[drdaeman]

> Why pay a pixel artist if AI can generate 100's of unique little people pixels in seconds

Because someone who knows something about pixels needs to make a judgement. It is rare to see a machine-generated artifact (picture, video, text or code) that's good on the first try. And not always a non-specialist can see the issue.

Same thing why we still need human software engineers, even though a machine can generate code. Someone with actual understanding of the problem needs to make a management decision. Just like engineers see code slop (design or implementation) that laypeople vibe-coding don't recognize, artists see the visual slop where layman eye glances over.

Honestly, IMHO, this whole panic is artists' own creation. Instead of educating others on how to spot the issues (and thus reaffirming that expertise still matters - nothing had changed, and probably nothing ever will), a notable fraction went all-in on neo-luddite ideas, as if they don't know the history of their own craft and adjacent creative industries (I guess many really don't, or at least it doesn't click). Evaluate new tools, make use of them when they provide value, skip them where they fall short, and most importantly reaffirm that fancier brushes don't replace the artist in a human society - this is an already well-tested and proven strategy. Ring the existential bells when we'll get to the question of machine cognition rather than just intelligence.

Same for the engineering. Don't shy away from new tools, use them where they're a good fit, don't waste time when they are't (but periodically check out if something changes), explain everyone why you still matter - just to push back on unfortunate misconceptions.

The fact that a lot of companies' upper management went delusional and decided they want to replace humans witch machines (as if don't need responsibility anymore) doesn't help. But - hey - already plenty of stories how it bites them back, so while this period sucks, it's not exactly fucked, just in a state of (a pretty much expected) confusion.

Dishing out pixels or lines of code got somewhat cheaper. Expertise cost remains the same, though.

[coldtea]

>Because someone who knows something about pixels needs to make a judgement. It is rare to see a machine-generated artifact (picture, video, text or code) that's good on the first try.

Not if nobody cares for the end product that finely.

And even if it was true, one person can make the judgement, while automation erasing 5 others that would have worked in both the judgement and the graphics wrok.

[drdaeman]

> Not if nobody cares for the end product that finely.

Yes. But a non-negligible number of people do care. If nobody would've cared, we wouldn't have this drama.

> one person can make the judgement, while automation erasing 5 others that would have worked in both the judgement and the graphics wrok.

Yes. In other words, new tools had increased people's performance for mechanical work - individual units of that can be arguably done faster than before. So hypothetically one person can do a work of five. Note of that erases those people and their skills. The real underlying issue is that demand for it doesn't catch up because world's coincidentally fucked (through a series of unrelated issues, such as a quite few global conflicts) and economies aren't exactly thriving outside of a few niches du jour.

I strongly suspect that if we would've had a flourishing economies around the world, the demand would ramp up and artists (and engineers, and writers, and everyone else whose performance could've been positively affected by new tools) would be in greater position than ever before.

[coldtea]

>So hypothetically one person can do a work of five. Note of that erases those people and their skills.

It just doesn't magically take them out of the universe or turns them into unskilled persons.

But it does magically erases those people with those skills as needed employees.

>The real underlying issue is that demand for it doesn't catch up because world's coincidentally fucked (through a series of unrelated issues, such as a quite few global conflicts) and economies aren't exactly thriving outside of a few niches du jour.

Why would that demand have to "catch up"? Just because we can do something faster or automate parts of it doesn't guarantee demand will go up, even in a good economy. No shortage of jobs that vanished forever in a similar even, despite the economy going otherwise up. Even more so now, where it's fucked up anyway, of course.

[drdaeman]

> Just because we can do something faster or automate parts of it doesn't guarantee demand will go up

It's not guaranteed, but why wouldn't it? It's digital entertainment and art, and the market is not saturated, there's still tons of ideas unexplored. If more people would have spare money they can spend on digital purchases instead of making ends meet - I'm pretty sure there'd be more people seeking ways to earn that money. Especially if production just got cheaper.

Correct me if I'm wrong, please, but every time production got cheaper for something that isn't obsolete (and art and stories are never obsolete), the markets became more and more flooded.

[coldtea]

>It's not guaranteed, but why wouldn't it? It's digital entertainment and art, and the market is not saturated, there's still tons of ideas unexplored.

Because there's only so much "digital entertainment and art" people practically care for, and already people were saturated and bored with all the crap out there pre-AI too.

[cognitiveinline]

You are indeed wrong, there's no infinite demand for everything

[drdaeman]

I surely can be, but I don’t see it so far. How the latter suggests the former? The demand doesn’t have to scale infinitely - I don’t believe the demand is or was anywhere near saturation.