“AI generated art will devour sustainability of being an illustrator” | Hacker News Reader

“AI generated art will devour sustainability of being an illustrator”

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As somebody who did oversee illustration, mostly for advertising. No, no way. You should see how often these illustrations go back and forth, with little fixes here and there. Ai can't do that (yet)?

I can see it becoming big for Stock footage and layout purposes.

It may even curb demand for illustrations, because now some Manager / Art Director made a layout with an Ai. And they need it like that, but with friendlier character / more headspace / bigger eyes / the Logo incorporated / different color etc etc.

Also illustrators will want to use it, to get a first couple of layouts to the client.

Professionals will also quickly notice that all the AI illustrations from a particular GAN all look alike. This is true even of the samples we've seen already.

A bunch of copycat images that can't be tweaked or edited will never replace creative people.

On the contrary it’s the industry standard. Why waste human time on Alegria when you can train a GAN to be more artistic than anybody who made their way through CalArts?

GANs can only be trained to reproduce their input. So if you need a GAN to make endless characters in the style of a single video game, that would be a great use case. But if you need to come up with the idea of the style for your video game, you'll need a human.

Twitter seems like the worst medium for just about any message worth reading. What happened to people having websites for long-form content ?

So, I read the first tweet, and the headline, and I've had the same thought looking at the amazing pictures that cutting-edge image generation networks can compose, things that are not only way better than what I myself (not a digital artist by trade) can produce, but also with content and composition that fit the description it was given, better than I think I could have done.

The same is probably going to be true for many fields, and this is probably fine, if we can make the shift to future where the machines do the work and the humans do the enjoyable parts of living.. UBI and more is going to be needed, probably restructuring beyond what most people can even handle mentally. I know there are people so defined by their for-profit work (and even the profit in its own right) that they could probably never be made to understand a different kind of world.

> I don't understand this perspective - idk about you, but, to me, art is not just a means to an end

As a producer of art, I find the process of creation is the end goal in itself, it is why I do and enjoy it, I don't care about the end product very much, that's how it is with recreational activities.

As a consumer of art, I couldn't care less about anything _BUT_ the end product..

Regarding that twitter PITA, I totally agree. This service seems to help (first time I use it): https://nitter.net/FreyaHolmer/status/1532261886078631940

Regarding art/illustration: I'd expect the market for cheap filler illustrations to shrink. For expensive, HQ illustrations that require effort and time, an illustrator will still be the better option.

OTOH illustrators might also profit, since they can use AI to do their work quicker - which is especially valuable for cheap illustrations. With AI you still need an artistic vision, then write a good prompt to get close to that, you need to know how tune the knobs and sliders (I expect future AI-based generators to allow altering a "close but not good enough" image) and finally, in case you want to further improve an AI generated illustration, you're probably going to need an illustrator anyway.

To some extent. To fill a space with some derivative work is probably up for AI soon. But it will be a very long time before AI can connect with the viewer at an emotional level by creating just the right illustration.

I wonder what artists said about the invention of the camera…

Excellent point. They thought painters and illustrators would go out of business. But that has not been the case. Far more people work in painting and illustration now than when the camera was invented.

If anything, the dreary reproductions afforded by the camera are what led to Impressionism and a new regard for the human eye and hand as creative tools.

Time to up your game from Alegria to actual artistry, but yes this will kill the CalAets grad dead. And good riddance! They ruined animation and illustration.

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