Treating Imagen as just an "AI art generator" is extremely short sighted. Sure, you could just try to sell the outputs directly. But the real value is using it to supplement larger works. No need for a stock photo subscription service if you can just generate them automatically. Don't need artists to create textures for your simple games. I can spin up a merch shop powered entirely by AI art and nobody would know. The marginal cost of creation is approaching zero.

And perhaps even more interestingly these things not only exist but there is competition in this space! Essentially unregulated competition as well (and likely for the next 10 years). The cost will be driven into the ground.

The apocryphal Henry Ford quote about the average person wanting better horses comes to mind. People off the street have no concept of the impact this tech and the methods behind it will have. Sure, no one is going to be printing these and hanging them in museums. Very few artists support themselves that way, though. The people diffusion models are coming for are the graphic designers, the concept artists, the marketers, and everyone else with a copy of Photoshop and a Getty subscription. GPT-3 is amazing, but it's also not good enough to be useful. Imagen is industry-destroying.

Although I agree that a somehow less extreme version of that will happen in the course of this decade bar a legal decision to prohibit using those models, that won't translate to comparable revenues. The companies providing those services will struggle to make even 10% of the salaries of the displaced workers in revenue. In fact, this will probably be a GDP-destroying (though not value-destroying) application of technology.

It's not about generating more revenue, it's about cutting costs. Any company that employs graphic designers etc. will be able to cut 90% of the staff.

Video game companies that need concept art? How about 1 guy/gal with Imagen to generate baselines and then curating/tailoring as necessary instead of a team of 5

That has nothing to do with anything I wrote. And doesn't contradict it actually.

Saved costs will not translate to higher margins for those that cut them because all competitors will be able to slash them as well, resulting in lower prices across the board.

With the amount of context awareness this AI has, there’s nothing all that special about human “art” to be honest.

I am willing to bet that the revenue from AI-generated "art" will be smaller than the revenue from human-generated art in 5 years (or even 10 years) despite the former probably being at least 2 orders of magnitude higher in volume. This is basic supply and demand + acknowledging the fact that humans don't care about AI "achievements".

AI achievements will be indistinguishable from human achievements. Humans will try to pass off AI achievements as their own. The line will become so blurred that it will be impossible to tell the difference.

If that happens, all art will simply have no value and art as % of GDP will plummet.

Incidentally, this hasn't happened in areas where AI already dominates like chess and go. Magnus Carlsen alone probably generates more "revenue" than all chess AIs combined.

In general, it's not possible for machines to replace labor - this is the Luddite fallacy. If the machines do exactly what you ask them to do this becomes even more true, because labor has the comparative advantage that they'll do things you don't know to ask for.

It is possible for the labor to quit and find something better to do, as happened to elevator operators, but that's a good thing.

In the case of chess, AIs don't want money and Magnus does, so they're not going to help you find ways to get more of it.

If there was a way to have an AI feed you moves without being caught, then I am positive Carlson wouldn't be at the top for long.

He wouldn't be at the top only if he was not using said way and his competitors were. This is of course missing the point. If chess enthusiasts knew that grandmasters were using AI to aid them when playing in tournaments, the interest (and the revenues) would simply plummet.