[vanadium1st]

I am a graphic artist. In the recent months I've read dozens of articles and threads like this. I still can't see what the big deal is.

Graphic artists don't have trade secrets or unique impossible techniques. If someone can see your picture, he can copy its style. It becomes publicly available as soon as you publish it. For the vast majority of graphic styles, if one author can do it, then hundreds of his colleagues can do it too, often just as well. If one author becomes popular and expensive - then his less popular colleagues can copy his style for cheaper. The market for this is enormous and this was the case for probably hundreds of years.

I personally am a non-brand artist like that. More often then not clients come to me with a reference not from my portfolio and ask me to produce something similar. I will do it, probably five times cheaper than the artist or studio who did the original. It may not be exactly as good, but it won't be five times worse.

Some clients are happy to pay extra for the name brand, and will pay. Some want to spend less, and will settle for a non-brand copy.

The clients that are willing to pay for the name brand will still be there for the same reason they are now, and the existence of Stable Diffusion changes nothing to them. And the ones that just want the cheap copy would never contact the big name artist in the first place. The copy market will shift, but the big name artist doesn't even have to be aware of it.

[xena]

The main thing people are worried about is the fact that food costs money and you need to eat in order to live. People are afraid that their illustration jobs are at risk because of AI illustrations being _good enough_.

[vanadium1st]

This is a hundredth time in history when technology progressed and artists had to learn new ways to make money. I've learned art in art school - none of the jobs that my art teachers had in their youth are relevant right now. The tools, the pricing, the workflow, the clients requests and expectations are all different. You can keep some of the skill, but you still need to learn and adapt to the new reality. Sometimes it takes 5, sometimes 15 years, but the job of the artist is always transforming.

The illustrator from the article is probably drawing in Procreate with an Ipad. Probably doing her promotion on social media and doing business with her clients remotely. All of those are recent technological advancements that appeared in her lifetime and completely outperformed the previous way to do commercial illustration. Illustrators that worked before that had to learn those new ways, or lose their jobs. This happened dozens of time in history. Now is the turn for current illustrators to adapt.

[diputsmonro]

But none of that addresses fundamental changes to the market structure. How can a beginner artist possibly get traction in a marketplace where people only pay for premium names or pay dirt for beautiful art that's 90% of what they want. You said yourself most clients are willing to settle if the price is right, and you can't really beat free.

[vanadium1st]

When we get to $0 for any possible artwork of any quality - yeah, it's game over for everyone, the end of the industry. Right now we are far from it, thankfully. AI still can't produce usable commercial quality files. Most of them are simply not good enough, and even those that look kind of good have to be fine-tuned and reformatted by a human artist. Which takes real skill and effort and costs money.

And until someone does any job for some amount of money, a beginner can start his career by doing the same job for less money. This will still be the case no matter what technology comes next.

[wilsonnb3]

Something very similar to what happened to working musicians when we developed the technology to record and replay their performances.

Now there are a lot less people playing live music.

[andai]

That's funny to think about: if music playback technology didn't exist, every cafe would be in need of a mediocre guitarist.

[least]

They don't. They will either need to find a way to stand out in an increasingly competitive market, or get pushed out of it. That's how all labor markets work, but creative fields are especially cutthroat and very few people get to do art as their full time job.

[throwawaylinux]

Same problem for wheelwrights and loom weavers and chimney sweeps. Occupations go obsolete, people have to adapt. There is nothing special about artists in that regard, if technology supersedes them then they'll go away and people will have to do other things.

[gedy]

This doesn’t directly answer your question, but when I was in university about 20 years ago, I was in a digital arts program, but I focused on algorithmic art and using programming to generate images. I came to the realization that "style" doesn’t matter, and the body of work I produced really looked quite different from one project to the next. I could generate countless numbers of images in a particular style but then moved on. The art in my case was thinking of style as parameters and certain constraints.

[runeks]

> But none of that addresses fundamental changes to the market structure.

There is no fundamental change. Only an incremental one.

Even if AI-generated imagery takes over the market for “drawings in the style of someone else”, these AIs will still need to be trained and operated by human beings. It will not bring the cost to zero, it will just lower it — which already happens continuously in all markets due to human ingenuity.

[doublerabbit]

Your profile states your a logo designer. With regards to your above post "Now is the turn for current illustrators to adapt."

Are you happy for me to feed that in to an AI generated feed and and generate logo's based off your illustrations, post them online to be sold? How would you feel? How would you adapt from that?

[vanadium1st]

I am not happy or unhappy about it. I just don't have a moral problem with it.

I did the same thing to get into the logo industry. In the process of learning I've analysed hundreds of logos made by other artists. I've tried hard to understand how they work, copy the best practices and styles and do the my best effort so my logos could be as good. I've trained on this dataset and got to be successful enough to become a part of it.

I don't have a moral problem with AI doing the same. It will probably be hard to compete with it, but for now I manage. If I won't be able to compete anymore - I will adapt and apply my skills elsewhere.

