[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.