At least for art - I don't think you'll find anyone who actually enjoys art hanging up anything produced by AI on their walls. For these kinds of "customers", they could equally easily frame & hang up a poster of the Mona Lisa. Artists are not at threat, if anything, AI makes original artworks more precious & enjoyable.
My worry is that, at least among the artists I know, many kept themselves afloat early career by doing commercial freelance jobs like illustrations for local events or companies. Those kinds of jobs might largely vanish.
On the other hand, with the internet inevitably becoming swamped by AI generated content, I can definitely see a de-digitalization of art moving into offline spaces. At least for independent work, you don’t necessarily need mass appeal or exposure, but rather access to individuals and small groups with an actual willingness to pay for art.
That's not art though, and while it might have paid a small amount of money, it can also be incredibly degrading and soul crushing. That's the kind of work that AI tools are doing now. Those jobs should vanish. People shouldn't need to degrade themselves for money, we can have a system where people are generally taken care of, and the people who build extra cool shit can live even better.
> That's not art though
Why not? Would you also argue that most of the works by painters like Rembrandt, such as The Night Watch aren't art - just because they were contracted to make it? Does book cover art stop being art the second a book's title gets placed on it?
And sure, plenty of corporate work is boring and soulless. But the worst of that switched to spending 10 minutes with clipart and PowerPoint decades ago: if you were still hiring an artist, you cared at least a little about what the result looked like, which means there was at least some space for artistic vision.
> People shouldn't need to degrade themselves for money, we can have a system where people are generally taken care of
We should, but we don't. What's your proposal for letting artists grow and mature while paying their bills in the meantime? AI is currently killing their "degrading" jobs, do you think forcing them to take a shift at McDonald's is going to help their artistic career advance?
I suppose with those same artists, at least for the smarter members of the group, might start using AI for basic commercial freelance jobs and just act as the human review, perhaps doing some final adjustments to the finished artwork.
So instead of being paid a small amount of money for something that they spend hours on, they create 10 artworks in that same number of hours and earn 10x what they did previously.
> Those kinds of jobs might largely vanish.
have already largely vanished
That's assuming that the only market is stuff people are hanging up. The games industry, one that already takes advantage of its workers, is going to love this to the detriment of really passionate artists who love their craft and industry.
All complicated commercial art (movies, series, games, music, designed spaces...) has its budget as a key constraint of what is built. You don't get a new season of an anime that looks 4 times better because of a random genius: Someone evaluates the money it will make, and somehow decides that increasing the animation budget will be worthwhile. It was the same when it was animated by hand, with huge cameras and cels, than in modern digital-first animation, and whether it's using plain hand-ish drawn 2d, or using 3d models for some shots. The art is tied to the budget, and maybe the next season the budget is 2/3rds of what it was before, and the technical quality drops (see One Punch Man, Blue Lock and such)
So when an artist looks at AI, it's unlikely to be as a tool that will build a whole piece: Insufficient control, and currently nowhere near good enough to do more than occupy space, like a little painting in a hallway or in a hotel room. But it is something that can be used to better spend the budget in places where it'll be more impactful for the quality of the piece. Not unlike how CGI is often used today in places where it wouldn't have been 20 years ago, and it's aiming to be invisible. Not because the shot was impossible, but because it's cheaper.
Treating AI in art as a moral thing will end up being like the people being against synthesizers in the 80s: It's a viable creative choice for some things, but ultimately not a good expectation for industry direction. Ultimately the vast majority of art is commercial, and we'll see shortcuts being taken for budgetary reasons. Nobody is manually animating every detail of every mesh in a game like this was Toy Story. And even though doing that would produce more work for artists, it wouldn't make better games, really. And we'd sure have far fewer of them.
Lots of illustrator jobs for businesses too
genAI is going to be great for indie games. Solo productions are much easier to produce and will only get easier as tooling improves. I sort of see this as a spotify moment I guess. A democratizing force that will allow many more people to get paid for their art but with much less job security and often as a second job. Whether that's a good thing is certainly up for debate but I think as a consumer it's probably good for me.
Gamers don’t like AI.[1][2] I actually think indie studios that don’t use AI will do better than ones that do.
1: https://www.ign.com/articles/larian-ceo-responds-to-divinity...
2: https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/clair-obscur-expedition-33-ai...
Gamers don't like lazy slop. I've played quite a few games that utilized AI tooling to build them, and had a lot of fun.
I think the context makes it clear this is about llms and generative ai, not everything that includes a NN
Both your articles are from big companies. I think what gamers dont like is big game companies replacing jobs. Solo creators and small teams using AI can create stuff that would never exist otherwise. I also think the whole anti ai thing is a fad though so maybe Im projecting. Im also not convinced that articles like this represent majority opinion.
well, GenAI is an ultimate prototyping machine. I keep repeating that so often that autocomplete on my phone already learned it. look at Clair Obscur - this game did use GenAI internally for textures and forgot to clean up in ONE place. they were sorry for that and thanked the community for pointing out. naturally, Twitter and Bluesky went equally mad at Sandfall just for the mere fact of usage, but that didn't disqualify them from The Game Awards, as you can tell from how many awards they got.
Expedition 33 nailed music, aesthetics, and narrative, and I am glad that they took a diffusion model for what it is, not for what marketing wants you to believe. although the game itself would benefit from one or two months dedicated exclusively to optimization, it is THE reference of how generative technology can be used - purely internally, to ideate and iterate at the pace of your taste and a bunch of H200s. we are aware of that process detail purely because they slipped in one place and got briefly "owned" by Twitter.
I think this is only true in a vague and abstract way. In reality, AI devalues labor (in general) and the worth of artists (in specific).
Good art requires good patronage and institutional support in turn. No one will have time to produce the next Mona Lisa if they're barely able to make end's meet working a slavish factory job. That's doubly true when the vocations that supported artists—either antiquated, modern, or contemporary (painter, typesetter, graphic designer, etc.)—vanish because AI can do "just about as well."
Art isn't just a divine presence gracing the souls of those deemed most worthy, it's a collection of skills and knowledge that must be built by community over decades of struggle.
On top of the generation of slop, AI is removing some of the final protections that hold these pillars up. That is what should keep us up at night.
> Artists are not at threat, if anything, AI makes original artworks more precious & enjoyable.
Sure, but how are you going to find it?
I've got a print of some digital work by Simon Stålenhag on my wall. I discovered his work because I was was mesmerized by an image of his on some wallpaper sharing website, ages ago.
These days that kind of website is 99% AI slop. AI has made it impossible to stumble across art: either you consume what the big corporations are feeding the masses, or you have to already be part of a strongly-curated niche art community.