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Gari_305 OP t1_it7e47w wrote

From the Article

>It’s still too early to tell whether this new wave of apps will end up costing artists and illustrators their jobs. What seems clear, though, is that these tools are already being put to use in creative industries.
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>Recently, I spoke to five creative-class professionals about how they’re using A.I.-generated art in their jobs.

Which leads to an interesting question, will AI be utilized as a tool for artists or be used as a catalyst to displace the creative class?

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FluxedEdge t1_it7rucz wrote

I think just like any medium, there will be people who claim to be "artists" using AI to generate mediocre "art", think of all the people who call themselves photographers who really don't have the skill/knowledge required to produce professional photos.

Same with AI, there will be those who master it and use it as another tool in their toolkit. Creatives will still be necessary and while AI in its current form is great for inspiration and mocking up quick renderings, good artists will always outshine the mediocre "artists" who are just using the tool without knowing all the fundamentals.

I don't think we artists can be so easily replaced, I hope.

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Rodney890 t1_it7nnjc wrote

I'm a design student and have been thinking about it a lot. The thing I keep coming back to is this. For the foreseeable future someone has to direct it. If it could literally do everything on its own far more than just designers would have to worry about thier jobs. So, you fire your design team. So who's gonna direct it? The secretary? I think with every new innovation that let's us make more stuff our endless apatite for content also increases. So, will it costs current designers and illustrators thier jobs? There's a very real chance. But its almost guaranteed whole new fields will be created. Sorta like how a shit load of the traditional effects industry lost their jobs after Jurassic Park. But now there's more effects jobs than ever (and practical effects is still a large industry.)

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Eralsol t1_it81vdp wrote

Normally I don't consider myself an expert, but I'm fairly certain you will face the same us translators did a couple years ago and still do:

Designer Jobs won't disappear, but they will indeed be reduced. You still need someone to direct it, but the number of raw employees can be reduced due to ai.

For example, a 6000 words urgent job needed 4 people, 3 translators each taking 2000 and a proofreader checking all 6.

Now you just need the proofreader doing postediting.

I'm sure designers will become posteditors as well. Taking raw designs from AI as a base.

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IniNew t1_it8c1ox wrote

I don’t think translations and design are quite comparable.

Design work, at least in UX-UI is not “do this task” - execute - hand over. There’s still a ton if subjectivity.

It might replace things like templates did for web design - some smaller companies will opt for this instead of paying someone to do it, but anything higher than a landing page is still going to be looking for designers.

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Eralsol t1_it8dqze wrote

Saying translation is only "do task, execute, hand over" is as silly as if I said "well, design is only "open PS, paint some lines, color them, hand over".

As if translation didn't have jokes, inuendos, paraphrasing, etc.

My comment is just a cautionary tale, that it is unwise to think AI will not be able to have more creative aspects to it (we are seeing it right now already).

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Rodney890 t1_it83r1v wrote

For sure things will get wierd. But i also think a lot of new fields will be created. I've been trying to research it. What it comes down to is, automation is wierd and you can never really tell with new tech. I've been trying to be as objective as possible and not be on copium since I'm in school for it. Did you ever have these talks with other translators as the tech emerged and how has it impacted you're career?

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Eralsol t1_it85dwa wrote

Indeed, have talked about this with my translator students, after stopping being on copium myself.

How has it impacted my career? In my case, for the better, but that's because I managed to climb the corporate ladder high enough fortunately, but I'm sure it's not so great for those who didn't. We'll still need translators, but not as much as we did even 5 years ago.

The only tip I can give you is the same I gave my students: competition will be even more fierce than it was before; polish that resume, polish your skills, keep learning, and embrace the technology instead of denying it, because you'll compete against people that will do all of that and more.

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Rodney890 t1_it87bnh wrote

Yeah, more or less what I've been told. It's really changed up how I'm thinking about the stuff I'm making for my portfolio. It's kinda cool ngl.

Thanks for the advice 😁

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nox_nox t1_it8it1d wrote

This is already being done with simple design software that uses lots of prefab pieces for people to click and drag to make their designs.

AI software may exacerbate this trend, but at the same time everything starts to look the same when using those tools. I suspect the same will be true to some level for AI design and art.

Unique design work will still probably be best served by a quality designer. Whether they use those tools or not will be their choice. But implementation and art direction are something AI will take a long while to catch up with. Just like self driving cars can do some things really well but fail at other aspects.

I'm a graphic designer and have been professionally for the last 16 years. Just the capabilities in non-ai based design software have made leaps and bounds of progression from when I started. The benefit in those improvements have cut my working time for specific tasks. I think future AI will mostly cut work times more and allow people with fewer resources greater access to more professional looking design.

But tools don't make good design, I've seen lots of garbage from people with access to the same tools as myself.

