Anyone who thinks that their job is safe from robots or AI is deluding themselves. A lot of people used to claim that the creative classes were safe from automation, but these “text to image” AI’s put that to the test. Is the art “good?” I dunno. But I do know that the vast bulk of commercial artwork, stuff used to advertise books or cars or beer or vacations or sammich shops, while adequate to get the job done, is hardly high art. I expect that soon the majority of this sort of art will be done by this sort of AI.This will be bad news for humans of all kinds even if the AI art is “meh.” Why? because artists gotta get paid, and churning out commercial art can do that… and now that entire cash stream may be gone. How do you go from an unknown artist to someone making bank with their paintings if there is no intervening step from “amateur” to “professional”?
My own science fiction stories? One thing that has held me back from trying to self publish is the lack of cover art. It may be that very soon I’ll simply be able to describe what I want and Google will spit out art that gets the job done. And of course, around about that time I’ll be able to feed my related stories into Google and tell it to crank out more, and suddenly I’ll go from a few thousand pages of stories about Zane and Sarah to a few billion. Hell, feed it all three seasons of “Star Trek,” and soon enough I’ll have a thousand seasons of the adventures of Kirk and Spock to pore through. Even if only one percent of one percent of that stuff is “good,” the sheer volume of the “good” AI-art will overwhelm the total productive output of mankind. The AI art will only get better, whereas humans have plateaued.
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