I don't know. As Wait But Why likes to say, cars sure did put horses out of business, pretty much thoroughly and permanently.
Similarly, perhaps artists will wish to participate in the economy by making art, but they're going to find scanty employment when compared with machines which can operate 100x faster than they can, and arguably at a higher quality of output.
The human beings previously called artists will still be around as humans and will still have jobs, even if it’s some other job.
“Artist” is a vague term though, and I think we’d still have a lot of them due to Jevons’ paradox, the same way ATM machines have actually caused the number of bank tellers to increase. Especially because it’s high-status for society to say they support artists, which isn’t the case for other service workers like bank tellers.
There is a niche for horse rides, though - they’re romantic and I’ve seen them as tourist gimmicks in different cities. Artists have a bigger niche, as AI art (so far) produces digital images and not, say, physical sculpture or paintings.
This whole debate reminds me of the early aughts, when digital music was said to kill all music. I predict a similar development here too.
Human graphic artists will adapt and the next generation will incorporate AI generated images into their tool kit.
And some of them are already doing that. In Peter Mohrbacher's latest newsletter he shared a digital painting which was started by Disco Diffusion which he then touched up to give it his characteristic look. Given the details and feel of the painting were unmistakably his, I wouldn't have guessed that the base of the image was AI-generated.
When sampled digital audio first appeared in music, it went from experimental to pop hook(e.g. Paul Hardcastle "Nineteen") and then to the subject of court cases that clarified IP law for samples over the span of maybe 20 years. In the middle of that period one can find scare pieces about pit orchestras being replaced by synthesizers and so forth.
The articles tend to be correct in that the same jobs don't exist when they get automated, but you get new jobs instead. And so the panic, where it exists, is tied to whether you specifically are on the chopping block. For digital illustrators who are focused on a high degree of finish and polish, AI art threatens because it's so good at replication of a high-effort stylistic mode of production. Cartoonists are much less impressed since they are already in a streamlined, symbolic mode, so the net savings of AI is harder to come by. With a few years of traditional training, most of it just focused on the core "you can draw what you see" skill, you have what you need to build up a library of reusable visual language for your work: an arm seen from various angles is still an arm, you can add more anatomy to it or stylize it, but it has a symbolic function tied to particular shapes. And an AI can bring out more detail from the symbol, just as when an artist follows a reference more closely and renders it more carefully, but it isn't creating novel representation. That's still coming from the illustrator operating symbolically.
And when you lean into that, it's like, OK: presumably the AI will be able to do some style transfer and turn a crude cartoon into a fancy painting. That levels the playing field a lot but it doesn't change the nature of what makes an illustration good: having a sense of composition, storytelling and so forth. A lot of cultural context things are in there that will evade automation.
- Potentially superior quality to algorithmically destroyed dynamics, but this is truly on a per-case scenario.
- Exclusive content not on streaming platforms, either intentionally, or because labels or artists are dead and gone, or the IP is in limbo.
- Directly supporting artists because streaming platforms pay a pittance.
- Elitism/snobbery. Whether professionally, within a fanbase, as an influencer, in an audiophile community, whichever.
- The community/culture. People love to belong, never underestimate the importance of that.
- USP.
- Distribution to actual brick-and-mortar stores where you'll get in front of tastemakers and influencers.
- DJ culture is huge, particularly vinyl-only nights where they want to show their skills without hitting the sync button.
- It makes a great gift and people like to put them on display as adults in place of posters.
- People take comfort in disconnecting and doing a physical ritual, just like tea ceremonies in Japan.
- Listening bars are important in Japan. To anybody reading, if you're ever in the position to do so, I implore you to check one out.
- One of the few ways to own some music in the long-term.
I could go on for another 100+ points before reaching "digital abundance".
Anecdotal. It doesn't matter if you yourself would never buy a vinyl, what matters is that a lot of other people are. Likewise, it doesn't matter if you would never buy a supercar/helicopter/Breitling/Rolex/swimming pool/jetski/yacht/vegan food/meat/gluten-free/keto-friendly/whatever, because others are.
I never said "all".
> Anecdotal
Yes, I know. Just like your comment. But you listed reasons for people to buy vinyls, when many were simply "reasons for people not to use streaming services". That was my point.
So here's the misunderstanding. The job of an artist is not to paint, or take photos, that's just the medium. Just like a software engineers job isn't to write code.
The artist's job is to elicit emotion. The means by which they do that, whether it's painting, photoshop, or running 10,000 prompts through DALLE till they find the thing they're looking for is irrelevant.
StableDiffusion is a 10GB model made from 100TB of images, so there probably isn't even room to have memorized inputs - there's also some built-in defenses against that.
It's possible to make an AI that does explicitly make collages out of inputs (that goes under "fine tuning") and such a thing would be useful. OpenAI has a similar paper about a text AI that cites its sources called WebGPT.