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Comment by helsinkiandrew | Hacker News Reader

> AI generated music will replace elevator music at best

And AI generated art will replace a lot of 'decorative art', perhaps not art that hangs in galleries and provokes thought but that people buy because it looks nice on their wall, or as a screen saver, or t-shirt. If that means that there's less demand for humans producing this kind of artwork - there will be less people making it and fewer good training images.

In "high art" there's always been artists like Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst who direct other artists and technicians in the production of their artwork, or even apprentices painting large parts of a master renaissance painters work. With AI generated Art I can't help seeing a future where the brand becomes more important than the art - images created from the description/thoughts of Lady Gaga/Kanye West

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I think it might go further than that, a whole lot of the commission and entry level illustration work is pitched as "draw this scene in a style similar to x" or "draw my character doing x thing in y style". AI has the potential to completely gut this area (and I suspect that the number of artists employed doing this type of work is substantially higher than the few pushing in novel directions).

This changes the design and availability of the software tools, the willingness for educational institutions to engage in these topics, and may even reduce the idea of a professional artist back to high art only (and we only need like 50 artists a year thanks).

I think it's necessary to consider that we as programmers are paid mostly for what counts as 'commissions' or 'elevator music'. Building another REST endpoint or wiring together a CI/CD pipeline hardly counts as advancing the state of the art, but that's what mostly pays the bills.

And on the contrary, let's say you managed to push the state of the art, like you developed a more efficient fast fourier transform, now, how would you go about charging money for that?

Im not really sure what your point is; If there were a similar tool for software dev im sure it would gut the industry in the same way. The thing about these AI art tools is they emulate the normal commission process for a client; You describe what you want with example pictures and a short statement and you get roughly what you wanted. I dont think there is an equivalent for SW work yet, everything I have seen is aimed at accelerating an expert.

The thing about computers/computing is that being better at a task usually gives someone a commercial advantage; finding them and exchanging money for the implementation seems fairly straightforward...

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