Art is about personal discovery and connecting to previous generations. But if you don't agree, I can't convince you.

This is a fate that will be a reality for any job that can be done on a PC within the next 10 years, so unless your alternative is something like plumber, it only delayes your fate and does not prevent it.

Also, artists will still be needed, no matter how good an AI is, it can't produce something good if you have no clue what "good art" even is. Or if you need something very specific from the AI, you need to be able to ask the right questions, it's like when a client who knows nothing about art tries to comission an artist, no matter how good the artist is, if the input from the client is incoherrent garbage, he will never get what he wants and this is a more fundamental problem of information, AI cannot fix this unless it can literaly look inside your head.

Competition within the field will be pretty brutal though, AI will majorly speed up the workflow of almost every artist, so a lot less artists will be needed in total unless the market scales accordingly, which i doubt will happen. AI will displace a lot of jobs but it wont completely replace them in many cases.

In short, this will be a problem you will face in your life no matter what you do, just pray our governments don't fuck it up to badly so might as well do what you want.

I am a painter, poet and musician. I don't make much money out of any of them. It's not my job.

I create for the love of creating and the challenge of doing.

And I'm more than happy to use AI to inspire me. Dall-E 2 is a godsend. It helps jog my imagination in ways I never imagined could be.

Is it better than me at creating images? Yes. Does it matter? No. I produce for me and for the love of art.

The day may come when none of that matters, where I can create and explore worlds with a single command. But for now, the process itself gives me happiness and meaning.

I think yes, you can forget about a reliable source of income. The downward economic force this thing will have on the writing and visual art communities will make jobs scarce and pay shit. But there will still be ways to reapply these skills indirectly. Physical artists might have the last bastion of hope given how much robotics are lagging compared to the language models. Ultimately though, no job is safe.

People are still interested in sports, theater and such.

Also please don't say "just do what you like because you enjoy it", I'm not 12, thankfully you guys don't seem to think like that though.

To answer your second point from the POV of a software dev: No (white-collar) job will be done the same way in the future compared to today. Many currently used frameworks for example will be outdated in less than 5 years. People that don't adapt to new technologies and paradigms will be left behind and have difficulty finding new jobs.

The safest bet is to try being up-to-date regarding emerging tools. It's important to think how to integrate these new tools into your workflow and whether they will improve your overall productivity.

I'm not sure this directly addresses your questions - here's a crazy optimists take on what it means for artists:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_pvb8085Lw

I've been haning around this subreddit and make music; techno, ambient, electro, etc.

Its funny, because if you go back and listen to some early techno and the like, there was always little hints of AI and general futurist technology. Techno music is humans trying to sound like machines. Now we have machines trying to sound human.

To answer your question, i think there will be general split. Some people simply wont care, and music is music, whether it is AI/machine generated or human made. On the other hand, you'll have people who have a hard "no" on all music generated from AI. There is likely a sliding scale to that, like i'm not quite sure if AI could accurately capture the pain expressed in blues or the nimble improv and soul of jazz.

You can match and learn how to mirror vocal inflection or the small techniques that a jazz artist might have but i think ability to recognize human spirit in certain types of music, like rock, blues, jazz, soul, etc.

Personally, i think we should be moving AI towards genres like techno, house, Ambient, etc. I'd love to have a techno jam with an AI buddy that looks like BMO from Adventure Time.

As for becoming a professional artist...i think its better in any scenario to get a good day job that can afford you to have fun with it in your free time rather than explicitly going into it.

I used to be a toll booth collector before my job was automated. But I wasn't going to let that stop me doing what I loved. So I bought a few acres out in the country and built a little toll booth for myself and now I just sit in it everyday reading a magazine and smoking cigarettes and every now and then I push the button to open the gate to let through imaginary cars and buses.

So take it from me just because technology has replaced you doesn't mean you can't still find satisfaction doing what you where put on this Earth to do.

How much faith do you have in your ability to generate worthwhile ideas and concepts? What is your ideal market and what do you believe people or companies will pay big money for in the future? I do think digital art is largely not worth it if you're hoping to make a living on sheer technical proficiency. If that window hasn't already closed, it will very soon.

