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Comment by imaginationra | Hacker News Reader

Artist here: Article is an idealistic take not based in reality- the Jeff Koons of the world will be safe with their 30 million balloon art sales.

Everyone else is going to be rekt.

All of the work my artist friends do is for businesses- businesses trying to make the biggest profit. Ai art generators are faster/cheaper/more flexible. The artists are done and now it's all about the prompt engineers that don't need to be artists to excel.

Market will decide what to pay "artists" but seems like it will be a race to the bottom. Artist types I know are preparing accordingly.

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But you should realize that any artist learning prompt engineering should be a better AI-artist than a non-artist learning prompt engineering. After all, art is not jsut about technique but also creativity, composition, theme etc., right? And an artist can furthermore touch up the AI generated product manually if necessary.

Sounds like a job for us pot smoking slackers who studied art history to me.

What leads you to believe those problems won't be solved in the next few years? What stops me from having ChatGPT provide feedback on my prompts to make them more artistic? Maybe I just pay some artist to touch my stuff up for me if they're desperate for work or maybe the output gets good enough that I don't.

Id say these tasks (coming up with a good artiatic theme for a company) when considered in the full limit of their potential complexity are AGI

Yep. I spent a good hour trying to generate some stuff with DALLE. I then asked a friend that works in media and he was able to give me ideas for a prompt that worked almost immediately.

AI art is fun and _sometimes_ it can replace some things but at the end of the day, I don't really want to mess around prompting over and over. If I pay an artist $100 for something, I couldn't care less how they make it. I feel like AI can be another tool. I'll even make a bold prediction. In 10 years, we will still have "Graphic designers" and "digital artists" the ceiling will just be raised similar to how it was when photoshop became more commonplace.

sure. but you need 1 prompt engineer producing work equivalent to 100s of artists*artist_hours

not to mention, prompt engineering doesn't seem like a particularly technical job either

That is true. I mean, I'm sure this will negatively effect quite a few people... I just don't see it replacing the majority of artists anytime soon.

But that skill you're describing here is equally trainable and it probably will be in the near future, such that a specialized Artist AI will immediately guess what you're after, and if not, present you several iterations. That Artist AI, in turn, will become a subset of a Market AI which will have access to a lot of data about what makes people tick, testing and deploying market strategies accordingly. That Market AI, in turn, will be a subset of... you know where I'm going. All of this felt like Sci-Fi a while ago, but now you can almost taste it.

Nothing in the information space will be left untouched by the ML/AI revolution. I was a bit skeptical last years, but seeing this space evolve in the last 2-3 years left no question about it.

The only thing stopping this a Butlerian Jihad, probably. Actually, it probably can't be stopped.

Humanity as a whole seriously needs to start considering alternate incomes and ways to support people existing. We need to shift our perspective from the human individual as a value-producing asset to a right-to-exist-and-experiment-reality entity.

All of this is really awesome, but for me it's like admiring the exquisite beauty and calm of the blue sky in the center of a hurricane.

I'm still trying to adjust: am I too fatalistic or people are clearly ignoring of the tectonic shift that's happening?

Out of interest, how are they preparing accordingly? It's not remotely my own field but I'm starting to wonder how I should be guiding my children who have tallent for art, in light of all this.

Draw comics, or really manga in particular. The only real challenge in AI art, that won't be solved any time soon, is storytelling: chaining multiple panels together for coherent stories. Even ChatGPT cannot tell a coherent story longer than 2 paragraphs. Being able to write a long story well, requires understanding world modelling, human motivations , etc, AGI tier abilities.

Also, expose them to AI-art. If they lose interest in art after seeing AI art, that means they were never meant to be artists, they merely like to draw, not to make art. And drawing alone is not really economically useful anymore.

Presumably a skilled artist using SD can produce comics far faster than an artist on their own can? Or is it hard to get the model to draw consistent characters etc.

I was working on a comic two weeks after SD came out. There were lots of problems. I've watched all of them disappear. The only one remaining is wardrobe consistency.

Yes, far far faster, in full colour too. Traditionally, manga artists took photos and applied filters on them, to serve as the background for the manga panels. Its just that time consuming to draw things in detail, that they didn't bother. AI is like this, but 100x more radical productivity boost. It will be a huge boon for manga artists, who traditionally had to work regular 80 hour weeks, even with assistants. Their core skillset is storytelling, panelling, not drawing.

The 'consistent character' issue is already solved by LORAs, just draw 15 images of the character in different poses, feed it to the AI, and it outputs a 300MB model that you can add-on to your prompt to reliably reproduce any character.

There's no money in comics, it's like saying "be a rock star".

