There's a lot of dread and panic among the artists online regarding AI art.

Here's the deal: If you're working in a marketing department and you need an artist to sketch up some ideas and then design a graphic for your energy drink, you can hire a graphic designer or you can just play around with stable-diffusion or DALL-E, vectorize it yourself in adobe, then present a mock up product for your boss. Your boss might look at it and spit in your face and fire you because "it doesn't have any soul!" or they'll look at it and shake your head and say "this is why I hired you!"

Which is more likely?

To the graphic designers I have to say: Figure out how to sell a service that a machine doesn't do.

Or you could always just work at a car wash, or a factory. You could do hotel cleaning.

Okay, you don't like menial unskilled labor? Oh, but that's the unfortunate reality of the vast majority of artists.

They put all their skill points in drawing, didn't bother with anything else, and so they live hand to mouth doing art as a hobby, and then bus tables in a restaurant. Or they stack boxes in a warehouse. If they are lucky they get a decent-paying unskilled job as a receptionist or car sales. And they draw cartoons in their spare time.

If you're thinking of going to art school, please don't. It's a scam. You'll be paying tens of thousands of dollars in debt while flipping burgers.

Learn a trade, or go to school for something technical. Become an engineer, or electrician, or technician, or brick layer.

At least until those jobs are replaced by robots

at which point we will be living in a post-scarcity world and you wont have to worry about the cost of living because of the deflationary effect of automation.

"BUT NIHILOPHANT, WE HAVE MORE AUTOMATION NOW THAN EVER BUT THE COST OF EVERYTHING GOES UP"

Yeah, that's mostly due to the printing of money far FAR outpacing the cost-savings and innovation of automation. The cause for high cost of living is entirely due to the parasite we call "government" using your money to make missiles to blow up random people for no real reason. They also have to pay prison guards to rape prisoners, they need to pay police to arrest parents for trying to save their children from school shooters, they need to pay hired protesters to block traffic to influence voters, they need to pay for commercials to convince you to take an experimental gene-therapy that doesn't work, they need to pay teachers to teach children about how "age is just a number" and chomos are "minor-attracted persons".

Ya know, government stuff.

No, not roads. THose are crumbling.

Also roads can be paid for voluntarily through private companies but that's a different blog post.

If you're worried about robots taking your job, it doesn't make any sense. That job didn't exist in the first place.

You can be an artist, but you were very likely never going to make a liveable income from it anyway. You would have to work a 'real' job and then do art in your spare time as a hobby.

Did you ever even bother to check how many people that graduate from an art school actually go on to have a career in that field?

Here's my prediction of the near future:

People will make a lot more art than they do now, but it wont be commercial. AI-art will be a service many people pay to use, but will never make money from it because anyone willing to pay for AI-art will just use the AI-art service.

The AI-art services might make a profit, but the costs of the engineers, electricity, equipment (servers, Neuromorphic computers, other computers), and everything else, could make it difficult to expand unless they come up with products that see mass-appeal. Is there a customer base that can make AI-art service worth while? Who knows.

But what does that mean for human artists? Was art creation, for the sake of art itself, ever worth anything to humanity at large?

Fine Art is and was always a scam. Just a way for rich people to launder their money from taxes. Or a CIA psyop (no, literally, for real, Jackson Pollock was just a CIA psyop. Look it up. I'm not kidding.). For someone who wasn't in-the-loop they were just going to be working at Taco Bell while painting as a hobby. If they are lucky and smart they could divest themselves early in life to also have an interest in the medical field, or electrical engineering, or car repair, or computer programming, and get a job that can support their existence without worrying about not having enough to eat or pay rent.

But in this near future scenario, people pay an AI-art service to make pictures for them, print them, and hang them on their wall in their house, and that is something they will value enough to pay whatever monthly fee.

"BUT WHAT ABOUT THE AI ENGINEERS STEALING ART TO USE AS TRAINING DATA SETS?"

A) Nothing is being 'Stolen'. This assertion is being thrown around a lot but it's not even kind of true. The images are available for anyone to see. Or anyTHING to see. When you see an image, it forever alters the architecture of your brain. It creates a permanent impact on the shape of your brain. In much the same way, AI looks at these images and it alters them. The data isn't copied, stolen, duplicated, reproduced, or any way that could be legally construed as "stolen".

B) I don't believe in intellectual property and neither should you. But that's a whole other blog post.

C) If laws are changed so that AI engineers have to pay some kind of royalty to all the artists that contribute to the training data sets, how much do you think an artist who's work makes up less than .001% of the total data in the training set will get?

The very best you can hope for is to ask nicely to be given free access to the AI's fast-pass (or front of the line, or gold member, or premium service) for artists who work contributed to the training data set and have to pay no license to use the output images.

Getting the government involved has never helped any situation in all of human history. It has only ever made it worse.

COnsider that Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg ASK government to regulate them. Not out of the kindness of their art. It's because of something called "regulatory capture" and it's a common scheme that big corporations at the beginning of an industry to inhibit upstarts from competing. Airline companies did this early on and now the service is terrible, the prices are outrageous, and the quality is shit. Same for housing, healthcare, medication, etc.

Artists asking for regulation is like fish asking for dull hooks.