A little over a month ago, I attended a get-together via Discord. It began as a fairly low-energy affair, but after the customary greetings and updates, things took a turn toward the hysterical as we found ourselves creating art with the assistance of online artificial intelligence programs. Basically, a user inputs a prompt. Then, these text-to-art generators spit out a series of images. For instance, one may write “Jack Black in the French Revolution” and get something like this:
Courtesy of Stable Diffusion AI
We also had “James Bond in Super Smash Bros,” “Fred Figglehorn in the style of Studio Ghibli,” and of course “Rococo Kermit,” yet no matter how out-there our concepts were, Stable Diffusion usually did a decent job keeping up. It is undeniably impressive, but the implied question still stands: Should human artists be concerned about their jobs?
This very question was brought into public conversation just a few months ago when Jason Allen won first place in the Colorado State Fair’s painting category for Théâtre D’opéra Spatial (pictured below). This piece, pictured below, was made with AI image generator Midjourney.
Midjourney development team is led by former NASA consultant David Holz
To some artists, particularly those who specialize in large paintings that take a ridiculous number of hours to finish, this was a major wakeup call. In 2017, studies estimated that approximately 47% of occupations would be automatable over some unspecified number of years, perhaps a decade or two, and there was always this assumption that creatively driven fields were relatively safe. There’s a level of irony here in how technology has aided creative processes for decades, yet it seems as though we have now reached the point where machines can now do the brunt of the creative work. If these tools were to get stronger, why would any advertising agency, publishing house, or video game company need to hire concept artists or illustrators when a machine can produce similar quality work in a fraction of the time? The same could be said for writing and music – how long before the integrity of these mediums are compromised?
At least in my opinion, AI will likely never fully supplant artists, barring an event such as a robotic apocalypse or dystopia. For one, it’s important to note that, while Allen’s piece was produced by Midjourney, he did do some editing to clean it up and apply the finishing touches. The system isn’t perfect. Secondly, Midjourney is still largely reliant on existing human artists to manufacture their pieces. There’s a level of ingenuity present in human art that I still don’t quite see AI replicating, at least at this stage. Sure, the job pool will almost definitely shrink in the coming years because – duh, big corporations will obviously favor fast production versus innovation, but I don’t think most of the fearmongering online right now regarding the advancement of AI is completely warranted. Regardless, I’m personally quite pleased with these developments in AI, because – above all else – it produces results that are really frickin’ funny.
Source
Frey, C. B., & Osborne, M. A. (2017). The future of employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?. Technological forecasting and social change, 114, 254-280.
Written by: Jack Hawkins
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