The same thing happened to bank tellers with the ATM. Jobs change and so do industries. Art's become more niche.

Not that it matters, AI is only going to get better from here. I'd also feel depressed if I made my living doing digital art.

If anything, if it is true that AI will render lots of jobs obsolete (I have my doubts), at least there’s a chance this may allow some empathy to grow in those affected. Perhaps we finally get some meaningful social change.

> Honestly this whole "adapt" thing is a load of nonsense parroted by people who aren't immediately under threat and have nothing to fear. Who is going to adapt at 30/40/50 years old? How about people who just graduated art school? Go right back into college? Please.

I agree completely, I just don't think a degree being involved has anything to do with it. I assume most people work the best job they could land, so someone doing menial work and losing it due to automation is in about as much pain as someone facing the same situation on a very specialized role. If anything, the person with more education has a much better chance at getting another (perhaps lower paying) job.

I interpreted your first reply as conveying the message that it's not so bad if low skilled labor is automated, and it's a bigger problem if it's high skilled labor that is replaced. My apologies if I misunderstood you.

But automation has been coming for low skilled work for ages and the wisdom was that high skilled work was supposed to be safe(r). I think it is extraordinarily problematic if high skilled workers are forced to start competing for a diminishing pool of low skill jobs. Moving into another high skilled job would be best but without free/subsidized education puts undue burden on people and who is to say what work is safe 10yrs into the future now? Once high skilled work starts getting automated it means there is no protection and therefore no stability. How can we grow the middle class in such an environment?

This also means automation of low skilled work will accelerate. Order kiosks will be replaced by a specialized ChatGPT customer service version. Acts and sounds like a real person. Maybe it's got a floating head avatar while an automated process in the back assembles the food. One store manager and a guy who inspects the equipment across town.

Today it's the artists but tomorrow it could be IT workers. Companies are pyramids and the room at the top is finite. A healthy economy is not a pyramid.

> Today it's the artists but tomorrow it could be IT workers. Companies are pyramids and the room at the top is finite. A healthy economy is not a pyramid.

This is why I said perhaps some meaningful social change may come out of this. If we assume automation will continue to replace jobs higher up the pyramid, at some point it seems the extremes in the range of possible outcomes is "more people competing for a diminishing pool of low skill jobs" on one side, and "we figured out a post-capitalistic () society in which how useful you are to the economy (this is basically your skills vs the demand for them) determines things like if you get the house with the nice view or not, but not whether you get access to good health care, can live in a place without the fear of getting evicted or of getting robbed/murdered when you go out, etc.

I know it's utopic but I rather be utopic than dystopic, I guess.

A great path towards a better (IMHO) arrangement would be to have very good unemployment benefits, including education/training for jobs that are in demand when you get downsized/automated away.

() I use post-capitalistic for lack of a better term, and to make it obvious I don't mean communism. I certainly don't mean that and see societies organized that way closer to dystopia than utopia. My point is, as you say, I believe a pyramid is not a good way to organize an economy (or a society for that matter).

“technical disruption is hard on people” is a much more sympathetic position than “artists should be exempt because they’re special”.

We all face risks. We all have to adapt. We all have opportunities from adapting to the world rather than clinging to the past. Artists are no different from factory workers (or programmers, or bus drivers)

Honestly this whole "adapt" thing is a load of nonsense parroted by people who aren't immediately under threat and have nothing to fear. Who is going to adapt at 30/40/50 years old? How about people who just graduated art school? Go right back into college? Please.

Edit: For the record, I care about anyone getting displaced but not all displacement is of equal level. If highly educated/skilled labor is now at risk this world isn't prepared for what's about to come.

As for art school, I've always heard that it was more fun than IT/computer science/accounting but way more dangerous, as in you weren't guaranteed a job at all. Not everyone has heard that, of course, not everyone has the time/skills/resources to plan their career. I don't really know what to say except that it sucks for them. On the other hand the lower bar of entry may bring way more art in general, like it did with digital art.

We know why rote labor is being automated. Not just to squeeze as much money out as possible but to reduce failures and liability and increase productivity. If a factory pumps out more medicine to save more lives who can judge maybe automation was worth the tradeoff.

But art? Is this something civilization needed to try automating? It's not going to create more jobs than it replaces. It's not going to advance society to the next industrial level. It's not filling a demand because we're already flooded with more media than we could ever consume.

Stability is important for society and tossing golden apples around "because" and telling people to "adapt" to senseless chaos is awful. People will get squeezed out and career change is a bigger deal than adapting from paper to digital.

They're not guaranteed jobs so why make it harder to get them? So failed artists can compete for jobs with the factory, fast food and coal workers whose time is written on the wall?

I think this is just a truth people will have to accept. I used to make music and quickly realized I would have to dedicate 1000s of hours to it if I ever wanted to make it a career. This is simply because there were 1000s of other people that wanted to also make it a career.

I could take artist out of your statement and put blacksmith in and it would be difficult to tell if this was wrote in 1890.