How the art is created will be immaterial if you have faith in your mind's eye and your ability to conjure the things you envision. That's kind of what art has always been and what it will remain. You could even do this for other people. Until AI is so good that it can cut out all the back and forth and faithfully produce what the customer desires on the first try there will always be people impatient enough to commission work from other humans. And even if it gets there, still no one's going to take away your ability to create novel and thought-provoking work.

You probably need to have something valuable to say, because there won't be value in having a pretty way of saying something. I don't know about you, but I don't see much evidence of AI encroaching on the former quite yet. And when it does we're all fucked.

The market will be crowded and you'll need to stand out in some way to make a living, but there aren't many fallbacks where this won't be true, especially in the creative sphere.

And if you find this kind of stuff disturbing to a point where it fucks with your daily life, come talk about it with the other nutballs in r/MAGICD.

Working in marketing, I’ve already witnessed numerous agencies using AI to create variations of graphics and copy for A&B testing. However, this type of creative work is and has been fairly soulless to begin with.

I primarily work in the video production side of marketing. I’m certain product videos will be one of the first areas to go. When AI can generate millions of variations of your product in various settings, colors, etc then there’s absolutely no need for a human to perform these tasks.

With that being said, the area I believe will be difficult for AI to fully replace will be storytelling that’s unpredictable. I work with many nonprofits creating mini documentaries for fundraising purposes. A lot of companies do this but many fail to create an emotional connection with the audience. The amount of time we spend building trust with our subject to get the best presentation of their story is critical. We then plan ways to create opportunities for emotional sequences to unfold. This could be presenting the subject with a physical newspaper featuring their story, visiting a loved one’s grave, walking through a vacated building they experienced homelessness, etc. We go into these settings understanding they could give us genuine emotions to capture but there’s an element of improv where a lot of the magic happens that we just can’t predict beforehand.

Will AI be able to have this same level of understanding and personal connection to a subject? I find it difficult to believe we’ll see this anytime soon as it requires humans to reach a level of comfort with AI to open up. And even if this is achieved, how is a director of marketing for a nonprofit going to understand how to prompt an AI on these intricate and sensitive details when they can’t even craft these stories on paper without the help of someone like myself before AI?

The way I see it is humans enjoy experiencing the little quirks and details that make us humans.

It’s similar to how Pizza Hut can make a pizza in 10 minutes at any of their franchises around the world, for a fraction of the cost, that’s good enough but yet when given the choice many people will prefer to eat at the local pizza joint where pizzas are handcrafted by a family that’s been doing it for 50 years. There’s totally a market for both but as humans we place value on doing things the more personal and at times difficult way.

Imo the hand drawn art would have much meaning and we would love the imperfections of human

Okay I’ve made all my points about my issues with AI art in replies to other comments and am kinda busy now so I probably won’t engage with future comments but feel free to keep providing perspectives and discussion.

art is ultimately about expressing and sharing human emotion and experience which ai fundamentally cannot do, can ai make satisfying visual generations that are interesting to look at for commercial purposes? sure

can it make art? no

Deleting the post because people are getting mean and personal about this on a level I’m not comfortable with. I might have been a little testy because this is directly affecting my livelihood but the intent was to genuinely see people’s different takes on this, not resort to name calling.

I think people/artist should use AI as a tool, there is a massive difference between AI art directed by a beginner and a professional. When cameras arrived photography became an art too, while painters complained the same way artist do now.

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currently, you can ask it to generate an image, but not a movie. In order to coordinate at a higher level you need to understand lower level details, which can only be done via practice.

so, as an artist, my game plan would be

to broaden my scope - e.g. go from generating art for comics to generating whole comics, or from stills to youtube videos (this will be a bit of a race cuz AI will also broaden its scope, however you don't seem to want to do this, although it's probably the way to capture the most economic value, albeit a bit of a high effort gamble)

> is there any point in continuing to make art being human when everything artists humans could ever do will be...

personally I would bet the last jobs to be automated will be manual labor jobs. but that will probably only last a couple years after most white collar work has been automated. i would be surprised if it was more than 8 yrs (after white collar work is automated that is, which might be more like 15 years). if i had to bet maybe 3-4 yrs. i think they will pay a lot better than they do now though, although manual labor also has a learning curve so now might not be a bad time to start.

Art has always existed alongside humanity, its a form of expression in my opinion and i think it is slightly below writing and will forever stay with humans. Will art in its current form change and render many artists obsolete? yes, but there will always be humans want to express themselves artistically and other humans who want to engage as we are social creatures.

