[raincole]

I really wonder whether you have seen Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT or any other the recent trendy AI things.

You can't find an illustrator who could "cheaply and reliably" do illustrations at Midjourney's level. You just can't. If you could you would have been the biggest contractor company in the world long time ago.

[TeMPOraL]

"Midjourney's level" is precisely the quality I'm talking about. It's impressive for what the computer can do, yes. It's not impressive when you find it coming out of a black box labeled "commercial commissioned art", not when compared to what used to come out of that box for about the same price. The images are... almost OK. But there's always something. A missing finger here, a tiny extra eye there, some psychedelic pattern faintly visible in the negative space, etc.

But what can you do? Every black box labeled "commercial commissioned art" is now returning similarly off images, almost but not quite there. They all dropped their prices a little, so there's that - while the few black boxes offering the quality that used to be normal now cost 2-3x of what used to be normal. Hard pass.

(Meanwhile, people operating the black boxes - i.e. companies or in-house departments churning out commercial graphics cheaply - are swimming in money made on firing all their minimum-wage artists, replacing them with Midjourney or SD, and pocketing the difference. Sure, they had to drop the prices a little to clear out remaining human-powered competitors, and they will have to drop them way further once the competition restarts in the earnest - but for a short moment, they all get to make small fortunes on selling shit output, that's 100+x cheaper to produce, at roughly the same price as mediocre one before.)

Can AI be used to generate much higher quality at the same cost as human art? Sure - you'll need to spend what you used to pay an artist, whom you just fired, on generating variants and a (cheaper, at least per unit of output) human select best ones - but yes, AI can give you much better quality for the same price. But AI can also give you same quality as before for cheaper, or somewhat worse quality for much cheaper. Which is the best option to choose?

The answer, I claim, is that there is no choice - competitive pressure will force everyone to go for shittiest quality the market can bear, sold almost at cost. This will satisfy enough demand that "standard quality" offering becomes something very expensive or outright unavailable, as economics of using minimum-wage factory artists suddenly stops working.