There are some real dangers here that need to be navigated.
Junior artists who get their start doing commissions are not going to have that path anymore.
Reddit's job boards for junior artists are a literal desert now.
In a sense, the activation energy gradient to producing good results has lowered such that the economic reward for up and coming artists has deteriorated.
> Why don’t you let the artists maintain their own practice, rather than pressuring your friends to join you in yours?
Artists who get their start in AI early can build recognition and clout within the community. They'll potentially be at a big advantage.
a16z is investing in non-technical artists to bootstrap production and community. There's actually a lot of interesting stuff happening when you dive in to AI art.
This is true for just about everything, honestly. The more you play with these tools (and use them in anger to do real shit) the more you push their boundaries and learn what they are good for and what they aren’t. You also quickly realize, like any other computer tool, there is a certain skill you need to have in order to provoke these things into generating the output you expect.
They can be time savers but also time wasters.
But what they aren’t gonna do is make the employees of entire industries vanish overnight. But I will say you’d be a fool to ignore these tools because once you master them they can be a pretty awesome force multiplier.
That all being said, many times it feels like it’s just a fancy, more annoying Alexa that you have to fight with to get the results you want. But alas…
I don't think I made my argument clear. This isn't about companies not paying artists, it's about peer-to-peer opportunities contracting and the market shrinking at the bottom.
This is hardly the only community for this, and it's evaporated into a ghost town. Prices have decreased an order of magnitude.
This is one of the ways up and coming artists without professional training get started earning money from their skill set.
You should see also how Fiverr has filled up with GenAI artists that are pricing out traditional artists. Fiverr isn't typically a place for highly skilled work - it's for newbies and developing world opportunities. And now the money is thinning out.
Contract art for individuals looking for a custom image has been devastated by GenAI.
This makes a little more sense as the bar for quality is much lower than a widespread commercial product and most individuals are willing to compromise on that to get a good desktop wallpaper quickly for free.
Even local events have been using AI banner images.
> Artists who get their start in AI early can build recognition and clout within the community.
The non-artists community? The "I don't have anything I can show I own the copyright to" community? The "I made this with genAI so now the company can't even protect it's copyright?" community? The "tech-bro NFT fraud" community? The "do it for the exposure" community?
Taking anything a16z does as an example disqualifies any conversation about art.
You all can only think as a fuction of capital allocated and possibility to make money. It's ok about technology, it doesn't work about art. You just have the wrong set of tool for the discourse, but the Dunning Krueger is strong.
but indie films have always existed. there have always been amateurs using film as a medium, since there was film (in high school, we wrote, storyboarded, directed, acted in, and edited our own short films for our final film class projects using camcorders and watched them at a viewing night at a local theater!).
you're saying "you must have a giant budget and tons of time to compete with the studios and AI can level the playing field" but i don't know why an artist would want to compete with a major film studio which is pushing out generic content in the first place?
you don't need a multimillion dollar production budget and $300k props to make art, in the same way a sculptor doesn't need to make statues out of gold or diamonds.
That's probably because commodification and mass production are far more viable a path towards feeding one's family than is expression of the human condition.
You know that people can see you as you sit there sharpening your teeth.
I dont think anybody who has taken up an artistic practice, professional or otherwise, should or would spend much time basing their life decisions around an online job board.
> You know that people can see you as you sit there sharpening your teeth.
I'm an engineer and a filmmaker. I've lived with 5 AM call times and shoots that ended at sunrise. I've rented ridiculous $300,000 glassware, lifted heavy items from the top shelf of the prop house, dealt with talent issues, struggled to memorize lines, had post production drop projects on the floor, and dealt with so much bullshit - that world sucks.
The film portion of this market is bending a little bit differently than illustration, and these changes are presenting a huge opportunity for filmmakers and animators.
Film needed studios historically because (1) distribution was hard (YouTube and Netflix have addressed this) and (2) films are logistically complicated, capital intensive, and require lots of people. Gen AI is changing this last bit in a big way.
