this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024
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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.
Yeah, you're probably right. I still see plenty of artists that are able to scrape by on a combination of comissions and furry porn, but I think the bigger problem generally is just that, as wealth inequality grows and cost of living gets worse and worse, which doesn't seem to be like it's gonna be something that gets better globally because of climate change, I don't think the consumer market is going to be able to step up and substitute some of this billboard work for "actual" artistic work, or, more free artistic work. I think otherwise, that might've been the case, more.
The efficiency gains, what would otherwise let people save more money to spend on things like artists, are all being sucked up by rich dudes, and not your average joe. Sucks omega hard.