Generative AI is here to stay, but so are artists

“Art is a fundamentally human pursuit and any suggestion these generators are replacing artists is not true. Let us think about impactful art in 2022: it is not pure mimicry of other artists; it is not odd images of Alex Jones in his basement; it is not posters of Soviet Afrofuturism. Impactful art is collectives such as Forensic Architecture – who act as an investigative taskforce, creating videos and aesthetic presentations of state violence and human rights violations, to correct official narratives.”

This was a very lengthy article which never seemed to approach this thesis till the very end.

To the people who are claiming this and clearly not on the chopping block let’s be clear - artists aren’t going away. We’ll probably always have artists even if AI totally surpasses us in the same way that we still have craftsmen despite machining automation.

But ~99% of professional artistic creation is not this high level abstraction. It’s not doing this.

It’s creating a drawing to become a tattoo. It’s drawing a decal to be put on a rave shirt. It’s nudging a web element till it “looks right”.

The vast majority of art, just like the vast majority of producing sneakers, will be automated where it can be and humans will fill in the new gaps created which will not be what we currently consider to be art.

I’m not an artist, but hearing tech folk reassuring artists that they have nothing to worry about is a very nauseating side product of getting shiny new AI.