Film is basically getting its "Steam" moment. Just like indie devs can make games, indie authors can write novels, or indie musicians can work on a DAW and publish to Bandcamp, filmmakers will soon have the ability to build their own universes and audiences - something that wasn't possible before. (While there are writers, comedians, and animators like Vivienne Medrano, Joel Haver, and Zach Hadel, GenAI makes this happen in a big, repeatable, and sustainable way.)
20,000+ film students attend film and animation school every year. There aren't enough projects currently to have all of them be autonomous or pursue their own vision. That's changing.
And why would you want to build in Disney's ball pit and play by their rules when our own minds are so much more expansive? So many ideas wither on the vine and never see the light of day due to the intense capital requirements and the bland general audience algorithm of the existing regime.
Ask yourself why there are 20,000+ fantasy books but only 50 fairly generic fantasy films and TV shows.
This is all a good thing. Art is going to explode and fill into every niche and interest you can imagine.
The market will grow, not contract, and the artists will have their own brands and audiences.
Sorry, but graphic designers (who are the group of artists most affected by genAI) don't think this way, and I have a hard time believing you're actually interacting with any and discussing this issue, because this take is what I'll call "the trendy online anti AI art" viewpoint. In the real world, graphic designers are pretty pragmatic people that tend to master whatever toolset they can get their hands on.
This is what I came here to say. Tech has been pretty central to the tools of professional graphic artists (which include video games) for a long time.
I notice a lot of non-professional artists running to the rescue of artists. I suspect this is in part because there are a lot of young people who have pursued a degree in art and have been frustrated by the mismatch of their expectations in the commercial world. There is a lot of romanticism.
I myself went to art school (MFA). Actually I was really grossed out by the big Art gallery scene. It professes to be open minded, anti establishment and non commercial but it is extremely narrow in politics, hugely elitist and deeply oriented around big money. That’s ok, but I wouldn’t claim that Art has any moral superiority.
Can you please avoid the flamewar style on HN? You're welcome to express your views, but not like this—it's against the intended spirit of the site. If you want to express your substantive points thoughtfully, that would be fine.
I think there's a condition though. That if they learn generative AI tools then they won't be obsolete. If op was just of the view that there's nothing special about generative AI, then the post would read very different.
I think they think that generative AI might help give his artist friends a competitive edge against other artists, which would help make them more hirable, hence assuaging their concerns of obsolescence. My guess would be OP thinks generative AI won't make artists obsolete, but might make being an artist more competitive. But I reckon we're just speculating on their internal state.
I dont think any aspiring artist, professional or otherwise, was ever deeply concerned about their future prospects in creating corporate graphics or mechanical pop songs. It was a fast buck, that’s all.
Attempting to seduce them into committing ever more of their creative efforts in the service of a machine that only seeks to churn out more artifacts misses the entire point of ever starting, and especially continuing, an artistic practice of any kind.
The entire purpose is in the act of creating and the efforts involved in honing a craft that entirely relies on your commitment.
It doesn’t get any simpler or less pretentious.
The road to mastery is the entire bloody point.
Trying to encourage your own friends to short circuit that only serves in getting you to the artifact faster, and in the process neglects anything of any value from the entire process. Is that really being a friend?
Unless you think the only thing that matters here is the artifact. Then you’re lost.
I'm an amateur musical artist and writer of literature, and while I agree with you on the importance of the creative act - fundamentally speaking, I've come to accept that my music practice, like a good diet and exercise routine and spending quality time with loved ones, is just something I have to do if I want to be truly happy - I disagree that artifacts don't matter.
I think that in my case, and I suspect the case of many of people, one of the most rewarding things is someone connecting with a piece that I made and having it greatly improve their lives. I can understand wanting to optimize the process of creating artifacts in order to have more people thanking you for making their day/week/month/year with your art ^_^
The road to mastery, while yes there is that whole spiritual journey aspect of mastering yourself via mastering a craft, is also supposed to end in a place where you have the skills to give joy to people via your art. Via making something that they'll love, be it a painting, a song, or some software.
Wanting to optimize this not only makes sense, but is probably part of the process of mastering the craft. It is for me in any case, I do give a fair amount of thought to how I can improve my creation velocity when I make music, drawing inspiration from artists like JuL and Lex Luger who are known for their ability to rapidly compelling new tracks.
