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Comment by yojo | Hacker News Reader

There is a distinction between “fine” art, and what I’ll call “working” art people with artistic ability produce for money. Think graphic designers/illustrators/etc

Fine art is going to be okay. Authenticity has always been a big thing there. New social critique is going to be something AI trained on last year’s data will struggle with. Ditto for pushing boundaries or establishing new styles.

Working art though… it does look doomed. Who’s going to pay an illustrator for something DALL-E does for pennies? You may still need someone with good taste to pick the images, but as the author points out, that’s not the same as being the artist.

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Yeah I am not sure how this will play out for professional illustration...

You can trace a constantly evolving visual style in web design back to a root cause: "The need to look modern and legitimate."

It's hard to remember, but there was once a time where good stock photography was a way to look modern and legitimate. That birthed a thousand cheap stock photo sites and eroded the effect.

So we moved on to a constantly evolving style of illustration. Skeuomorphism, corporate memphis, gradient meshes, clay. Websites use these to signal modernity and legitimacy, but the very use of it erodes the effect and they have to move on.

If we can write an ALT tag and get a professional-looking illustration in any style, that will erode the effect, and we will have to find new ways of looking modern and legitimate.

Maybe that will involve professional illustrators, or maybe it will move somewhere else, just like when it shifted from photogs to illustrators.

If I had to guess, I'd say the trends will still be set by big design agencies and artists who get paid handsome sums to work on a big company's rebranding project.

The difference will be that many of the smaller illustration gigs, which essentially boil down to "copy the style of this big company" will cease to exist. Those types of gigs don't require a whole lot of creativity or skill, because the client simply wants a knock-off of what someone else came up with, but for cheap. AI-generated "art" will allow those clients to bypass the human and just get what they want directly from a computer.

In a sense, it's going to be similar to what professional photography has gone through in the past few decades with cameras becoming more and more commonplace and affordable. Some people still want a professional portrait taken of them, but the majority of people are perfectly happy with what a mobile phone camera can produce.

I saw a similar argument recently, subtly different in that it was claiming the root cause was needing to look like you spent real money as a way to signal your legitimacy. I think they called it peacocking, and it’s the same idea that “virtue signalling” had before that term got used for “politics I don’t like”.

Spending money to prove you have money to spend made me think it would be a perfect fit for NFTs. (Not any NFT in particular, just so long as it’s needlessly expensive in any strictly objective sense).

Well we already know how to do style transfer. But yeah, it'll be interesting if DALL-E is considered passé in 10 years.

It depends on the level of quality, polish, precision or originality that you want. It’s pretty likely that some people will be much more talented and skillful with this new class of AI-art tools than others. People will figure out how to do much more with these (evolving) tools, by exploring and interacting with them, and build up a body of knowledge which they can teach to others. I imagine that there will be classes in how to make better AI-art, which could have wide appeal since the technology makes content creation much more approachable for casual users.

> Fine art is going to be okay.

I'd argue that fine art has been the opposite of "okay" for the last hundred years..

I think it will give rise to new art and design trends that are harder to imitate.

Working artist not finished yet... But it doesn't look great

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