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Comment by antigirl | Hacker News Reader

interesting you say writers and artists would survive over programmers when AI has practically threatened all writers and artists livelihood as of recent.

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I hear people say this, but I haven't seen any concrete examples of AI generated art actually threatening the entire art industry. Sure, AI can generate me a nice pic to use for my blog post, but are game studios ready to fire all of their concept artists?

Well, the _entire stock image industry_ has surely been disrupted. If you relied on stock imagery last year as your primary source of income, you may be out of work come next year.

https://www.shutterstock.com/press/20435

Press F to doubt.

20 years? Maaaaybe.

Next year? No way.

Maybe when SD can do high res and soft focus.

> but I haven't seen any concrete examples of AI generated art actually threatening the entire art industry

Because you have not waited long enough. AI generated pictures were just born yesterday.

I disagree. By definition, AI can generate average-ish work, but not new, disrupting, expressive work. It would have never come up with cubism, magic realism, or any innovation that makes art, art. They will improve at requiring less training data, less energy, come up with more likely possible works, polish out edges, sure. AI can imitate, period. It is not small feat. It is a fantastic achievement that can be used for good.

By definition, AI can generate average-ish work, but not new, disrupting, expressive work.

The vast majority of people working full time as 'artists' are paid to quickly produce "average-ish" work to spec and on time. Nobody (to a first approximation) hires artists to produce capital A Art.

If you want to get semantic about it, we could say the illustator and graphic design jobs (often done by artists) will be lost rather artist jobs.

It'll just become even more of a bimodal distribution of income than at the moment. There will be hundreds of thousands of people writing for free in communities, with whatever anti-AI policing they need to make that work for them, and a few dozen celebrities who make a living from writing.

Right? I don't think, however, that any competent writer or artist feel threatened by AI outputs at all. The threat comes for others abusing AI to misuse their name and steal their work. That is a legitimate concern.

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