AI didn’t take his job, the commodification of a low-effort task did. AI might be the proximate cause but it isn’t the source of why his illustration side hustle got undercut.

Tons of boiler room illustrators in low income countries would have happily undercut him, too.

Anyone that has ever done spec work has already faced just how demoralizing this will all be. When you do spec work for design, it's basically everyone just submitting their designs for the buyer to decide which one to pick. All the designers copy the designs that are getting the "this is going in the right direction" feedback. The average person will now be able to just say "make me something just like that" for free. It's basically the end, and only a world war will reset things. Best of luck all.

I'll add one other thing about war:

Humans are not exactly a peaceful bunch. A bunch of people with nothing to do start gang wars, often on a national scale, country versus country, or country-men versus counter-men. It's a hot-take for sure, but, we're trending towards war and that's especially true if AI can easily be used to rile each other up with ease.

I think that transformation is difficult to appraise from within. In the future we’ll have a much more clear sense of how we feel about the invention of the automobile.

I think that the calm, more disciplined take of “the sky is always falling, it’s never falling. There’s other, probably better ways to be creative” is the one.

Today my eight year old sat at the PC for hours using Scratch to make what was essentially a Flash animation. He had PS5 access, Switch access, iPad access. Nope. Wanted to bash his head against loops and timers for hours.

The craving to be creative is insatiable. It’ll continue to take on new forms.

With apologies to the farriers of today.

It’s interesting how in music the same application of ML swamps companies like Suno in trillion dollar lawsuits, yet in graphics and text no one cares, even though graphics and text fall victim to the same sleight of hand.

It feels like a big tech company can just ignore the law, unless another big company stands up against it (and hopefully helps the average Joe as a side-effect).

This is not a very substantial analysis of the industry and I'd be interested in a more comprehensive diagnosis. I believe there are coincidental factors in industries that typically employ illustrators and other artists that are affecting the market that are not AI, namely the market conditions since late 2022. To give the games industry as an example, the industry grew unnaturally during Covid, everyone thought that trend would continue and there was a lot of money and hiring thrown into it. The industry is returning to the normal trend line and it's still highly profitable, but layoffs are happening because executives are not hitting financial forecasts. Similarly, marketing budgets have been slashed across industries as the economy slowed down, and design work dried up in tech because nobody is raising money except the people who think they can replace creative labor with AI.

One thing that I'm not seeing in this thread is the reputational risk of using AI, especially in artistic works like games. AI imagery is generic, lazy, and is seeing a backlash from the public. It's a negative quality marker even if it's trendy in tech spaces. There's definitely a lot of people in executive leadership and management who think they can replace all kinds of labor with AI right now, but from what I've seen, that has not played out as expected in the real workforce. The actual reason this guy is losing half his business is probably more due to people cutting back on discretionary spending more than AI taking jobs.

Professions die in the face of competition, that's nothing new.

What's more perilous is that the internet will soon cease to be a useful way to access and distribute knowledge, and has been transformed from a resource for learning and sharing into a clear-cut forest which nobody will replant.

But hey, at least sama got a new gruebel forsey.

Tangentially related: Recently I was thinking of commissioning an artist to do some album art for me. I had a specific concept in mind and it needed to have a certain look to it but I didn't mind if the actual art was physically painted or digital.

What struck me is there's no website for hiring an artist. ArtStation has a Shop section (pre-made art for sale) but no Commissions section. Fiverr has some artists taking commissions but none I could find of really good quality, and there's AI art spam now as well (takes commissions but just sends you an AI prompt result). Reddit has two art commission subreddits but there aren't really many artists there. And both Fiverr and Reddit's main selling point is cheap art commissions, but I was happy to pay more for something good.

Unless you know an artist already that suits the style you're after, and they're currently taking commissions, it seems quite hard to find anyone. I kinda thought I'd be able to go to, like, CommissionArt.com and filter by Traditional -> Oils -> Landscapes or whatever to find someone perfect.

To everyone who says hire a real artist instead of using AI - where do you go to find them?

TL;DR

Love the tech. Hate losing business.