My advice is to use AI to vastly increase your workflow and become more creative, only an artist will best know how to creatively use the new AI that's coming out, after all gold will float to the top and shit will drown. This is coming from an 3D modelling hobbyist who uses ai to increase my speed

I appreciate and respect art that was created more by hand than by a computer mushing other paintings together

I get paid to be creative. If you're doing it to make money, you're probably gonna be fucked. I don't see a huge chunk of the positions I work with rn being around in ten years. You should always do it though, you never know when someone with more money than sense finds its and offers to buy your soul. But it wont make anyone rich in the future. More importantly it helps you stay in touch with yourself and those around you, art will hopefully become more about means of communication than commercialization.

I am a musician and i spend hours every day making music.

Just this morning i read the thread about the new music generator AI.

TBH the AI will make a lot of stuff, but it will also NOT MAKE THE STUFF I'M MAKING.

Can it be better? Yes, but who cares? I have my own personal creative needs that need to be tended to.

Besides, every creation is unique, you like it or not, every art piece is unique and the AI is coming to add to that, at least in my view, and expand art in ways we never thought possible.

As an AI enthusiast, I'm more than thrilled.

As an artist that doesnt give a fuck about mainstream and money, I am more than thrilled.

I CANT FUCKING WAIT FOR AI DJS PLAYING ON UNDERGROUND RAVES.

AI RAPPERS RHYMING ABOUT NON-PHYSICAL EXISTENCE.

AI SHREDING ABSTRACT GUITARS.

INVENTING NEW INSTRUMENTS.

NEW MELODIES, NEW FUCKING MUSIC THEORY.

CAN SOMEONE IMAGINE SOMETHING MORE DISRUPTIVE THAN THIS?

What does an artist want if not disruption of the status quo? I see a lot of people who learned how to draw and think they're artists. These are the ones complaining about AI taking over.

I'm just fucking excited because before loving to make art, I love art, and I just wanna see what kind of over-human shit AI will come up with.

Electricity just got invented...

Was there a point to being a woodworker or carpenter after electricity was invented?

Was there a point to being a baker after electricity was invented?

Was there a point to being a factory assembly worker after electricity was invented?

Was there a point to being a clothing tailor after electricity was invented?

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Electricity can do 'unlimited' work. So can AI. What AI needs is a human to guide it, explain what other humans want, and restrict it from it's 'unlimitedness' into a product that meets a need.

AI is a tool, and we'll still need humans who can wield that tool. We'll need to learn how to use it best, but the 'human who can use a tool and make something' skill will still be useful.

There might be a market where human art is like a rare and expensive good to have but people want it bcs it isn’t flawless,that’s what comes to my mind . If the whole AI stuff is very advanced ppl might just pay good money because it is human art

There is no objective value in art and AI is reducing the minimal value to electricity cost of running a graphics card. The art for commercial purpose will follow the path of all disruptive technologies and will be replaced by automation: today AI flaws will get fixed as demand for fast, cheap and quality art meets the infinite supply. Non-commercial art will be transformed by editing with AI plugins and inpainting/outpainting will become as common as "Photoshopping". Every week there new networks and models appearing to satisfy specific niches and speed at which new art is produced is equivalent to invention of printing press. If you pick the side of 'art gatekeepers' you will not gain much, outlawing the algorithms that power diffusion/denoising is futile and datasets are replaceable. The current idea of 'artist' as prestigious occupation and its cultural impact will dissolve into fragmented insular communities that gatekeep their art as AI dwarfs their output by billions of times: you can even see AI 'artists' infiltrating and pretending to be real artists because to observers there is no difference in the final product, as result the culture will consist of 99.99% AI content and the rest will be heavily edited and AI-enchanced 'manual works' that is exemplfied by img2img workflow. There is no point wasting your best years to learn art, its like training to be a scribe when the printing press exists. Example: You can paint a few paintings per day of great quality. I can create 10K paintings per day of which 1%(100) will be on the level of top human art, randomly or subjectively. Its order of magnitude greater output of quality works that no artist can compete with.

1. Humans will always have a select few that train in older methods.
2. Just become an artist…you don’t know what’s going to happen so just go do what you want to do

Although it is a bit ironic that art was first (because artists publish everything they do), the truth is that the same techniques apply to any creative activity (including technical problem solving). So by the time that AI can actually replace artists (it can't yet), it will replace everything else.

