You know, interesting kind of aside here, I haven’t seen talked about anywhere at all, but I would like to interrogate everyone here about it to get their thoughts.
I don’t think AI is generally going to just replace artists wholesale, or is going to take over without some sort of editing, and that editing will probably necessitate a kind of creative process, and that’s probably going to be adjacent to what lots of artists already do. AI as a tool, rather than as a replacement. We saw this with the shift from 2d to 3d in animation. This was accompanied by lack of unionization in the 3d workforce, yes, and was incentivized by it, but the convergence of these mediums, even really only fairly recently, has bolstered artists’ ability to make much smaller projects work on a larger scale than they previously would’ve been able to. If you really need evidence of this, you can kind of look at much earlier newgrounds stuff vs the later work. There’s less people using that site now, and the userbase has probably aged up substantially over time, but I do think it’s probably fair to say that the quality of the work has gone up (quality obviously being subjective). Basically, Blender is a pretty good software, it’s very cool and good.
SO, to the point, if this is the case, and artists are able to substantially cut down on their workload, while still producing similar or larger outputs, or better outputs, will this actually affect art, kind of, as an industry? Is there a pre-allocated volume of art that public consciousness will allow to exist? In which case, the amount of artists would go down. Or is it more the case that there is only a pre-allocated amount of capital that can be given to art? In which case, the number of artists might be the same, and we might just see larger volumes of art in general? I think historically the latter is the case, but that might have changed, or, more realistically, I think it would be dependent on external economic factors.
The issue is that most art is not made just for display. Concept art, corporate art, icons, stock art, and more is how artists make their bread and butter. You might not be able to sell an unedited AI image as a print (yet), but making, say, 100 icons for a mid budget mobile game goes from a small freelance job for an artist to no job at all. Same for someone who makes all that stock art you see on news articles or random blogs. The truth is, the vast majority of the art we look at every day isn’t meant to be critically scrutinized, but it still requires artists to make. AI art dramatically reduces the small but numerous jobs for artist, who already struggle to make a living.
The contentious part is that all of this AI was trained on decades of living artists’ work (and associated descriptions provided for accessibility) without their permission, and now it is actively, not theoretically, replacing their jobs. Now artists are hesitant to even post the art they want to make for fear that models will be trained to reproduce their style.
I mean, twofold questions here. Were artists really wanting those jobs in the first place, for one? I would think that, you know, along those lines, this is just kinda the long end of a process that has been taking place throughout the whole of the 20th century. Used to be that you would have to get someone to paint your billboard, paint your glass storefront, used to be that you would have to hire skilled draftsmen to draw up blueprints on huge boards, for basically every product. Now we’re at the point where you only hire an artist to draw something if you really want to get something that looks very original, for some reason, because otherwise you can probably just get it in a stock library, and make whatever you want with stock assets, even without AI. You might also still be looking to artists for product design, but that’s maybe going to be less and less the case as you get design processes that are driven more by committee, and consumer feedback.
So along those lines, the total number of art available to artists to do, would be dwindling all the time, basically because the total amount of art floating around in culture, or at least, the total amount of art monetizable by culture, has remained the same for much of the 20th century, and automation has simply made it easier to get rid of artists.
Second question, right, is… I dunno, I forgot it. damn. There’s probably also some theoretical point about capitalism and how this is just the mechanism through how it’s working at current, and not the fault of the technology specifically as much as the organization and forces of the market, but I feel like everyone’s already made that point mostly, and it wasn’t gonna be my second question. I dunno maybe if I cook long enough I’ll remember what it was gonna be.
I’d argue that those are still jobs lost to automation, that just weren’t mourned like jobs are today because they weren’t lost after decades of huge swatches of jobs being taken over by automation.
When billboard painters were replaced there were 1000 other places they could go. When today’s fiverr app artist loses their small niche income to AI, they’re losing what was already their last ditch artistic income. It’s the same issue, but the scale makes it hit WAY harder now.