Everyone seems to fight automation in an individual/industry battle rather at the society level. We keep measuring our worth based on work and when we finally run out of work we're going to have a problem.

Yeah, because work pays the bills. Guess what happens when you automate faster than social policy changes? Also people resist change when it threatens their way of life. It's almost like the luddites resisting automation are saying slow down automation people "when we finally run out of work we're going to have a problem".

This is not an artist problem, this is an everyone problem that is unavoidable. Of course here in the US we're playing right versus left instead of a few trillionaires will own everything versus the starving huddled masses that this path seems to be leading to.

I’ll submit that people who feel horrible have mistaken the commodity and value-add aspects of their jobs. AI does not make someone an artist, but nor does great hand-eye coordination and good brush technique. The actual art is concept; brushes and canvas and AI are tools.

I’m sorry that the decoupling of creation from performance is making people you care about feel bad, but really this is hundreds of years old news for most artists (musicians, architects, sculptors, etc).

People who enjoy drawing can still draw, just like people who enjoy playing instruments can still play instruments.

it's probably different in the way that the parent poster described, that artists found drawing an emotionally satisfying process whereas people typing probably didn't think setting styles in MS Word made them complete.

Because driving a car or typing is entirely different from making art.

> People who enjoy drawing can still draw, just like people who enjoy playing instruments can still play instruments.

"You can just sit at home and play your little instrument, and not bother anyone, is that good for you?"

Your contempt for art and artists is just awful. It makes me despair for humanity.

Humans change technology, technology changes humans. It is a tale older than civilization.

Also, many people would consider racing a car a form of art in itself. Same with riding horses that cars caused the general replacement of.

Art shouldn't be the privilege of only those dedicating a lifetime to holding a brush.

You just need better social security.

No clue what you mean by 'menu'. Artists have always chosen from a selection of available possibilities - colors of paint, size and shape of canvas, notes of music, words to write... A book is no less art just because the author had to pick from a menu of 26 letters. Nothing stops you from hacking and molding and mixing the results down to the finest details of every atom if you feel so inclined.

Maybe you can't envision any future for AI in art, but that only says something about you as an artist, or lack thereof.

But I don't think AI art can possibly take away from the beauty and enjoyment that can be found in drawing and making art. You mention how a musician loves playing their instrument. I can download a music edition software and summon a virtual orchestra out of my speakers in seconds. But does this take anything from the musician? Is their feeling any less true, their music any less meaningful to themselves and to those who listen? If I bring my laptop to a party and play Vivaldi's seasons on it, will that elicit the same reaction as if I play it in the living room's piano?

If language models eventually get good enough at programming that I'm out of a job, I won't derive any less enjoyment out of programming. I'll be a lot poorer, sure, but I will still enjoy the process of coming up with a way to express constraints in code, even if a machine can do it for me in the blink of an eye. Just like I find it relaxing to do the dishes myself when I'm anxious, even if I have a perfectly good dishwasher. Just like how people who enjoy solving Sudokus don't find it less fun just because automatic Sudoku solvers exist. The journey is the destination.

And for the record, I don't think human art will disappear because of AI art, or human programming will disappear because of AI programming. If there's one thing that's demonstrably true through the history of humanity, is that humans have a strong human-centric bias. The sooner we commodify something and remove the human element from it, the sooner we bring that human element back, now elevated to the status of luxury and catered to a niche.

Let me explain what I mean: I can buy black garlic in a plastic container for cheap, but I can also go to the weekend farmer market and pay three times as much for black garlic from a lady who lives up the mountains and can tell me the shape of the jar she fermented it in. IKEA makes perfectly good furniture that you can use to play board games for less than a hundred, but board game enthusiasts pay hundreds or thousands for custom furniture with nooks and bezels to stop the tokens from sliding out. Glass blowing as a form of art continues to exist, regardless of the availability of perfectly fine, industrially-made glass appliances. It's just in artisanal fairs in Venice, not in your living room.

And sure, you won't be able to make a living anymore out of cranking out uninspired corporate Memphis for bay-area startups, or drawing cartoon furries for Twitter randos on commission. And, in a way... thank fuck for that, right? The combinatorial space of drawing people with smooth curves in fantasy skin colors using technological appliances in collaborative settings can be exhausted by an AI, and you can actually focus on making art that breaks the mold, art that hasn't been made before, art that is meaningful to you. You can imbue art with meaning and use art to communicate with other humans, while the "art" that ticks out boxes and replaces placeholders in landing pages can be cranked out by AI.

Yes, it will be harder to make a living out of that, but I'm sure it won't be impossible. Computers have been able to generate Mondrian paintings since the 80s, and that hasn't made Mondrian paintings any less valuable. An AI may be able to produce the exact same drawing that you do, but it can't imbue human meaning in it.