In terms of whether you should do art or not, I would say it depends on the reason you’re doing art. If you’re making art to make money, then yeah AI is going to be better than you just by virtue of the fact that it can crank out 1000 pieces of art per second and some of them are bound to be decent art. If however you’re making art because you can’t not make art -because it’s part of you and you need the outlet- then who cares if you can still get paid? Keep doing art because you need it for your mental health. You’ll figure out what you need to do to pay the bills. And who knows, maybe you’ll even hit it big and become one of the few “analog artists” left

Is there any point in playing chess when Stockfish, AlphaZero, etc... can win against anyone? Computers have long surpassed humans in chess and other games, yet people still play professional chess and make careers out of it. Chess players have adapted to using computers to help them learn their mistakes and better tactics. I believe the same will happen with AI art, artists in the future (some even in the present) will use AI to help them make art, learn from it, and use it to explore new concepts.

A machine can cycle oxygen through an air sac. Is there any point to breathing?

You'll do art for yourself, because you enjoy it. There won't be a commercial incentive to do it.

I've enjoyed writing poetry for 20 years now. It's a dead art. My sonnets were never going to pay the rent. I understand what it's like to practice at something that has no monetary value, and visual artists will too soon.

>artists could ever do will be fundamentally replaceable in a few years

This is a speculative statement like the doomsday prophecies about 2012 or 2020. We don't actually know how much AIs will impact Art economy or freelance artists because AI art has no copyright right now in lots of countries.

AI art is just a new medium of digital art, you can still draw with any other medium and make tons of money or you can adapt AI into your workflow as artist and make tons of money.

You must either train your marketing skills to become a freelancer or comic book artist or work for a corporation which might or might not fire you because of random reasons or study AIs + art.

Money in art isn't made with just drawing skills, it's mainly made by connections with people:

[1] more fans you have bigger your patreon income and shop sales are

or

[2] you're working for a corpo and the replacement period is VERY unclear because AIs have no rights whatsoever, but in near future you might need to learn AIs to work for a corpo.

If art is your way to express your own world, then what will it change when AI can produce better art? I doubt many will pay for your art though.

​

I have been playing chess for the last few years. There are more chess players than ever even though AI run on a smartphone can completely destroy the best chess players in the world. Yet people still spend years to master the skill that is not needed in a real world and that computers can do much better and quicker. People just enjoy to play and learn. And there are people living of teaching chess.

I recommend sculpturing instead of purely visual art. Sure AI will eventually master it and surpass all human efforts, but it’ll take longer since there’s the matter of manipulating physical tools and understanding how to make sculptures which are structurally sound what with entropy and gravity and all. That’s what I’ve done anyway.

I am painting for my own pleasure.

Art for art's sake will never die.

I like using the zero sum analogy.

If you bake 5 cakes and robots bake 100 cakes, you now have 105 cakes. Even if the robots bake fantastic cakes, I'm actually irrationally drawn to the human-made ones because they're more special due to being human-made.

That's no way to sustain an economy, sure, but if anything, things are even better now that there's an abundance of cakes and I can choose which ones I want.

Maybe early on, I'd prefer the robot-made cakes, but over time, I'll definitely start focusing on the human-made ones.

Similarly, art is not a zero sum game intrinsically. Now when there's a job to be done, yes. When you need 100 cakes and you can only bake 5 in the time it takes robots to make 100, clearly you go with the robots.

Similarly, if I'm looking for a good logo for a product, I'm probably going with a machine-created one if it's just as good or better than human-created ones.

As a writer, I absolutely will use natural language generation tools to help me write or even outright create stories for me, but that doesn't mean I'm never going to write again. If anything, having generative AI is only reigniting my interest in writing myself. I'd love to generate whole novels with AI from small prompts.... but I'd also love to generate texts to edit into my own style, or write in my own style and transfer it into another, or just write just to write. I'd love to see if I can learn from AI-generated text.

It's similar to how chess-playing AIs didn't destroy chess. If anything, human players became better by learning from superhuman chess AIs. A similar thing is happening in Go right now.

There will absolutely be a massive glut of AI-generated media. AI-generated movies, games, TV shows, books, comics, etc. But that's not going to stop dedicated humans from trying their own hand at it just to do it, and there'll be an audience for that.

