Not sure about ChatGPT, but Midjourney et al have definitely transformed many markets already. Why would I get any illustrations from fiverr.com, when I can get better turnaround times for $0 from Midjourney?
Look at the homepage for a popular site like Stripe, Figma, Digital Ocean, whatever, take your pick. Try to get Midjourney to generate high-quality art like you see on those homepages, in a format where it is ready to go directly into a site without further processing in an image tool. My experience was that I could have gotten better results at Fiver.
I can see Midjourney already replacing the low end. The question is how good can it get, and then as the bar is raised what can be done to differentiate. Answer to the latter ironically may be going back to old school human interfaces.
There is a grain of truth to this, but again just choose whatever lower-budget website you want. And then just try the exercise I suggested.
Midjourney isn't producing work at a "bad Fiverr" quality level, it's not producing usable work at all yet (at least without a lot of hands-on prompt tuning, at which point why not just use Fiverr?). At least with Fiverr, I am likely to end up with something I can put on the site, which is not true of Midjourney yet.
Decent in this context doesn't mean something I could just hand to an editor. But it does mean a pretty good starting point that I could amend, flesh out, add some links, add a quote or two. I could certainly see using it to give me a sort of pre-draft on some fairly evergreen topic.
I could also use it to generate some boilerplate definitions or historical background to include in an article.
But, sadly, I think you'll see the LLMs being used to generate a lot of blog/article content with a minimum of human effort for even less than the small amount being paid for a lot of this today.
I never would have done any of this stuff before, and there was a LOT of super low quality art in the space (D&D character art), so low quality I never paid for it as it just didn’t tickle my fancy.
Now I can get stuff that looks like a Frank Frazetta painting, which I can’t get at any price since old Frankie died in 2010.
- you had to spend your time iterating on the prompts, redrawing, etc.
- you had to do post-processing yourself
- you had to pay for a GPU
In all -- not a good substitute for e.g. Fiverr for typical work-related artwork.
But, hiring someone with decent drawing ability for simple tasks is pretty cheap and they can produce something to your exact specifications (and/or show some creativity). A co-worker did a book cover for me recently that wasn't technically complex but was far better than anything I would have designed on my own or an AI would have come up with. Also a lot of Creative Commons and public domain content out there too.
Furthermore, no company is going to (or at least should) make official use of generative AI work until any potential legal issues get worked out. The open source IP lawyers I know think it's probably OK but no one is really sure.
Also, in some ways that’s like asking “why should I shop local when I can buy from Walmart and get the exact same product?“ Well obviously if it’s all down to simple dollar costs, you do you. But there are several motivations/considerations for choosing why we shop where we shop.
I'm suspicious the makers of the art generator AI systems know exactly what they're doing and see no issues with it.
Either way, I’m more just curious what other people have to say on the matter as I am not as knowledgeable of subject. I am on the creator side and it’s all bad news over here.
RMS wrote 'the right to read' because issues like this, and if you've not read it, I recommend you do. "A bunch of little bits of different things" isn't stealing, it's society and culture. If you got your wish of everything I create if fully copyrighted, you'd find two things. One, that you're last in line and don't come up with original ideas often, even in original artwork. And two, that monied corporations would quickly buy up rights to everything and make life as an artist completely impossible.
I don't have great insight into copyright issues, but as one who loves music and used to play a lot of it, I'm right there with you on the "it's all bad news over here".
It seems to me that the current crop of art generators ape styles but don't come up with their own.
I worry that if they put most human artists out of work, the arts will stagnate badly.
I guess we'll see.
Right there with you. And it's hard to even decide what qualifies as "adapt or die" you know? Do I just use AI-assisted tools? Do I "just" pivot my career and go somewhere else?
Also note some new research: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.13188
However to get to a point where you _can_ recreate copyrighted works implies copyright infringement in the dataset. Thats not really been tackled.
Also, there is the GDPR angle here as well, collecting people's faces on the internet for something other than the person reasonably intended is also on grey legal ground I would argue.