AI’s Creation of ‘Art’ Is A Horror Story in Ethical As Well as Copyright
I was interested in this story and spoke with several professional artists about it. They all work in film, television, and video games and many are worried about the future of the art industry. Jeanette, a concept artist who worked for several AAA publishers, told me that the artist’s skills were already undervalued prior to the technology.
Bruce, an artist who worked on several award-winning indie songs, said that “The endgame for a potential employer does not make my job easier. It’s to replace or reduce all my years spent honing and perfecting my craft into a boring-ass pilot in machine learning, where I’m trained vaguely to direct an equivalent software program in hundreds of different directions until it produces an asset we can feasibly utilize in a game.”
“I can’t imagine any worse hells for my career.” Both morally and experientially.
RJ Palmer, who worked on the movie Detective Pikachu, says that “I don’t believe this tech will harm any established, big deal” concept artists or illustrators as much as the low-level ones. I can easily imagine a scenario in which AI could replace 5-10 entry-level artists. Although the tech is still very basic, it’s rapidly improving. Unfortunately, the industry’s focus on speed over quality is a sad reality. A clean-up AI-generated image that is ‘good enough” could be sufficient for many needs.
Palmer states that self-published authors have spoken out about how wonderful it is to not have to hire an artist. This is how many of us started our careers as professional artists. As an artist, seeing this attitude change makes me worry about the ability of the next generation to find steady entry-level work.
Karla Ortiz has shared her concerns about young, upcoming artists. She’s worked for Ubisoft and Marvel, as well as HBO. Kotaku is informed that “the technology is not yet there in terms of a finished product”. It is important to note that AI still needs professionals to correct the mistakes it makes. This is enough to scare major corporations.
It does produce results that are ‘good enough to some companies, particularly those who offer lower wages for creative work. The end result is “good enough” so I believe we may see a lot more entry-level and less visible jobs disappear. This could affect illustrators as well as photographers, graphic designers, modelers, and any other job that relies on visuals. All of this could be outsourced to AI.
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