This will supercharge artists, it won’t replace them because details matter and when you need to get it just right, you cannot just keep rolling the dice by “prompting better”
I think it will decrease iteration time during an exploration phase for new artists or when you're not quite sure what you want and want to explore your idea space more quickly (and maybe even get new ideas as you iterate).
It's similar with these coding AIs. A lot of the time it's great for the "blank page" phase of a project where you have to do all the "boring" stuff out of the way. Another great example (I think it was a blog post here) where the AI recommended a method the author didn't know about that yielded a crazy performance boost.
I tried to get some help from copilot on writing a shader the other day, and it was really an amazing experience. One still needs to have a pretty deep understanding of what needs to be done to use these tools.
I imagine it's similar for writers. Maybe they want some help to reword a sentence to be more succinct, but the ideas will still come from their heads.
I can't predict if this will one day be so sophisticated that you can have it do both low level and high level "thinking" when exploring ideas, but if that day comes I don't think it will mean an end to jobs, just that some jobs will become more accessible, or that it won't be so much about nitty-gritty work and more about higher level idea-level work (which to me sound good, not bad).
Obviously there's people who enjoy the nitty gritty (as a developer, and amateur painter who does enjoythe process), and I don't think that will fully go away, just become more of a creative/artisan field maybe. Who knows, though? I may be way off, but I don't think it's as bleak as some people fear.
For instance, I'd like to make a game. But I don't have enough money to even hire an artist to help with concept art. So I don't get to the point where I can raise money off that art, and hire an artist to make game assets.
Now I can generate all the concept art I want for free, and I can raise money off of that (wallets open faster with pretty pictures than with words). What am I going to do with it? Hire artists! They will probably be better at using AI art generators than I am, and they have the skills to actually work with the generated results, unlike me.
For someone like me, I can do a lot, but not everything. I've managed to get my own project to a stage where I had felt I would have to bring on more people to advance it much further. But I had lacked the funds to do so, and it's hard to get people to do things for free when they don't believe in it. It's also hard to get people to believe in something without seeing it. My project was very likely.
So that's where tools like stable diffusion and chatgpt come in. I'm now suddenly unstuck; I have a cheap tool to do work I wasn't capable of before, so I can now take the project further than I could have otherwise. Whereas before I might have abandoned it, now I can take it further and maybe get it to the point where I can hire people. The question now is: how many projects are now going to take off? Is there funding out there for them? Can they hire more artists than are displaced?
I guess a better way to rephrase that: would it make them more profitable to produce more art? Or to keep producing the same amount but paying fewer people to do so?
Honestly, I'm an artist myself. I'm competent enough to be reposted and plagiarized (to my amusement) in places, and I have influenced people with my designs or style, even unwillingly. I mean, I can say anything on the internets, but I've been through all of the "artist's phases of grief" and nobody can take that from me.
Let's humor this thought for the sake of discussion: What if, maybe, just maybe, the artists that get replaced by an stable diffusion instance...deserve to be replaced?
People keeps talking business and not enough people is talking about ART. Something which is baffling to me as an artist. A lot of artists have a lot of technical skill obtained through grinding (and learning from others) but have zero passion to improve further or have any real distinctive traits to stand out. It's double baffling coming from places such as Hacker News, where a majority, being tech workers, know that you need to keep improving and recycling yourself to stay relevant to employers. We know that pressure very well. You think art is not a competitive field? Every day 10 people can just pop out of nowhere to compete in your niche and take your audience away, with a much lower barrier of entry. That other person just needs their art to look good, no need for qualifications. Some people are just gifted, too.
If your art stagnates and all you do is sexy ladies for overblown prices, then, yes, you failed to keep up and someone else will replace you. If it was not the AI, it would have been another human being, as always.
Besides, corporate entities usually use custom photographs with photogenic actors, carefully staged for maximum engagement, or generic, parametric, inclusive-yet-bland art in the lines of Alegria. The whole notion of megacorps purposely stealing from indie artists (when their models are usually curated, or going to have to be curated for maximum advertiser friendliness, and a lot of indies draw cheesecake because it's what people commissions...) paints a pretty tale of David vs Goliath, but it's completely absurd in practice. And the risk of some random dude "stealing" your style has existed always.
The AI can have pretty dark uses in the wrong hands, but a lot of the situations described say more about the lack of passion or excess of ego of the one crying foul, than actual reality. And, take it from an artist, we do have an issue with inflated egos. All of this sounds to me like a huge case of "Do not steal", when making it into any huge training set in any significant capacity should be a badge of honor to wear. If even The Algorithm© recognizes the value of your art then you are already pretty well established anyway. I really can't wrap my head around the strange perspective of other artists.
People should really put all those strong emotions onto the canvas instead of internet kerfuffles, is what I'm saying.
Also there are people who really don't care about quality. There have always been different tiers of art: it's one thing to have clip art for a throwaway blog post (royalty free stock), it's another thing to base a marketing campaign around images (rights managed stock) because you don't to have all your competitors choose the same image.
https://cxl.com/blog/stock-photography-vs-real-photos-cant-u...
The bottom feeders will be very happy to accept the problems of A.I. art and in fact you might not have the embarrassing dogpiling problem that the above blog post describes.
Although in this case, it’s an adobe product, the only people who will use it are artists.