[yuzuquat]

There's already a lot of discussion on the legal/moral arguments here so I'd like to comment on something more concrete.

As I understand it, an illustration for a magazine like the New York Times might net anywhere from $100 to $1000 and require 8 hours of work. An illustrator working for someone like the new york times or magic the gathering would likely consider this the pinnacle of a stable job. Many, including my comic books teacher, spent years moonlighting a service job before making it and publishing (Kikuo Johnson). With the advent of generative AI art, it seems immoral from a fiduciary responsibility point of a view that an art director doesn't train an AI model on their illustrator's art before laying them off.

I have no doubt that generative AI will continue to push forward irrespective of the legal arguments being made. I'm fearful for the frictional unemployment that comes. Having come from art school (and luckily working in tech), my illustration peers are creative but such creativity doesn't necessarily translate into creative use of tooling, business-savyness or marketing. All I can say is that I empathize with a lot of the fear and hope for the best.

[blueblimp]

> With the advent of generative AI art, it seems immoral from a fiduciary responsibility point of a view that an art director doesn't train an AI model on their illustrator's art before laying them off.

If they do that, the quality of illustrations they'll get will be vastly worse (as can be seen from the comparisons in the article). If they were willing to spend $1000 on an illustration in the first place, I doubt they'd accept that quality drop.

[yuzuquat]

As someone who's collected roughly ~40k images over the past decade, I'm tempted to say a lot of the images in the article look pretty good. That being said, I think the quality will only continue to improve. Moreover, for an art director who can easily generate a couple hundred images, it shouldn't be difficult to pick out 2-3 good looking ones from a large batch.

[blueblimp]

Superficially, they look good. That's what's new about 2022 AI image generation, and it's legitimately impressive. But as I've seen more of these images (and especially used the tools myself) and taken a closer look, I've noticed that they lack the deeper content that all human art has.

Hollie Mengert points this out in the article:

> “I feel like AI can kind of mimic brush textures and rendering, and pick up on some colors and shapes, but that’s not necessarily what makes you really hireable as an illustrator or designer. If you think about it, the rendering, brushstrokes, and colors are the most surface-level area of art. I think what people will ultimately connect to in art is a lovable, relatable character. And I’m seeing AI struggling with that.”

[t-writescode]

Where do you get $100-1000 in cost for a major publication? The artists I know easily charge in that range, and that's for private commissions that they retain the rights over.

I could not imagine the custom work done that helps sell publications, *especially MTG or similar* only net $1000 per piece. Certainly they have some sort of royalties contract, at the very least.

[yuzuquat]

This is pretty anecdotal (6 years back) but I've had one professor tell me they were paid $800 for a NYT illustration and $400 for a smaller publication. I might be off with the specific numbers but these are the general ballpark numbers I remember. Nothing about MTG, etc that I can give concrete numbers for.

[baq]

It’s a quite dystopian technology for sure, but maybe it isn’t all that bad. the artists just (cough) have to pivot from delivering images to delivering style sheets for generative models…