For instance, I'd like to make a game. But I don't have enough money to even hire an artist to help with concept art. So I don't get to the point where I can raise money off that art, and hire an artist to make game assets.
Now I can generate all the concept art I want for free, and I can raise money off of that (wallets open faster with pretty pictures than with words). What am I going to do with it? Hire artists! They will probably be better at using AI art generators than I am, and they have the skills to actually work with the generated results, unlike me.
Except now you’re competing for the attention and disposable income of everybody else doing that. How are consumers going to tell your stuff apart from all the other AI placeholder games that will flood the market?
I guess what I'm trying to say is that in the course of developing anything, one goes through various stages of development. Depending on the expertise of the individual, they will be able to take a project further before bringing on more people. If an idea is well-trodden, then it's easy to get people on board without much convincing. If an idea is brand new and far out there, it will take a lot of work to convince people before they get on board.
For someone like me, I can do a lot, but not everything. I've managed to get my own project to a stage where I had felt I would have to bring on more people to advance it much further. But I had lacked the funds to do so, and it's hard to get people to do things for free when they don't believe in it. It's also hard to get people to believe in something without seeing it. My project was very likely.
So that's where tools like stable diffusion and chatgpt come in. I'm now suddenly unstuck; I have a cheap tool to do work I wasn't capable of before, so I can now take the project further than I could have otherwise. Whereas before I might have abandoned it, now I can take it further and maybe get it to the point where I can hire people. The question now is: how many projects are now going to take off? Is there funding out there for them? Can they hire more artists than are displaced?
That artists will be able to do more not necessarily mean that fewer of them will ne needed. I bet the opposite actually. Companies will want to produce more (with more resources) not the same (with less resources).
I guess a better way to rephrase that: would it make them more profitable to produce more art? Or to keep producing the same amount but paying fewer people to do so?
When something becomes much cheaper than it was before, people tend to find much more uses for it. In game development, for example, amount of money that could be spent on art almost always amount and quality of content; if art becomes 10 times cheaper, a typical indie game will have 2 times more different pieces of content with 5 times variants of each.
But now the situation is bit different, coz there's a limit to the number of pieces before it looks awkward and that limit can be reached by AI generated contents quite easily and quickly thus not needing to have more man power.
On social media and elsewhere, companies need more and more varied content on a daily basis. Many are effectively now producing something akin to a magazine or a TV show to stay present in feeds or minds.
This is completely ignoring the thousands, maybe millions, of non-notorious artists that do their art, in whatever form, because it's fun, because it allows them to express themselves or as a creative outlet or as a mere hobby to unwind after a hard day of work.
Honestly, I'm an artist myself. I'm competent enough to be reposted and plagiarized (to my amusement) in places, and I have influenced people with my designs or style, even unwillingly. I mean, I can say anything on the internets, but I've been through all of the "artist's phases of grief" and nobody can take that from me.
Let's humor this thought for the sake of discussion: What if, maybe, just maybe, the artists that get replaced by an stable diffusion instance...deserve to be replaced?
People keeps talking business and not enough people is talking about ART. Something which is baffling to me as an artist. A lot of artists have a lot of technical skill obtained through grinding (and learning from others) but have zero passion to improve further or have any real distinctive traits to stand out.
It's double baffling coming from places such as Hacker News, where a majority, being tech workers, know that you need to keep improving and recycling yourself to stay relevant to employers. We know that pressure very well. You think art is not a competitive field? Every day 10 people can just pop out of nowhere to compete in your niche and take your audience away, with a much lower barrier of entry. That other person just needs their art to look good, no need for qualifications. Some people are just gifted, too.
If your art stagnates and all you do is sexy ladies for overblown prices, then, yes, you failed to keep up and someone else will replace you. If it was not the AI, it would have been another human being, as always.
Besides, corporate entities usually use custom photographs with photogenic actors, carefully staged for maximum engagement, or generic, parametric, inclusive-yet-bland art in the lines of Alegria.
The whole notion of megacorps purposely stealing from indie artists (when their models are usually curated, or going to have to be curated for maximum advertiser friendliness, and a lot of indies draw cheesecake because it's what people commissions...) paints a pretty tale of David vs Goliath, but it's completely absurd in practice. And the risk of some random dude "stealing" your style has existed always.