Drawing Corporate Memphis bullshit for startups is a great way to transfer a big chunk of VC money from some Bay Area jerkoffs to an artist living somewhere much cheaper, where it can pay multiple months of their rent for not much work, and maybe even let them have some luxuries and/or financial cushions. Thank fuck that all that money can extend the startup's runway a tiny bit further now instead! Thank fuck those artists won't have to wrestle with the feelings that comes from getting paid better for a few hours of corporate work than for anything they've poured their passion into!

If you're regularly taking on client work, then you have places to play and experiment while still getting what you need to pay your bills, and even if you're just turning the crank to make another piece that fits in with everything else you've made, you're getting a tiny bit better at making art with every drawing you do, and you can bring that back to the time you spend on your crazy personal work. If you take some other job to make ends meet, your rate of progress slows way the hell down. I've seen it happen. Friends who used to draw a lot better than I did twenty years ago now just draw as a hobby, and draw just like they did back then; me and my friends who made it my job have spent the last twenty years drawing, and it shows in our work. Thank fuck that's endangered! Thank fuck we, too, might have a bunch of recurring gigs collapse out from under us! Thank fuck those of us who embrace becoming an AI wrangler for a corporation will be asked to do tons more stuff for the same pay, or less!

How do you propose the artists who are now blissfully freed from the work that pays their bills should pay the rent on their homes and studios, and to pay for their tools and materials, while still spending all their time making art that "breaks the mold, hasn't been made before, and is meaningful to the artist"? How do you propose they should find the time to hone the skills needed to do this? Because doing that is a lot of work.

Artists are the ones now experiencing what the Luddites did. Smashing the looms didn't stop more looms from being built. Also, now the average person can afford fabric because of the technology.

Simply put as we move into a world where most needs can be provided by technology keeping up the 'winner take all' method of capitalism so many subscribe to isn't going to work.

How will we support ourselves until the extremely unlikely event that becomes a reality?

What are you doing to support artists through this shitty transition? Hint: Calling us "luddites" and vaguely waffling about the hoped-for death of capitalism is pretty much the opposite of supporting us.

All I’m saying that it is already a problem that should be better solved, so all the talented artists that as of now can’t sustain themselves from their work can also feed their families.

Capital formation is always and everywhere painful for labor (see: medieval enclosure, the American frontier/genocide, the Great Leap Forward, the triangle trade, and many others). This is obviously really really bad but so far we haven't devised a workable, lasting way to systemically stop the ownership class from doing it to us.

They should connect with the people that aren’t artists and have a similar preference for non-AI art.

Or, they should learn the new tooling of the field, and use it as part of their mix of tooling.

The vast majority of would-be artists have never been able to afford to do it full-time and have needed “real” jobs; it would be astonishing for the narrow fortunate elite that have to think that they are somehow the one group of people in all of human history entitled to have that privilege without being concerned to adapting to change, even though that’s never even been the case in that same elite, which has had to deal with change (whether driven by technology or changing aesthetic preference for media, techniques, subjects, etc.) rather continuously, historically.

Serious question: are you sure that it can be? What you just described as the value proposition of your work is not the delivery of some pretty pixels. You’re selling a service, an experience, a human connection. You’re selling your artistic judgment and your ability to translate back and forth between client’s imperfectly expressed wishes and the visual design space. You’re selling work that is valuable to the buyer _because_ it was made by you.

I completely understand the fear that is gripping a lot of artists. But I’m as of yet unpersuaded by the predictions of doom and gloom. Art is human connection. Once the hype has worn off and we all get inured to generative art, I think we’ll find that people still value and pay for the real thing.

A final thought: algorithms can’t lay graphite on paper or put brushstrokes on canvas. You may consider offering your clients tangible artifacts that only a human can make.

Yes, but the moment you publish one piece the AIs will be able to crank variations on it at the push of button. So artists might think twice about publishing.

Good luck finding the time to enjoy your hobbies when you're poor. You'll have much less time an energy for passions at that stage. You'll probably be flipping burgers at burger king, until that's automated too :)

On the other hand, if all programming was truly able to be created instantly by an AI, the productivity of our entire species would be increased to such a great degree, that being poor would be of little concern, because everything that you would want to buy would be instantly available for a fraction of the price it is today.

Also I kind of agree that in the short term this will suck for artists and illustrators but on the other hand, we recently went on a day trip with some friends and paid an artist to sketch us while we sit together and drink coffee, it was a great experience and I could’ve just used the “sketch” filter on my phone but there would be no “experience” or individuality. No memory that made it special.

What was interesting was, she had a huge queue of people paying about $100 an hour :) she was open for 9 hours.

Good luck to your wife. This is fucking horrible. Being in an industry that Silicon Valley shitheads are ruining sucks.

A friend works in law, mostly handling workplace discrimination cases His job will be safe for now, but not those of his paralegals and staff who research case law, write drafts, and handle everyday communication with clients and the courts. Many of them have been in it for years and are passionate about helping victims who have been hurt by racism and homophobia. One of his most tenured employees is an elderly black man well past retirement age, who greatly enjoys that he can now help stop the sort of discrimination he experienced when he was young. None of these people will be able to meaningfully contribute to their passion in ten years.