People like saying "You won't be able to tell the difference."

But from my experience, 95% of people who use AI-gen tools actually do take the time to announce or mark that what they've made is AI-generated. I don't see that changing. Especially if regulatory laws pass.

And once these tools have spread sufficiently throughout society and human-made art becomes the new niche, it becomes the new hot commodity in and of itself. True, online you do have to trust what you're seeing is what it says it is, but I think there'll be enough ways to make sure in due time.

It's the more expensive things, like major motion pictures that require tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to make, that I think will become slightly more obsolete. And even then, if the market still exists for them for whatever reason, who knows.

That's the big takeaway: "Who knows!"

I've been following synthetic media's rise ever since 2017. I called all of what's happening.

Nowadays, I've been shifting to a less "destroy everything" mindset to one that accepts that people will choose to maintain the status quo if it can be helped.

Artists aren't replaced by other artists. This is just a new player in the game. Art is inspiration and vision. That won't stop because a program can mimic it. A true artist will continue their craft because they are driven to express their own vision. AI will likely be adapted and incorporated into that vision.

No, it’s not like AI just dreams up art, it’s just a tool. Any real artist would pick up on this and start to learn to leverage it for gain. And, hand created art will just move into a more niche, and possibly more profitable arena. Supply and demand.

In fact, many think tanks think, AGI will bring about UBI, which will intern free people up to follow creative passions. Which would mean more art available.

It's a game changing tool, a company that needed ten artist will probably only need two. If you are posting on instagram, it means ten times the competition.

If you want to stay relevant, either become an expert with the new tool or change to a medium that isn't affected (sculpting painting, etc).

AI will replace programmers and artists in a few years, but they are still useful skills in a post-AI world. A good programmer can specify what they want, and what they know is possible for computers, just as a good artist can set a scene, decide lighting and palette. They provide the seed about which the AI can grow the crystal. A good musician can provide a great song, while AI can do a million variations on it (some better, some worse). I recently asked Riffusion to blend Trance and Reggae, two genres I'd never heard together and the result was great. It was like listening to a never ending fount of music.

George Lucas needed thousands to enact his vision. Those thousands can potentially be replaced by AI now. But G. Lucas's skills contributed to his vision, they did not take away. AI can come up with truly novel things, this shown by medicine and protein synthesis, but this has yet to show up in the Arts. Yet I imagine asking Dall-e to blend Dali and Monet is quite possible.

What we do isn't useless. A simple example is solving a 2D maze. You can trace a small maze, such as they have on Children's menus in the time it takes an AI to solve a monster maze. But just because the AI can solve a maze doesn't mean YOUR maze solving isn't useless, it just means MORE mazes get solved. Capitalism makes everything seem a competition, but that is not how the Universe works: cooperation has won the day, as exampled by our own Human species. Short term, Artists may lose work, but long term, they will bath in unlimited artworks, inspiring their own "maze solving."

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Saying that Human art is dead is like saying horses should be extinct because we have cars. On a fundamental level they really have nothing to do with each other. Another example is saying we shouldn’t need skilled carpenters because we can 3D print houses or use prefabricated manufacturing.

Now, in terms of going in to art as a professional career to sustain a family and make a living… that’s really no different than trying to become a professional athlete or a movie star. The passion (and at times connections and genetics) needs to be there.

Your professional work doesn’t have to be something that you “love” or even feel passionate about. In fact I’d argue it makes it easier to disconnect from work if you’re not passionate about it. Keep art as a hobby if you’re passionate about it.

AI hype train is full steam right now and given how long technology has taken to proliferate globally (iPhone I would say has only in the past few years reached full saturation) AI will still need to be adopted and used by all the humans that first need to find a killer app for it. Right now it’s shaping up to be the next level up in google search / an incredible digital assistant. Amplifying productivity and capabilities of professionals in multiple fields. AI won’t take a job today; AI + a human most definitely will start to.

Long story short, it’s way early and you’re young. Think more on what you would actually see yourself doing for the next 5 years. Adapt to the world accordingly after that time assuming anything has truly changed.

Artists have always been prompt engineers. Andy Warhol instructed his craftspeople what to create and then took the credit. Don't conflate art with craft.

My man misses the entire point of art live in 4K