As an artist, I think it is a net negative for us. Disregarding the copyright issue, I think it’s also consolidating power into large corporations, going to kill learning fundamental skills (rip next generation of artists), and turn the profession into a low skill minimum wage job. Artists that spent years learning and perfecting their skills will be worth nothing and I think it’s a pretty depressing future for us. Anways thoughts?
It sure makes self publishing a bit easier. You can just sit down and try to narrow down the terms necessary for the AI to generate a sick, eye catching cover for your books/pamphlets. It puts more control of the final product in the hands of creators for the time being.
As for commercial artists, this shit obviously sucks. There’s a lot to be said for how these tools are developed through mass exploitation of their art for the data used to train the AI, all without neither acknowledgement nor payment for their work. This is without a doubt a kind of mass exploitation. After all, can you imagine how much it would have cost these developers to pay the artists for the literally tens of thousands of images they feed to these AI? Much easier to quietly collect scans online for free and chuck them in the set. Whose going to ever know?
I see a lot of potential for AI in producing propaganda. You can quickly generate eye catching imagery, and even text with stuff like ChatGPT, then do a pass over it to clean things up.