No, this is not a Black Mirror episode.
A typical point that I severely miss from most discussions about AI is what it means for future artists or, in this case, future actors. And therefore what it means for us as a society.
By taking the art from the artists, regardless of whether it’s an actor, illustrator, author, etc…, the way it is done currently, we will see much fewer people who will even try to learn these skills, or share them. At some point there won’t be anything new anymore.
Yeah I’ve had a similar discussion with people before about how this will impact fresh talent in my industry (design/illustration).
The thing AI is gonna clobber first is the entry level work. The lower level clients that just want the thing cheap and aren’t the greatest to work with and generally don’t value creatives as much as they should.
These people suck to work for but that kinda work is precisely the the sort of stuff you need to do early on to learn some really valuable lessons. You learn patience, being diplomatic yet assertive, learning how to identify red flags, and also just getting the hours in designing/illustrating that it takes to become truly good at the job. And you need some kind of income even if it’s not great at that phase of things.
If I hadn’t had those kinds of jobs on and off for the first X number of years I wouldn’t be where I am today. School really can’t teach you all of that in practical terms either. So where does that leave beginners? It looks to me like the only kinds of people who could afford to get into my line of work in the future are people with rich parents or something. Or just people who are content to be the AI button pushers for clients who don’t care to learn to press the buttons themselves (but that will get stupid easy as time goes on). And those button pusher jobs are not going to pay as much and there’ll be plenty of people out there pushing those buttons too.
I fear that it’s gonna just be real damn challenging to become an actually good designer or illustrator with any kind of decent career in the future. And probably within 10 years the AI will be coming for the higher level jobs too so I have no idea where that will leave me.
Maybe I’m overlooking something, but isn’t the actual change that doing these things will no longer be a viable way to earn a living?
On the long term yes it presumably is a threat to entire professions. On the short-mid term I think it will decimate the entry level tier of a lot of those professions first because it’s easier work to replace.
but isn’t the artistic field already a lottery when it comes to making a living doing it? Maybe I have the wrong impression, but I feel like if “I very likely won’t be able to make a living doing this” actually discouraged new art from getting created, it already would be doing that.
Art and Illustration are two related but different things when we’re talking about jobs. Commercial illustration is actually a pretty viable field to break into for people who have some artistic/design talent. I’ve been desinging for years but got into professional illustration around 5 years ago and have since done illustration work for Intel, YouTube, Penguin Books, High Times Magazine, Sierra Nevada Brewing, etc.
This is stuff like illustrating the cute characters websites/apps put into onboarding screens, the illustrations you see on food and beer packaging, the illustrations you see in editorial pieces (web articles, newspapers, magazines, blogs), the art you see on book covers and in books, the art you see on posters and fliers, the art on album covers, apparel, etc, etc, etc.
If you’re also a designer like I am you get to be a one stop shop for a company like a brewery that wants a cool new illustrated beer label (I’m working on such a job right now). You can then get the whole job of doing both the design work and the artwork for inclusion in the design work. That can be quite profitable.
Fine art on the other hand is indeed a shitty line of work and incredibly hard to be successful in for most. It’s like trying to make it as an actor or something.
That’s fair; the person I first responded to seemed to be discussing the “fine art” part.
How worried are you personally about these more advanced machine learning tools? Just a month or so ago I was playing a Pathfinder (rpg) video game and didn’t care or any of the built-in avatar images, so I hopped onto one of the websites that make an image based on a text prompt to make me an image that matched my character and it took a few times to get the right wording but in the end I got a pretty good image out of it. I vaguely know how it works. (vaguely is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence) and it still seemed kind of like magic.
Yeah I am fairly concerned.
Like I said earlier I think it will be the entry level shitty jobs that get gobbled first. Like drawing avatars for people is typically both low paying and the clients (no offense) tend to be less professional to deal with for that kinda work.
So those jobs? Yeah they’re going first and for me that’s fine but for new people cutting their teeth in this field that really sucks. How will people just getting into this line of work learn essential job skills like client management or get experience doing actual work for people?
On the long term I think my job is in jeopardy too and I’m still wrapping my head around what that means for me. It’s a rapidly moving target. It also involves my grappling with both ethical and creative dilemmas. These AI models are trained on other people’s work without their permission so my using them to stay afloat is problematic. And I got into this line of work because I actually like doing this work, learning how to improve at it, the process involved, etc. So farming out the process I enjoy so much to AI is not really what I got into this stuff for and at that point why am I doing it?
It’s a complicated situation and I’m not optimistic that society right now is well poised to respond to it in the most equitable sets of ways.
the clients (no offense) tend to be less professional
I don’t know what you mean by this precisely, but the “pretty good” end result I mentioned had a hand that melted into the sword-- so if you meant “low standard” then yeah, guilty as charged, haha. However, more interesting to me is that I would have never in 1000 years have paid someone to do that for me-- I just would have been low-level annoyed that my character and the avatar looked different the entire game.
I find the “they didn’t have permission to train from” argument is complete bunk. That’s not a right granted by intellectual property laws; there is no “right to control who learns from a work”.
What needs to happen is society (especially US society) needs to stop linking “working” and “enjoying a comfortable life”. Technology is coming for all our jobs, and the sooner we accept that and prepare for it, the better we’ll be when it happens.
Only if you’re looking at the very top of the profession, like people who hit it big as stars. There are a lot of other levels of employment and success short of Banksy or Beeple level.
My hope is that deep-faking tech might actually help lower levels of the profession, even if it’s at the expense of those at the top who get huge amounts of money because of how famous their face is.
Imho, Studios don’t even need to copy a famous actor’s face… just create a face of a person who doesn’t exist and make it into a new famous character by stamping it into a good (even if not top famous) actor.