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starstruckmon t1_it7wyxo wrote

>So who's gonna direct it? The secretary?

The marketing team? Instead of communicating with a designer they'd communicate with an AI.

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Rodney890 t1_it803a6 wrote

I'm not so sure. Marketers aren't designers and a huge part of a designer's job is to explain to marketing people why something should be a certain way. Plus, I'm not sure a marketing team wants to deal with it. A large reason businesses owners hire photographers and designers is because they don't wanna deal with it themselves, even though anyone can use canva and most people have a servicable camera in their pocket. Plus, designers are responsible for making sure huge campaigns are consistent and it's all documented so everything is always consistent. Something AI aren't doing (yet)

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starstruckmon t1_it816bi wrote

If we're talking about directly using the current text to image generators, thats true. But that's not what I'm talking about.

The real fun starts when you start connecting them to language models

https://twitter.com/jaukia/status/1567914039061217287

This is an example with GPT3. But will get better in the coming years ( year? ) with even more powerful LLMs, especially the multimodal ones that can directly inagine visuals instead of just text that is passed to the text-to-image renderer ( the rendering model might still be used for the final composition but it helps to have the designer model be able to think in actual visual terms ).

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Rodney890 t1_it82noo wrote

And at that point way more then designers will be at risk. Another interesting point is that we can already automate a shit load of white collar jobs.

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iiJokerzace t1_it97b7g wrote

I think what is going to happen is not completely remove jobs, but dramatically reduce number of positions needed.

Still, I don't think human creativity will be dead. In fact, I think it will get better as we see what AI can inspire us with.

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neoplastic_pleonasm t1_it9ahx5 wrote

If you take a look at the various AI art subs, you'll find that the most impressive works by far tend to be by people who were already artists.

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Telkk2 t1_it9nipd wrote

Bingo. I'm in a startup that designs AI writing and production tools and an indie filmmaker. I reached the same exact conclusions, which has been guiding us to create user-controlled AI generative media. The future isn't just outsourcing. Its giving everyone what only rich people can afford...contractors and assistants.

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Fredissimo666 t1_it7xciu wrote

Both I think. First, I think AI-generated art will be mostly used in non purely artistic contexts such as poster and ad design. There will always remain a market for human-made art.

For instance, my SO works at a small NGO and often need art for their newsletter. They have been thinking of using AI generated art instead of their previous method (looking for free images on google). Other companies may use AI images instead of hiring artists.

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But there is an upside for graphical designer and the likes. AI-generated images could make them WAY more productive! Maybe they can get a rough estimate of what they want and then do some manual corrections. Or maybe they get really good at giving the AI the right prompt. Since they are more productive, their rates will drop, so more people will be able to afford graphical design. Imagine having a designer do custom christmas cards for you, or a banner for some event! So in the end, it may be the case that nobody loses their job!

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elementofpee t1_it7ytlj wrote

What implications does this have regarding copyright and trademark protection? This seem like a really grey area.

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starstruckmon t1_it822f5 wrote

I won't go into the actual legalities since that is still untested in the US. But practically, what difference does it make? If it's good enough, how is the copyright/trademark office or judge going to know it's AI generated?

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ImACredibleSource t1_it8oqr8 wrote

Same way musicians get sued for using a specific melody. If it's sampled and not properly attributed, this can cause huge problems. Especially for big companies with lots of money to be taken in a lawsuit

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starstruckmon t1_it8pc3j wrote

It doesn't work like that. So no, aren't going to find "samples". If you were to use an AI tool to see if it was simmilar to some other work, problem is putting human made works through that would also result in matches.

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ImACredibleSource t1_it8q8lq wrote

Evrything that is generated is based on work made by real artists.

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starstruckmon t1_it8riv3 wrote

It learns from images and artwork ( like humans also do ). There aren't going to be any "samples", not any more than you'll find in the work of other humans ( which was my point ).

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ImACredibleSource t1_it8rx6x wrote

Artists actually have to be very careful about making derivative work without attribution. There's been loads of cases about it. Even the guy who duct taped the banana to the wall is getting sued because he took the idea from someone else.

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Surferstan101 t1_it9mk8b wrote

It is a gray area for sure Corridor Crew touched on it recently by creating art the was inspired by a certain artist and it begs the question: Are you stealing someone’s intellectual property?

Though I’m sure very few people will care.

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starstruckmon t1_it9pb5a wrote

No, style isn't copyrightable.

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Surferstan101 t1_it9w4vg wrote

It’s not a human taking inspiration, it’s an ai directly using another artists work so who knows maybe they’ll adjust the legislation on it.

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Fredissimo666 t1_itc7px2 wrote

It's still to be determined but I think the user should have copyright. After all, Photoshop already has automatic tools and nobody claims that the user loses copyright for using such tools.