> I think that in my case, and I suspect the case of many of people, one of the most rewarding things is someone connecting with a piece that I made and having it greatly improve their lives
The way you said this makes me think you agree with OP. The piece that You made is the embodiment of your experience, which can connect with someone at a certain level.
It's you, the piece is just the end result.
Could you do the same with an AI music generator where you input a prompt? Maybe the same amount of people would connect with it, but are you as an artist connected with it? Does that prompt embody your expression? I doubt it.
A good exercise anyone can do is to question why X or Y artists became a reference at a certain time.
You end up finding out it was about: the historical context, cultural disruption, influence during or after their life, consistency in pursuing their artistic expression... the list goes on.
In some cases the final outcome, the artifact, is "cool" on its own without the context, but in all cases, it's the artist that makes their body of work valuable and "cool".
Technology at the service of artists has played its role in new media and different ways to work with it, but it's mainly as a tool.
I think you might be missing my point. It seems like you're arguing "being an artist is not becoming obsolete because...". I'm saying that OP is not making the claim that artist's are becoming obsolete. The OP's artist friends are making that claim. Not OP. So the frustration here is a little confusing to me.
But to address your claim, I disagree that the entire purpose of art is individualistic honing of craft. That's a very romantic view of art which I imagine many artists would also disagree with. There are many reasons why people create art. One is for the individual honing of craft. One is as a means to communicate. One is as a means of making a living. One is catharsis. Another is to bring about change. And there are many more. Most artists likely have a cocktail of these reasons as to why they are artists. My guess is professional artists _do_ want their art to pay the bills, and might not be able to practice their art if they had to spend 40h a week doing something else to pay their bills. So I understand their concerns that being a _professional_ artist _who can support themselves from their art_ might be becoming obsolete.
I do agree with you that I don't fully understand the purpose of OP's proposal to teach them the internals of how AI models work. I would understand teaching them AI artist tools like Adobe's AI integrations -- since these tools could potentially give them a competitive edge over other artists, which would help them be able to continue working in the field they love. And like you said, artists might not have a great love for the more corporate gigs that pay the bills -- where that individualistic expression is greatly diminished anyways -- so that might be a prime opportunity where an artist could use AI to help support themselves so that they can then spend time creating art they care about.
> What resources would you point your friends to who both want to learn about generative AI and assuage their fears that AI will make artists obsolete?
It seems like your post is mostly based on assumptions about the poster, and a misreading(?) of this one word.
There’s no hubris in wanting to assuage people’s fears that their skills might become obsolete.
> The important part of art is the practice and the transformation that occurs in the creator.
They claim to be engaging (talking to friends) to the extent that they can be without already being a working artist. Maybe they are lying, but all we have is a post on the Internet, so if we assume the author of the post is a liar, we don’t have much to go by.
> You will never understand this unless you engage. Trying to circumvent it again and again will only result in circumambulating the point and will miss it every time. No matter how shiny the artifact that results.
Do you actually work in art? I don’t. But what do you mean by engage? I’ve taken some art classes. It was fun. But this was a cultivated experience, I was paying the instructor to have fun and explore ideas.
On the other hand, you can poke around online and find people who will complain about the day-to-day bullshit of their art jobs. I worry that, almost by definition, the easy paths to engagement are almost by-definition not going to give a good view of what the day-to-day bullshit experience looks like.
People romanticize engineering and programming as well. The beauty of getting a tangible solution, sprung from your mind, that impacts the world. At the end of the day, a lot of houses and dinners were bought by the need to throw together boring assed corporate inventory management systems.
Most work is the sort of stuff that nobody wants to do, after all. That’s why they pay you for it, rather than going the other way.
Why don’t you shelve the pretentious corporate rhetoric yourself and re-read what I’ve suggested.
Get off the computer and pick up a pencil, or mound of clay, or whatever, and give it a few years of regular practice. Theres nothing pretentious about that. It will do everything and I will need to say nothing.
Tell me, why dont you “drill down” and explain what is so pretentious about suggesting you might need to commit yourself to a practice in order to understand it. A pencil and paper are far cheaper and more accessible than a laptop and online subscriptions to “gen ai platform of the month”.
