If I judge by the examples posted on OpenArt, Dall-e is currently perfectly happy to produce art "by [artist name]". What would they gain by starting to pay commissions? I doubt that will happen unless some legal action forces them to do it.

Even in that case, how would you decide which artists get the commission and which do not? They can't possibly track down authors of millions of artworks across the globe they scrapped when training the model. It seems to me that paying commissions to anyone would just mean that they acknowledge the questionable copyright status of the artworks produced by Dall-e.

[hackernewds]

When cars were invented, there were concerns of accidents, pollution, noise and even the cost of good horsesmanship rising. And yet here we are..

[cocokechun]

We hope https://openart.ai can be used by both Dalle-2 enthusiasts as well as artists to draw inspiration for amazing artwork.

[nbzso]

Sorry, whichever way you flip this, Inspiration is used again and again to hide the real intent of this technology: To remove artistic contribution from the corporate expenses list. Period.

And this is just the beginning. Illustrators are the low-hanging fruit, they have no unions to protect them, they were undervalued for ages even before the digital age.

Human made digital art will be competing with synthesis and generative processes for minimum pay, the regular Joe will have no doubt that the AI "Art" is better.

The main problem with this tech is that I have no clear answer of the question: Who benefits from this "advancement"? Artists? Or corporations?

To become a good artist, I have spent all my life practicing from anatomy through composition and color theory. Can you imagine the stupidity of my choice? Any schmuck with a computer and prompt collection will be a master of Arts soon.

The war between Hollywood and Silicon Valley has reached the new high. The "geniuses" which scraped all the stock websites and created this monstrosity, in my view, must be named "The Spirit Crushers" from now on.

But hey, it is too late. The genie is out of the bottle. So who is next?

I stopped my successful art career years ago over different reasons. But now I see my choice in a different light.

[isoprophlex]

> they were undervalued for ages even before the digital age

Why are they? Why are teachers, nurses, policemen, etcetera undervalued?

I think this is because these jobs don't scale. You won't be able to show progression through time where you churn out 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, ... artworks/week. Nor can a schoolteacher aspire to teach 30, 100, 300, 1000 kids a year.

Our economic system is addicted to growth. S&P 500 must increase 4% a year or we're all doomed.

The ridiculousness of this in a post-peak-everything world is glaringly obvious.

I'm sorry you chose a form of human expression that is incompatible with infinite exponential economic growth.

[odessacubbage]

if you are under the impression that working artists were suffering from any shortage of inspiration before sam altman decided we shouldn't have jobs anymore then you are sorely mistaken.