I agree. I see AI-generated art as a force multiplier for skilled individuals, same as better editors, tools, languages, and frameworks have been for developers.
But those "force multipliers" have also eradicated the usefulness of huge parts of the skillsets of those skilled individuals. For a salient example in another field, printing, that was bulldozed by new technology: 90% of a typesetter's skillset was made irrelevant by Word/Illustrator/InDesign etc. It wasn't a force multiplier, it was a qualifications decimator. Now anyone could become a adequate typesetter by learning that 10%, plus the new entrants wouldn't be burdened by having to unlearn a lot of things that were now better done in a different way.
Not saying this is bad, or that typesetters or illustrators deserve a living. I am saying that being able to draw used to require being able to draw, and that instead being a fan of drawings, being good at describing imaginary ones to a computer and iterating them into a finished product is a mostly, if not entirely, different skill.
It's a different skill than pushing a pencil around, sure, but that's a small portion of what people learn on the way to being good at visual art. I'm terrible at it but know some people who are quite skilled. They are worlds beyond me in terms of composition and expression.
Right now naively generated AI images are having their day, but I expect we'll soon get over that. I think the real future is in visual artists who closely collaborate with future generations of ML systems that are much more tractable and responsive. I expect a lot of that iteration will involve pretty traditional art skills, because those are time-tested ways to convey visual information.
I've read a little bit about prompt engineering. The author said the stuff he needed to learn to be good at using stable diffusion, is about art history - knowing many art styles and their parts.
So basically, you read over a book(with amazing art) over, know your terms(or maybe know how to use a neat visual dictionary), and now you can paint in many art styles.
Of course there will be some more learning while playing with stable diffusion and getting a feel how to talk to it.
But it's very far from the old skill of neing an artist, not much knowledge will transfer.
A force multiplier, allowing existing professionals to generate more art.
The creation of a new profession. Digital artists are already doing a very different job with very different tools. These tools will be another step and there will be demand for human and generated art in different applications.
The empowerment of non artists. Same as how digital art democratized art. This will let people without hours of skill generate images of their liking with relatively minimal effort. Anyone can generate scenarios or images, even if they aren't perfect.
These aren't exclusive and will probably all happen at the same time. It will also 100 percent devalue artists work since it's now easier to meet people's needs. This won't make them obsolete, but it'll reduce demand and put people out of business.
Devalue, yes. Put people out of work? That's less obvious to me. Imagine:
- Instead of video advertising with a handful of regional variations, hundreds or thousands of variants tweaked for specific preferences, target profiles, as part of A/B testing, etc. Changes to accent, emphasis, copy, maybe even which parts of the product being advertised are focused on.
- Increasing variation in open world game locations and interactions, with AI able to insert much more meaningful distinction between instances of a template (as compared with recent Assassins Creed games, where identical towns and forts are copy-pasted dozens of times all over the map).
- Much greater accessibility of visual art as an accent for other kinds of creators— illustrations to accompany poetry, blog posts, fanfic, etc.
- Increasing ability for AI to do first-cut assembly of video content, particularly review-type YouTubers (think: SkillUp, Critical Drinker) where the video is kind of secondary and the majority of the audience may even be listening to it as a podcast anyway. The AI being able to understand from the script what is under discussion and select matching clips would likely match or approach what
This is far from a sure thing— sometimes people really are the buggy-whip manufacturers in a situation and technology completely displaces them. But other times (as with software development), the market and use-cases have expanded considerably faster than the efficiency gains made by better tooling.
Not saying this is bad, or that typesetters or illustrators deserve a living. I am saying that being able to draw used to require being able to draw, and that instead being a fan of drawings, being good at describing imaginary ones to a computer and iterating them into a finished product is a mostly, if not entirely, different skill.