As I said elsewhere, if you think the artifact is all that matters then you are lost.
And I have better things to do than get mired in rhetorical bickering.
Once software has “eaten the world” then it will starve with nothing more of value to consume. I will still be here.
And for some bloody reason still doing my taxes by hand while some energy hungry machine churns out Rembrandt imitations that I don’t bother viewing.
In some cases maybe it's less about superiority or inferiority of either approach but where the interest lies?
A person who has become accustomed to taking an engineering (or yes, unfortunately enough, a marketing) approach throughout their life may be more naturally drawn to a process that appeals to them rather than one that is unfamiliar. Especially as they grow older and their way of the world solidifies, since up to that point that mindset has served them well in their usual non-art domain.
I will be the first to say that I do not consider genAI as "art" in the traditional sense. And that the two approaches are not, and will never be, equivalent for the reasons of personal self-development outlined elsewhere in this thread. At the same time, I did do as you say and spent a lot of time and effort on analogue pencil/ink on paper drawing for a year and a half in rebellion to this genAI commodification of everything. I did a few free tutorials but in general just tried to sit down somewhere and draw anything, free of any boundaries or restrictions, to keep my mind on drawing.
After months and months of it, on a near daily basis, I just lost interest. I didn't have a strong drive to get really good beyond what I considered chicken scratches.
Now of course you could say something like I needed to spend more effort instead of stopping that early not truly understanding the process of drawing, but to me it feels like fitting a square peg into a round hole. It's about different people having a different alignment of interests. For example I find music processing tools like pure data far more interesting than anything related to pen-on-paper, and have created a lot of things with them (without any AI involvement), arguably rather artistic things, in a shorter timeframe, because I enjoyed it more than drawing. Likely because those systems feel more like engineering to me.
So in my opinion, some portion of the people insisting on genAI's superiority as an approach (completely the wrong thing to say IMO) in reality wouldn't have had much interest in creating art perhaps for the rest of their lives if genAI hadn't been invented at all. GenAI to those people is an indicator of how invested they are in art/personal reflection/growth, etc. Which is: not much, in comparison to other things. But to them that's fine. And it wouldn't have been much different without genAI, only you wouldn't have heard of all those people in an art-world context 6 years ago anyway - save for something perspective-altering like psychedelics, maybe.
And this also applies between domains within art as well. A person's interest in digital painting may never reach the same level as that of EDM production. And some portion of those hypothetical EDM producers will, unfortunately or not, discover a way of reclaiming the leftover time for their less-important hobbies in smashing a button 10 times.
When the bar has been lowered so low that someone can push a button and have a flurry of artifact imitations spit out, people will be naturally curious for at least a short time. When a few of them also realize that this places the domain of "art" (for whichever faulty or not definition they started with) into an engineering realm involving all sorts of sparkly bits like k-diffusion methods and LoRAs and UNets and activation functions and such, it's not surprising that some engineering-minded people would think to themselves "oh, this can become my way of expressing myself." However flawed that reasoning may be.
> It's just not true that everyone feels that practicing art is the main point
then it's likely that you're discussing people who don't consider themselves artists. i used to know some folks who did graphic design for advertisements - they didn't consider that art, as the point of the banners etc that they made was to attract attention and get people to spend money on a client's website, not to express themselves in some meaningful way. they were under no delusion that they were creating anything that could be considered near the same category as a Picasso (for example).
disagree. it's a very (environmentally) inefficient way to mass produce meaningless, generic pictures which are poor stand-ins for authentic expressions the human condition.
There are some real dangers here that need to be navigated.
Junior artists who get their start doing commissions are not going to have that path anymore.
Reddit's job boards for junior artists are a literal desert now.
In a sense, the activation energy gradient to producing good results has lowered such that the economic reward for up and coming artists has deteriorated.
> Why don’t you let the artists maintain their own practice, rather than pressuring your friends to join you in yours?
Artists who get their start in AI early can build recognition and clout within the community. They'll potentially be at a big advantage.
a16z is investing in non-technical artists to bootstrap production and community. There's actually a lot of interesting stuff happening when you dive in to AI art.