[passion__desire]

If that is the main issue, why are artists hiding behind the pique that "when I create art, it is full of soul, experience, blood and sweat" Just say that you need a way to make money and these models are replacing us.

[hypertele-Xii]

Because that argument is as old as the written word, and it works exactly as well now as every time in the past (not at all).

Every job being automated requires its own "we're unique" pitch to get any pity points.

[bombcar]

I wonder how many illustrators already lost their jobs once clipart took off starting in the 90s.

Many newsletters/newspapers of bygone era had an artist/doodler to do little sketches which got replaced by clipart in many cases.

[Matumio]

I dislike the drift this "need to work for food" phrase that I'm hearing so often. Job automation never reduced our ability to produce food. The harvest is not in any danger, not even if we suddenly produce twice the art with the same amount of work.

[egypturnash]

Hi. I'm a professional artist. I have a lot of friends who are also professional artists.

Most of us live in cities, and go to the store to buy food. We have specialized in being good at making images, which we trade for money, which we can trade for other goods and services such as "food" or "entertainment" or "rent". Some of us are doing well enough to have room for a garden, and the time to tend it. This is by no means the majority.

How many of your peers would know one end of a modern combine harvester from the other? Probably very few, if you live in the city.

[diputsmonro]

It's not about food production, it's about capitalism.

If artists could simply ask for food and be given it from the overflowing cornucopia, then yes, this wouldn't matter and in fact would be a net benefit.

Unfortunately though, artists must sell their art to get money, then exchange that money for food. Now, if a robot produces free art that's almost as good, most of those buyers won't pay those artists anymore, and the artists will starve (or stop being artists).

I do believe that job automation will quickly eliminate scarcity for basic life necessities, while also displacing more and more jobs in our economy, and that therefore UBI or some equivalent will be imminently necessary - but that's a much larger topic

[geoelectric]

I see a pretty clear analogy to the various industries that felt threatened by home video and audio recording improving to the point of being able to make copies quickly and without significant degradation--particularly when disc ripping at 20x+ became a thing and time wasn't even a barrier.

A person who can clone a style and crank out illustrations at human speed is a very different thing than an automated process that can do it immediately on request, in minutes or seconds. If nothing else, the latter is a huge efficiency gain for being able to self-serve, as it would allow an editor to trial different illustrative approaches without all the back and forth contracting out to a human would require.

Personally, I think what this will do most is convince artists not to put galleries of their work suitable for training online.

The Redditor identified in the article posted a new comic art model based on James Daly III (this is mentioned at the end of an article with a link). The Redditor's comment in that post implies Daly was chosen specifically because they had a gallery of easily consumable training images all in one place.

I have no idea what the minimum effort would be to make the images less useful for training, but I foresee a lot of obnoxious watermarks in our future as people try to do so.

[rafaelero]

The big deal is that now I can copy someone's style in less than 30 minutes and it doesn't require the intermediance of any professional artist. That was a major source of friction that was just uplifted. Not even mentioning that I can generate tons of samples in a matter of minutes. There are so many differences here that I can't imagine how you can be asking this question.

[makeitdouble]

It might not be a _big_ deal. But isn't it at least a small deal that on top of having her style lifted, her personal name is the trigger in the prompt to apply it back ?

[vanadium1st]

Her style isn't original and unique to her from the art world perspective. There are dozens of people who draw exactly like this, and hundreds who can draw like it and just choose not to. This is not a criticism against her personally - it's practically impossible to have a truly unique style in this world with millions of other artists.

The fact that pictures in that style can be meaningfully described by her brand is only a result of the success of her personal branding effort. She kept a consistent style, she promoted her work, established a website, personal portfolio, publicised her career. She didn't invent this style, but made an effort to claim it as hers. This is a regular path for an artist. It didn't just happen to her like a robbery against her will - it took years of effort for her to establish her name like that in the public consciousness, culture and search engines. Stable Diffusion just builds out of those things.

If this artist didn't exist, the style would still exist in works of other artists. It just wouldn't have this useful tag of her name. We would have to put something like Modern-colorful-flat-vector-cute-disney-textured-cartoon-illustration to get the same results. But since she claimed this style as hers, we can just use her name to effectively describe it. I don't see it as a tragedy, I see it as a success story.

[makeitdouble]

Thanks for the very nuanced take. I think part of the reaction is on the tension between these years of efforts to embrace and establish this style as hers, have it associated with her name; versus a project emerging from nowhere to take that name and art style and run away with it.

On a factual/legal level these are nothing burger events, and we'll probably forget about it if two months from now she has a big boost to her career. But I'm kinda skeptical much good will come out of this for her. In our worlds it would close to raising an open source project for a decade, have it succeed and shine in the world with some support money coming in, to then get it cloned by AWS and you're left wondering what you'll do next. This is part of the game, but it sure sucks.