Erm. Not really. I used to pay artists very frequently for art to be used in web pages as illustration. Not many people do this. But I did.

But when I saw the quality of pictures genereated by CLIP guided diffusion, I knew they were production-ready.

I used some of those instead.

I briefly worked with a company that served ecommerce sites with automating of various tasks- one of them was generating description of products.

In a meeting I asked a client how did they do it before. They said that they hired struggling writers. We replaced them for a fraction of cost.

We were not only doing bland product description, we were also generating beautiful prose around products.

I am still on the waitlist of Dall-E 2, but some friends have access and I played with it for hours, and it is not a trivial technology. It is production ready that can replace much of stock photos with generated content. So, not only artists, but some photographers are at risk, too.

It's not like AI will replace all creative workers, but it will certainly replace some of them, starting today. Hell, it has already started.

> and don't forget you're not seeing ALL of the pics that have been generated, but some of them

This is not some corporate trick. This is standard practice. When I worked on an image generation project, I learned that it was standard to generate 250 or so images, and use CLIP to rank them, i.e. let CLIP score the images based on input prompt. Then the top-k images with highest scores, i.e. most similarity to prompt according to CLIP will be displayed.

> for calculating and optimizing moves and branching paths - no creativity is needed.

In the AlphaGo documentary, it was shown that one move was very original. It was unprecedented in Go history. Maybe it wasn’t creative, but it can mimic creativity.

None of ‘em. None of them will be safe. Humans ascribe meaning to works where there is none, and intent by the artist or an AI can be wholly immaterial to what people appreciate about it. Great works may come from AI but the greatness of a work is virtue of the work itself.

That said, just because a computer can do it doesn’t mean that a human can’t, or that people will prefer the AI work over the human’s. I think AI threatens jobs in a lot of places, but not necessarily in creative spaces.

Isn't this the majority of the industry? Sure, maybe there are a few artists that can do profound work with context, meaning, etc. But when you're doing book covers for airport novels, you don't need any of that. Or when doing a website with a few images? You need a result that's good enough at the cheapest price. AI generated content is great for that.

You can apply an AI-powered “Starry Night” filter to any picture, but do you really think Van Gogh would draw something like that?