Most comic book artists are (in financial terms) absolute failures, regardless of talent.

Surely for art, the route to replicable success is graphic design, animation, computer game art, etc.? Something the dumb ML AIs you see today probably won't ever be able to replace, you'd need some sort of AI capable of creation to do it.

"There's no money in comics, it's like saying "be a rock star"."

There's no money in western comics.

Successful manga artists regularly earn millions. Simply put, western comics got left far behind in storytelling techniques, creative ideas, because it got stuck in superhero #12831.

Even in the US, the vast majority of top selling 'graphic novels' are mangas, not comics.

> Successful manga artists regularly earn millions

"Successful" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

Most Mangaka make less than minimum wage.

Don’t worry, soon AI will be a wonderful story teller for adults and children alike <smiling face with smiling eyes emoji>.

What on earth's name make you think comics are safe?

It's ChatPGT mixed with DALL-E no? I mean if you believe so strongly like everyone else that the job of the artist is done for, why would a comic artist be safe at all ?

> they merely like to draw, not to make art

My take is that computers don't make art at all, they are incapable of doing so. They can produce content at astonishing rates though. But content is not artwork.

You can maybe assemble content into artwork, but that's up to the person doing it. Are they an artist, doing work to elevate it into art? Or are they a fraud, who is just taking content the computer gives them and calling it art.

Some people call those frauds "prompters"

Anyways, if you enjoy drawing you are an artist. The mechanical process of creating is way more important to the artistic process than the end result.

Unless you only view art as a commercial output.

The harsh reality as far as I can tell is that the prospect of making a living as an artist, which was already slim if we are being honest, has now shrunk to near zero.

They should be learning about the AI field in order to create their art. That might be the only skill worth money when they are older.

AI is shifting the balance of power from technical ability and quality of tools to creativity/vision (and ability to market). The only "art" job left is going to be something akin to an art director.

Expose your children to a wide variety of art, books, music, food, travel and so forth. Teach them why (aesthetically) good things are good and bad things are bad. Also, encourage them to create stuff for an audience so they learn how to present things, gauge people's tastes and become comfortable with failure young.

Focusing on learning how to leverage these new tools to produce their own works faster/better/cheaper- focusing on their original ideas/designs/models- coming up with strategies to protect their source art from being used in other people stable diffusion models- learning about/utilizing nft tech to find new pathways to monetize their art-

In the end though its going to be all about original ideas imo- so creatives that don't have original IP really need to get on that and develop it- the new tools will allow anyone to create anything in realtime- people will be frozen by the prompt if they don't have original ideas/concepts/characters/worlds etc-

The temptation for those without original ideas will be to leverage chatGpt etc for "ideas" but humans are not required on that path-

So for your children- ignore the tools/technicalities and focus on ideas- original ideas-

And older artists said the same about computer art, things like :" this new artists do not know to mix paints or prepare a canvas". Artists can adapt and use this new tools and do their job faster, you might have to sell a logo cheaper but you might be able to make them 20 times faster.

There will just be people who are employed to wield these tools, select, curate and combine these images into whoever commissioned the work.

I don't know who all these tools are really aimed at? As a software engineer, I'd still prefer to pay someone to mess with any type of "art" or design while I focus on other things.

I mean even if I had an AI program that I could use to code, to do SRE, to do images, to do accounting etc, I still think someone would need to be in charge or making these things happen, or else I'd just be busy prompting machines all day, which sounds mad fatiguing and boring.

I think the real question is what does "making these things happen" realistically pay, pennies on the hour to sit in front of a screen and maybe elevate that to the 1/10,000 person who has to come hit a few keys to get the station running again?

How much do you actually pay an artist now? I've payed for graphical artists before, it wasn't all that expensive and I could've probably done it myself, they could've just been stealing someones work already, but it was just easier to pay someone to be "responsible" for it. Which is often what I'm paying for.

On the other hand, where was the backstop previously? Companies could have saved money on art by hiring unpaid college interns or teams from where the median wage is less than a few hundred dollars a month. Evidently there was some reason to favor hiring actual artists versus the cheapest possible person who can draw. Maybe that reason hasn’t died out yet.

LOL https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/18/arts/jeff-koons-sculpture...

My point is that unique digital art won't be replaced even by a hypothetical perfect AI image generator.

When it comes to the digital art workforce - it is likely to be strongly affected.

> Others might fall into a gap of “nice skills, but not yet that offer a business advantage”. Furthermore, the lower entry barrier to create any art is likely to result in the average quality going down - not unlike that plastic made manufacturing cheaper, but also less durable.

And you are right that, sadly, in many kinds of digital art, it will be a race to the bottom.

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