I’m not as anti-AI as a lot of my cohort (lefty artists). I’ve never been morally against art made by remixing other artists’ work, so it’s hard for me to be angry at the “stealing” AI does to make images. If AI images were only a toy, something people play with but don’t sell, I wouldn’t be bothered by AI images remixing other images at all.
But it’s not just a toy, and I am worried by the economics of it.
AI image generation makes images close to instantly, but it makes those images by remixing work by human artists who took hours, days, weeks to make those images. The styles AI imagery apes might have taken someone decades to develop.
Those instantly-generated AI-generated images then compete in a marketplace against human artists.
That’s not sustainable for the humans.
I have no problem at all with human artists training themselves on art other humans have made. In comics, that’s a primary way most of us learn.
But after I’ve learned from other cartoonists, I can’t instantly produce images. So when I compete with them, it’s on even ground.
When artists are competing with other artists, that can be tough, but the result isn’t that there’s less work for artists overall.
But the more AI enters the art market, the less work is left for human artists. AI simultaneously depends on our work existing to be remixed, and makes paying us for our work obsolete.
Second thought: I personally don’t feel threatened by AI (although I’m some combination of amused by and tired of people mistaking my work for AI).
But I really worry about the younger generation of illustrators. I think a lot of “entrance level” illustration work that used to exist is increasingly being done with AI.
Because that’s not what the people who the term applies to want to do. If you look closely at the…