From orchestras to video games, AI is going to change the way that art is done (and it already has), but the artists are not going away.
Art won’t go away, just a lot of the ways artists support themselves.
Product visual mockups also aren't art. The product design itself is art, but I sort of suspect that a human designer will be the one driving the AI to make the visual.
To put it in more immediate terms: the goal of business is profit. Cutting costs is a great way to do that immediately. It’s only over a longer span that things like Boeing reveal the issues. The goal of artists and the art industry is to create art that moves other people, at acceptable costs. Cutting costs with AI is a great way to do that immediately…
You see where I’m going. Sure maybe we’ll have figured out an entirely new economic paradigm by the time this bill comes due. But I wouldn’t count on it.
And hey, maybe you think art isn’t a career path worth any sort of consideration on this front, and that society will keep humming along just fine when AI takes over in that regard. I sure hope so, because that seems like the obvious conclusion of all current incentive structures.
An awful lot of the economy is made up of companies much smaller than $100M. If I walk down the street, I see all sorts of small shops & restaurants. Cars and trucks go by with logos advertising local plumbing services, nursing home care and catering. Yesterday I took a tour of a brass foundry which forges brass sculptures that hang on the walls of churches. How big is the company? Its one guy. One guy and a small warehouse of equipment.
I think a lot of incidental work is already increasingly being handed over to AIs. Business cards. Images for the wall of a cafeteria. The logo for a bakery. Whatever. Photoshop is full of AI assistant tools. So is Divinci Resolve now.
AI is slowly nibbling away at creative work from every angle it can find, to reduce cost and automate. I think we should expect this process to continue for quite some time.
Much of that pool is doing live performance art, like dancers and musicians, and when Napster and Spotify came to "destroy" the musician by giving everyone infinite reach, what actually happened was that more people succeeded as professionals.
The photograph was also a tremendously good thing for visual artists, bringing in the impressionist era and opening up a whole new field of art in itself.
As to the concept of changing the nature of the work of the "artist" - I can't think of an artist whose work wasn't changed by the technology of the time. From Prussian blue to the electric guitar, artists are usually made great by showing the new possibilities of the new technology of the age.
AI is very good at giving you an average-quality output. Art, by its very nature, is almost always a superlative expression of something.