You know, interesting kind of aside here, I haven’t seen talked about anywhere at all, but I would like to interrogate everyone here about it to get their thoughts.
I don’t think AI is generally going to just replace artists wholesale, or is going to take over without some sort of editing, and that editing will probably necessitate a kind of creative process, and that’s probably going to be adjacent to what lots of artists already do. AI as a tool, rather than as a replacement. We saw this with the shift from 2d to 3d in animation. This was accompanied by lack of unionization in the 3d workforce, yes, and was incentivized by it, but the convergence of these mediums, even really only fairly recently, has bolstered artists’ ability to make much smaller projects work on a larger scale than they previously would’ve been able to. If you really need evidence of this, you can kind of look at much earlier newgrounds stuff vs the later work. There’s less people using that site now, and the userbase has probably aged up substantially over time, but I do think it’s probably fair to say that the quality of the work has gone up (quality obviously being subjective). Basically, Blender is a pretty good software, it’s very cool and good.
SO, to the point, if this is the case, and artists are able to substantially cut down on their workload, while still producing similar or larger outputs, or better outputs, will this actually affect art, kind of, as an industry? Is there a pre-allocated volume of art that public consciousness will allow to exist? In which case, the amount of artists would go down. Or is it more the case that there is only a pre-allocated amount of capital that can be given to art? In which case, the number of artists might be the same, and we might just see larger volumes of art in general? I think historically the latter is the case, but that might have changed, or, more realistically, I think it would be dependent on external economic factors.
The issue is that most art is not made just for display. Concept art, corporate art, icons, stock art, and more is how artists make their bread and butter. You might not be able to sell an unedited AI image as a print (yet), but making, say, 100 icons for a mid budget mobile game goes from a small freelance job for an artist to no job at all. Same for someone who makes all that stock art you see on news articles or random blogs. The truth is, the vast majority of the art we look at every day isn’t meant to be critically scrutinized, but it still requires artists to make. AI art dramatically reduces the small but numerous jobs for artist, who already struggle to make a living.
The contentious part is that all of this AI was trained on decades of living artists’ work (and associated descriptions provided for accessibility) without their permission, and now it is actively, not theoretically, replacing their jobs. Now artists are hesitant to even post the art they want to make for fear that models will be trained to reproduce their style.
I mean, twofold questions here. Were artists really wanting those jobs in the first place, for one? I would think that, you know, along those lines, this is just kinda the long end of a process that has been taking place throughout the whole of the 20th century. Used to be that you would have to get someone to paint your billboard, paint your glass storefront, used to be that you would have to hire skilled draftsmen to draw up blueprints on huge boards, for basically every product. Now we’re at the point where you only hire an artist to draw something if you really want to get something that looks very original, for some reason, because otherwise you can probably just get it in a stock library, and make whatever you want with stock assets, even without AI. You might also still be looking to artists for product design, but that’s maybe going to be less and less the case as you get design processes that are driven more by committee, and consumer feedback.
So along those lines, the total number of art available to artists to do, would be dwindling all the time, basically because the total amount of art floating around in culture, or at least, the total amount of art monetizable by culture, has remained the same for much of the 20th century, and automation has simply made it easier to get rid of artists.
Second question, right, is… I dunno, I forgot it. damn. There’s probably also some theoretical point about capitalism and how this is just the mechanism through how it’s working at current, and not the fault of the technology specifically as much as the organization and forces of the market, but I feel like everyone’s already made that point mostly, and it wasn’t gonna be my second question. I dunno maybe if I cook long enough I’ll remember what it was gonna be.
I’d argue that those are still jobs lost to automation, that just weren’t mourned like jobs are today because they weren’t lost after decades of huge swatches of jobs being taken over by automation.
When billboard painters were replaced there were 1000 other places they could go. When today’s fiverr app artist loses their small niche income to AI, they’re losing what was already their last ditch artistic income. It’s the same issue, but the scale makes it hit WAY harder now.