AI Is Coming For Commercial Art Jobs. Can It Be Stopped?

A piece generated by an artificial intelligence text-to-image application won a prize in a state fair art competition, shining a light on the issue of technology encroaching into the domain of human creativity. As fascinating as those questions are, the rise of image tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, which quickly generate detailed and beautiful images based on text descriptions supplied by the user, pose a much more practical and immediate concern.

What impact would this have on the creative economy? Think about the end of a movie. 95 percent of those names are people who work in the creation of visual imagery. Commercial artists hone their skills for years in order to get plum jobs like concept artist and character designer.

These jobs, along with more traditional tasks like illustration, photography and design, are how most visual artists are paid. The issue has international ramifications. Some of the more production oriented art jobs are now offshored to low wage markets where they are helping to jumpstart creative industries in places like South Africa and Bangladesh.

Soon, all that work will be done by non- artists using powerful artificial intelligence-based tools that can generate hundreds of images in a matter of minutes. These tools are changing quickly.

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This isn't a problem for a future that is far off. Midjourney and others have been in limited deployment for a long time, with imagery posted all over the internet. In August, an open-source project, Stable Diffusion from stability.ai, publicly released its model set under a creative commons license, giving anyone with a web browser or mid-grade PC the tools to create stunning, sometimes disconcerting images to their specifications.

The progress is exponential according to a veteran art director and artist for gaming and entertainment clients. It will allow more people who have solid ideas and clear thoughts to visualize things which were difficult to achieve without years of art training. Rendering skills may no longer be the most important in defining art.

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The artists are taking notice. A commercial illustrator in the gaming industry is known for his evocative fantasy art paintings for projects like HAS -2.8% Magic: The Gathering and D&D. Hundreds of thousands of images have been created sampling his distinctive style after his name was found hundreds of thousands of times in image prompt searches.

"I'm very worried about it." Digital artists are focused on being recognized on the internet. When you type in my name, you will see more work from the artificial intelligence than I have done myself, which is frightening for me. How long will my results be indistinguishable from my work?

Juan said that human intervention is still needed to achieve desired outcomes from new technology. New inventions won't replace the current industry immediately. It is a new medium and it will change the industry in a way we might not have expected. The impact is going to be very large.

The founder of Midjourney spoke about that point in an exclusive interview. The platform is being used by professional users. The most difficult part of a commercial art project is when the stakeholder doesn't know what they want and have to see some ideas to react to. Iterating on concepts is very time consuming, so Midjourney can help people get to the idea they want quicker.

Sean Michael Robinson is an artist who is publishing a comic book called The Abolition of Man using imagery created using prompt on the Midjourney platform.

Robinson said that the type of work he does is already gone because of this. Comic books still need a lot of human intervention, but that is likely to change because the artificial intelligence has a hard time keeping images consistent.

The creative workforce is going to disappear. All that stuff is gone. When the creative director realises that they don't need to pay people to produce that kind of work, it will be like what happened to darkroom technicians when Adobe came along.

The impact on the rising generation is something that Grubaugh is very sad about. He doesn't know what to say to students.

One of the earliest users of digital techniques in the 90s was renowned fine artist/illustrator Dave McKean. When you can just type in a few words and get what you want, why would anyone pay to have an artist design a book cover or album jacket? The marketing department will want to see 50 comps of everything now that they can have unlimited comps. Financial imperative of that is inescapable.

The platforms will benefit artists, companies and society according to Holz. Some people are going to try to cut artists out. I don't think they will succeed in the market because they will try to make something similar at a lower cost. He thinks the market will go towards more creativity.

People in the industry who will benefit from automation say the issues need legal clarification. Juan said, "On the business side, we need some clarity around copyright before using artificial intelligence." The current copyright law is not up to date.

This is a gray area because the data sets used to train Midjourney and other image models are deliberately anonymizing the sources of the work, and the process for authenticating images and artists is complex. He said that it would be cool if the images had some kind of information about the owner.

Government action may be necessary to protect the interests of artists according to a European artist. I understand how these programs use artwork and images to build their models, but there should be some protection for living artists. It's more than that. It should be monitored by law. It should be something we decide.

The founder of Defined.ai is a data scientist who sits on the White House Task Force for Artificial Intelligence. She was alarmed by what she heard and said she hadn't considered the ethical issues around this particular application of artificial intelligence.

The artificial intelligence is being trained on his work without his consent. She said she needed to bring it to the White House. There are copyright implications if these models have been trained on the styles of living artists There are guidelines for that. A legislative solution is required.

It is not possible to untrain or create a program where artists can opt out if their work is part of the data set, so regulation may be the only answer. She said that the only way to do it was to eradicate the whole model.

It will be difficult to put the toothpaste back in the tube because the source code for at least one of the platforms is already out in the open. The threat of a simple tool deskilling and demonetizing the entire profession of commercial art and illustration won't be solved if the narrow issue of compensation is addressed.

Holz doesn't think that's the case. He wants to expand the imagination of the human species and make it possible for more people to visualize ideas from their imagination through art. He said that he sees Midjourney as a platform for consumers.

The company behind the Dall-E product, Openai, also positions itself as working to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. To make state of the art machine learning accessible for people from all over the world is what Stability.ai is trying to accomplish. No comment was made by Stabilityai.

I get worried when I hear about democratization access and transparency. Big companies help themselves to our data and use it for their benefit.

The systems automate repetitive tasks that humans don't like, like answering the same customer questions over and over again, or checking millions of bags at security checkpoint, which is why the systems are in favor of artificial intelligence. Robinson said that artificial intelligence is coming for the fun jobs, where people work and study their whole lives to get and potentially incur six figures worth of student debt. It is doing it before anyone is aware of it.

There is an opportunity for the creators to make money through licensing. Political support is needed. Is there an industrial group, an association, some group of artists that can create a proposal and submit it, because this needs to be addressed, perhaps state by state if necessary?

There is no doubt that artificial intelligence will have a positive impact in the number crunching areas of our lives, but the more it takes over from the jobs that we do and find meaning in, the less impact it will have. I think it's important that we keep that meaning. There needs to be a fight back.