In a finished AI image generator software, I expect there to be interractive functions. After you generate the first image, you can ask the AI to do stuff like "make the head funnier", or "keep the characters, but change the background". Then, the creative part very much involves the user as well as the AI.

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hgs25 t1_it8oy2j wrote

I can see AI art be used for story boarding scenes in animation.

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Roach802 t1_it93yv7 wrote

Boards will probably one of the last areas to use A.I. Putting together sequences is a complicated task that requires a lot of collaboration. Most professional artists avoid it because of how labor intensive and intricate it is. A.I. will be adopted for concept and design stages a lot more quickly (I would guess).

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Fredissimo666 t1_itc7wfz wrote

Yes, or other applications where the final art does not matter much. If you are designing a poster for a small conference, you just need something that looks good enough, not necessarily the best.

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celestiaequestria t1_it8nvr3 wrote

It will reduce the number of artists who can make a good living on their own skills, because it empowers the top talent (and firms) in the field to produce more work. A skilled artist who can tell the AI what they want, and then modify it as a painter / sculptor - could work with a handful of other artists to churn out tremendous volumes of work.

There are a ton of artists who make a living doing a good job drawing things most people don't want to draw - everything from boring stuff like commercial illustrations and technical drawings for training manuals - to furry porn. That's the kind of work AI can do far more cheaply - and that means illustrators for books and magazines, website drawings, personal art requests, billboard artists, et cetera - become more scarce.

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dissidentpen t1_itge2d2 wrote

Similar to how AI has been slowly replacing human writers for online content creation.

Boring or not, it’s putting people out of work.

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JeddakofThark t1_it8clrz wrote

As a 3D artist off and on for the last twenty-five years I've seen a hell of a lot of changes.

My main takeaway over that time is that new tools don't take away jobs. They just create more specialties.

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AadamAtomic t1_it855jf wrote

>Which leads to an interesting question, will AI be utilized as a tool for artists or be used as a catalyst to displace the creative class?

AI is simply a tool just like a paintbrush, any child can use it but it takes a long time to master and develop a unique style.

When the First Photography cameras were invented, Painters and Portrate makers where Furrious.

"This will bring an end to painting! No one will sit by the river and paint anymore if they can just take a photograph!"

Now, Here we are 200 years later and painting hasn't gone anywhere...

A.I is just a new medium of art. It will coexist and be mixed and matched just like all other art forms.

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ThatOtherOneReddit t1_it8f1tk wrote

Currently that's the only practical way to use it. It's very bad at doing specific things (as in narrowly defined stuff). It's MUCH better at giving.what you want if you can draw at least a clear but mediocre version of the final draft. All of them are incredibly awful at consistency so they aren't good for things like multiple angles of the same character or animation. Any attempt at that is a fever dream at best which is cool, but not really what you want in the vast majority of media.

Until these issues are solved it's mainly going to be a concept tool imo. I know a few professional and semi- professional artists who sketch a few things then generate like 20-30 different versions to help them concept out or send something back to the client so they can get clarification on what they want.

I used AI art recently as references for a commission I made. I think this will largely do what most tools have done. Raise the minimum bar of acceptable work this driving the quality up but the work amount will be the same overall, at least for the next few years.

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layzclassic t1_it806kw wrote

The use of canva speeds up content creation for marketing, basically short garbage views on Instagram. But can't replace photoshop pros completely. Likewise, Photoshop can't replace painters, but we lost animated films like Ghibli

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starstruckmon t1_it86nch wrote

>But can't replace photoshop pros completely.

True, not completely but most of them, yes. Currently there's literally one paper coming out per day on text based editing.

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TheRoadsMustRoll t1_it87h0t wrote

i see something in this (and also ai music) that nobody sees -i always get the thousand mile stare when i mention it.

imo the "artistry" in these works isn't just the end result (the painting or musical composition.) It's in the programming. ai isn't an objective source. i could program my "Bach" or "Van Gogh" machine and it would behave differently than my colleague's machine because we each have our own strategy for getting from a to b.

so we could critique the programmer based on how well the result matches the original master if they are producing new "Van Gogh" material. this would be no different than judging wine by how closely the taste matches the grape.

or, if somebody is producing original material (not based on a historical precedence), then we could judge the programmer on how original or compelling the end work is.

none of this usurps traditional art. instead of working in oils or watercolors these artists work in code; its just a different medium.

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MisterViperfish t1_it96eo6 wrote

I’ve been planning to use AI generated stuff to get original ideas across to real artists. I think there’s a sweet spot in which AI art makes for great reference material but only to communicate to someone who can put it all together if you want anything specific. But it’s only a matter of time before that changes too.

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blahblahrasputan t1_it8ke75 wrote

Anecdotal but we're messing around with it at our VFX (mid sized) studio. The artists are excited. It's just another tool.

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