I remember not long ago, I felt reassured that artificial intelligence would probably take over all the manual labor jobs before they threaten the creative industries. It felt like creative industries would be the last frontier for AI to break.
When I saw the rise of Dall-E, Midjourney, and NovelAI, I felt reassured that there’s no way generative AI would be able to replace professional creatives anytime soon. The Dall-E generations are at best a good laugh and at the very least, discardable garbage. The NovelAI generations would try to mimic the style of illustrators I like but I just couldn’t feel the heart behind the drawings, because there wasn’t one. However, I realized that as time passed that people who paid money for a generative AI and put in a few keywords were pathetically calling themselves “artists” and consumers were not only disregarding, but actively supporting the severe copyright infringements
Recently, I watched a heartbreaking video of a designer that goes by “Nadestraight” online be let off from the company he worked at for 8 years. The reason why he was let off was because the company deemed his existence redundant after they had nonconsensually taken his design work and fed it into an AI model. This is not what we were promised. A commenter under the video said it best, “The future is the opposite of what AI bros promised: You will do the mundane factory work so robots can create art and music.”
This is the source of my “Why” question: Why are creatives losing their jobs to generative AI?
The past 2 years have been hell for anyone in the visual arts industry.
Clearly these “artists” are in it for the ego and fame, the same way TikTok content farmers make the same video with slight alterations to farm views and followers. These “creators” have never cared for art, they’ve only cared about the benefits of what good artists have. This truly disgusts me.
The funniest exchange I saw in the past few months was between a suspecting self-proclaimed AI “artist” and a critiquing commenter.
As if it wasn’t the perfect setup, this pathetic Ai “artist” says “not even in your dreams would you be able to make an illustration like this”. The same commenter would soon find out that this person has been a long term animator for the One Piece TV series. Boy would I pay good money to see his genuine reaction.
Here is an infographic I made to quickly educate someone who doesn’t have strong feelings about the topic.
At the end of this day, I ask myself whether creativity has lost value in the general populous’ hearts. Will non-creatives ever see the integrity behind an artist putting their soul onto the canvas just a few decades from now?
It’s hard not to lose heart when I see peers, sometimes even in the same field, argue in favor of using generative AI to “speed up” the work they need to do. If the AI was trained purely on their OWN work, maybe there’s an argument to be made! But this?
This is different.
That work was never going to be done anyway. These people are using other people’s works and calling it their own. Stand up to these people. Let them know what they’re doing is wrong.
If that’s too hard, then the least you can do is educate yourself on the topic and follow the developments of this issue.