I used to think that the generative AI impact would be pretty low because these images always have some artifacts that I find pretty jarring, and that require fairly high artistic skills to fix.
However that was completely wrong: most people don't care!
Neither people producing the content, nor the people consuming it.
The second point, "only spammy garbage content" will be happy with AI generated content, is already proved wrong given the quantity of high profile blogs that rely on it. They don't have the budget for the maybe 5% improvement you can get by paying an artist, and 0 of the risks common with artists (difficult to work with, missing deadlines, etc etc).
In a way it doesn't even make sense: the artist is also is also a generative blackbox. It's better in understanding precise prompts, but exactly as in software engineering the problem is often that the spec is wrong, the commissioner cannot get exactly the image they dream of because they cannot imagine it without having pretty high artistic skills. Or a number of iterations are needed, making the process quite long and costly.
There are other reasons why artists won't be entirely replaced, especially the highest paid, but a good chunk of their potential income sources have already been wiped out, and the proportion will only increase.
My takeaway from generative art as a former illustrator and now data scientist is never has it been more obvious why artistic skill and taste are necessary for making images, while at the same time never have those things been more irrelevant because of the audience for the work.
> However that was completely wrong: most people don't care! Neither people producing the content, nor the people consuming it.
For the people making and consuming on Reddit maybe. I think that people who want this to replace graphic design work will want more attention to detail.
> I used to think that the generative AI impact would be pretty low because these images always have some artifacts that I find pretty jarring, and that require fairly high artistic skills to fix. However that was completely wrong: most people don't care! Neither people producing the content, nor the people consuming it.
Sometimes I feel professional people are so good at their crafts that they're disconnected from general audiences. It's kinda like a programmer trying to convice a data scientist that Python is not that good of a programming language, while the data scientist is perfectly fine with it.
The second point, "only spammy garbage content" will be happy with AI generated content, is already proved wrong given the quantity of high profile blogs that rely on it. They don't have the budget for the maybe 5% improvement you can get by paying an artist, and 0 of the risks common with artists (difficult to work with, missing deadlines, etc etc).
In a way it doesn't even make sense: the artist is also is also a generative blackbox. It's better in understanding precise prompts, but exactly as in software engineering the problem is often that the spec is wrong, the commissioner cannot get exactly the image they dream of because they cannot imagine it without having pretty high artistic skills. Or a number of iterations are needed, making the process quite long and costly.
There are other reasons why artists won't be entirely replaced, especially the highest paid, but a good chunk of their potential income sources have already been wiped out, and the proportion will only increase.