Are artists and illustrators going the way of the horse and buggy?
Right now though the software for local generation is horrible. It's a mish-mash of open source stuff with varying compatibility loaded with casually excessive use of vernacular and acronyms. To say nothing of the awkwardness of it mostly being done in python scripts.
But once it gets inevitably cleaned up, I expect people in the future are going to take being able to generate unlimited, near instantaneous images, locally, for free, for granted.
I haven't seen the latest from adobe over the last three months, but last I saw the firefly engine was still focused on "magically" creating complete elements.
So far Adobe AI tools are pretty useless, according to many professional illustrators. With Firefly you can use other (non-Adobe) image generators. The output is usually barely usable at this point in time.
That aside, humans are necessary for making up new forms and styles. There was no cubism before Picasso and Braque, or pointillism before Seurat and Signac. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone argue that if you trained a diffusion model on only the art that Osamu Tezuka was exposed to before he turned 24 it would output Astro Boy.
There is no better recent example than AI comedy made by a professional comedian [0]
Of course, this makes sense once you think about it for a second. Even AGI, without a BCI, could not read your mind to understand what you want. Of course, the people who have been communicating these ideas with other humans up to this point, are the best at doing that.
[0] old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1oqnwvt/ai_comedy_made_by_a_professional_comedian/
To clarify, the “comedy” part of this “AI comedy” was written entirely by a human with no assistance from a language model.
> For anyone interested in my process. I wrote every joke myself, then use Sora 2 to animate them.
Apologies if I wrote my original comment poorly, but that was I was trying to communicate.
Not only was this person able to write good comedy, but they knew what tools were available and how to use them.
I previously wrote:
> "AI won't replace you, but someone who knows how to use AI will replace you." ...
The missing part is "But a person who was excellent at their pre-AI job, will replace ten of the people down the chain."
The possible analog that just popped into my head is the nearly always missed part of the quote "the customer is always right" ... "in matters of taste."
I think comedy is a great example of how this is not the general case.
In this instance, the video you posted was the result when a comic used a tool to make a non-living thing say their jokes.
That’s not new, that’s a prop. It’s ventriloquism. People have been doing that gag since the first crude marionette was whittled.
The existence of prop comics isn’t an indicator that that’s the pinnacle of comedy (or even particularly good). If Mitch Hedburg had Jeff Dunham’s puppets it probably would’ve been… fine, but if Jeff Dunham woke up tomorrow with Hedburg’s ability to write and deliver jokes his life and career would be dramatically changed forever.
Better dummies will benefit some ventriloquists but there’s no reason to think that this is the moment that the dummies get so good that everyone will stop watching humans and start watching ventriloquists (which is what would have to happen for one e-ventriloquist putting 10 comedians out of a job to be a regular thing)
I will be right back after I think of a reply while in the shower, many months in the future.
Same will happen to music, artists etc. They won't vanish. But only a few per city will be left
I could see that changing in a few years.
Photography didn’t make artists obsolete.
For that matter, the car didn’t make horse riding completely obsolete either.
For artists, the question is whether generative AI is like photography or the car. My guess, at this stage, is photography.
For what it’s worth I think the proponents of generative AI are grossly overestimating the utility and economic value of meh-OK images that approximate the thing you’ve asked for.
Maybe just the advent of the microwave oven is the analogy.
Either way, I am out. I have spent many days fiddling with AI image generation but, looking back on what I thought was 'wow' at the time, I now think everything AI art is practically useless. I only managed one image I was happy with and most of that was GIMP, not AI.
This study has confirmed my suspicions, hence I am out.
Going back to the fast food analogy, for the one restaurant that actually cooks actual food from actual ingredients, if everyone else is selling junk food then the competition has been decimated. However, the customers have been decimated too. This isn't too bad as those customers clearly never appreciated proper food in the first place, so why waste effort on them? It is a pearls and swine type of thing.
And some day the news will announce that the last human actor has died.