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.
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.
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.
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 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" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
Most Mangaka make less than minimum wage.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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-