>>49242237Blackpilled artist here. I've been lurking for awhile. Just thought I should share.
The Macro: Society and human behavior at large
Nothing is sacred anymore.
For the longest time, art was 'considered safe from computer automation' because the general consensus was that human creativity is something that the computer couldn't understand. Only engineers and chess players needed to worry about Ai taking their jerbs. So the answer to this was just to make enough random generations until you get something close enough to what you want and train the data to eliminate the randomness. After that, all you have to do is open an image program and paint over the janky fingers or extra feet flying in space behind the characters' heads.
Same with 'the computer can't capture the human experience'. But we're getting to a point where we can quantify the human experience through larger datasets. Suddenly the mysteries of humanity can be described with population demographics and percentages. As things get more organized and smaller, we approach where the entire human experience can be placed into a Micro SD.
Far be it for me to suddenly lament that this is the direction we've been headed to. Because humanity has made technological strides that ever so closely inches to that conclusion. But we have never had quite the jump that takes decades and lifetimes of effort and discipline into a few hours.
And therein lies the big smoking gun. Effort and cost.
The Micro: in the sphere of creatives being replaced
Effort and Cost. Or the lack thereof. True, that learning to generate images requires effort of learning what these brackets mean, or a deeper understanding of how the computer treats keywords, how Loras and models interact and how to tardwrangle this technological mess into creating a passible image of pekora getting creampied by the viewer in bathing in a tub of bathwater pizza. It's not effortless.
But the art and the artists that people, normies, wellwishers, say we hold in high regard, that sitting down and practicing the art of creating a thing from lesser things, (though perhaps was already on its death knell when the wacom became popular), has been directly affected.
Decades to a lifetime of discipline is suddenly put into question. Centuries of art foundation painstakingly discovered and refined by people who had to grow their own flowers to create the specific kind of paint and dedicating their lives to come close to perfect anatomy and shape, form and shadows, has been upended in a span of 8 months, to where you don't even need a pretend pen to create anymore.
Normies I speak to are always assuring me that art is important, all the 'human experience and emotions' fluff, seem to still be in the mindset that AI art is version 1 stable diffusion jank. They all flocked to pixai when they realized it's become better and pre-tardwrangled to some degree.
"Art will always exist for the artist, and there will always be people still draw". And that's probably true. 8 billion people at any given time, sure there's going to be SOMEONE out there who draws.
But the discipline will suffer. Innovation and creativity will atrophy because, its just EASIER to be a prompter and learn that in the span of a few hours to a week. Consider the alternative: to take 4 years of art foundation, perfect practice, 10,000 hours, drawing live models, observation and eyeball measuring skills, going out to landscape paint, all the effort to become someone whos creative endeavors.
It's an easy logical choice. And if you look at the direction of humanity, it's overwhelming in the direction of making logically easier choices.
It's also an easy choice for the normie once the UI sufficiently irons out the technical aspects of ai, that's when you'll have a 2nd explosion of ai art.
The future: Where will lack of effort put us?
Assuming that there's a very small subset of diehard non ai artists in the world who still create by non-prompting means, this is also likely a dead end. Most people assume that the upcoming artists need to pivot their styles to avoid AI art styles. But if you can think a few steps ahead, you'll know this is also futile, because AI is constantly evolving at the hands of enthusiasts with enough computer knowledge know to train their models on these hypothetical new artists. It does beg the question 'why try anymore?'
We'll also seemingly have a new class of the 'art greats' who thrive on genius alone. Art has largely been gatekept by the enormous timesink that's been required to make anything that the general populace regards as worthwhile. All the art foundations I've mentioned before and the time and cost to perfect it all, is now largely upended by he who finds the right prompting lora model pasta, *who knows what he's looking for in the image.*
Genius is 1% inspiration and- actually hold my beer