Recently there’s been a lot of hubbub about how AI art is not “real art,” or how it’s immoral. In particular, these discussions are happening on hubs where many artists share their products such as on Twitter. Popular arguments as to why AI art is not of artistic value are that they take no skill to produce, they have no soul, and that they are stealing the art of real artists and displacing them. Most importantly, artists fear the idea that AI can replace them - a fear that they don’t have to worry about yet.
First, let us define art in the context of this article. In particular, we are talking about art in the format of drawn images. In addition, let us separate the definition of art market for the sake of this article; the art market is separated in two segments, one being the art market in world of galleries, auction houses and museums and MOMA vs art sold through direct transactions from the artist to the client, whether it be at a small booth, commissions, or through employment contracts. We are talking about the latter.
There are several reasons why AI art will not be displacing these Twitter artists anytime soon, but the main reason is that it’s simply cheaper to just hire an artist to draw it out than to hire someone who can understand AI and deep learning to the level of putting out professional products according to spec. A company can pay for five to ten designers for the price of an AI expert who can fine tune the product to the level five designers can. AI is good at generating generic products, but fine tuning the prompts to match a product that requires specific details or uses cases takes manual effort. It would be far cheaper to just hire a designer to pump something out, especially as designers can be outsourced to third world countries where labor is cheaper than the cost of buying compute on GPUs.
Small time artists who sell at local fairs or conventions have even less to fear. Generic art does not sell well, and building a decent, high quality, AI pipeline to sell art at local exhibitions requires skill & equipment belonging to someone who would be capable of holding a day job or consulting gig that pays significantly more. An AI professional would not sell at a local arts & crafts fair; it simply would not be worth their time.
So don’t worry! Right now you’re fine! Instead of worrying about the future, treat AI art the same way software engineers treat AI tools such as GitHub Copilot. Even when cars replaced the horse & the carriage, people chugged along and became mechanics. When we switched from coal to solar, we told the coal miners to learn to code. Markets eventually work out in allocating labor with demand!
One last thing - the power of an artist’s work is their brand. Worry about the brand more than the content, and the content will sell itself!