Debunked the comparison already. And no, there really is no difference. Compare midjourney shit posted by pros on artstation with portfolios of real art with randos on deviant art. Identical quality.

Explain how (digital) artists will be able to do anything that AI art won’t be able to do. I’ve already debunked the photography comparison in another comment. Painting can do things photography cannot which is why it survived.

>The issue I have is that it is currently not a tool but a replacement, it’s taking creativity out of human hands.

I don't think so.

Art is a creative, human endeavor. AI Art is, and will continue to be, a tool though an incredibly powerful one. And a real artist can do much more with that tool then someone who is not an artist.

The same can be said about cameras and photography. It has completely taken the manual, actually 'create the art' aspect away. Literally anyone can take a picture and call it art and it will be as good as 'real' art in terms of the technical specs. But it's not good art, because it doesn't have an actual artist with a vision creating it.

Of course, the camera was devastating for portrait artists and especially high-paid painters. If you want something to remember your children or grandparents, it's a millisecond to create an eternal, perfect (by some measure) image of them, and that will blow away anyone wanting to be the next John Singer Sargent. Instead we have Yousuf Karsh and Annie Leibovitz. Maybe AI art will replace them too, but that just means we'll have to create the next thing.

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I think people/artist should use AI as a tool, there is a massive difference between AI art directed by a beginner and a professional. When cameras arrived photography became an art too, while painters complained the same way artist do now.

at first living without any actual value might cause people to freak out for a bit but I think we'll work it out

With this tech we won't have to rely on billion dollar labels to decide which artists get produced and which music we hear

It's kinda rude to call people delusional, but I'll try to respond in good faith.

Firstly, I'm entirely aware how crazy I must sound when I speak about a post singularity world, it seems so far out and different to what we're used to that it's hard to wrap your head around.

The general concept behind it is that technology will advance at such breakneck, exponential speeds that it'd be impossible for us to predict what's coming next. Imagine dozens of discoveries worthy of Nobel prizes being made every day, then hour, then minute, then second.

This sounds fanciful, but with a self improving AI it's not beyond the realms of possibility. We humans think of ourselves as intelligent, but that's only in relation to other living organisms, there's plenty of space for improvement beyond what we're capable of.

At the moment we have quite narrow AIs, such as those that create the visual art you speak of, but they're still advanced compared to what we had only a short while ago. AI research and progress is moving at a very fast speed, which is partly why you'll find such enthusiasm in this sub at the moment.

If this technology continues to progress as it is, it's not unreasonable to assume that in the coming years we'll have an AI with an intelligence equal to that of a human. If that AI is able to improve upon its own code it'll soon surpass human intelligence, by the nature of exponential growth it wouldn't be long until it surpasses the intelligence of all humans combined.

At that point is it really so crazy to imagine that it could devise ways to solve any of the challenges you've posited? Would Governments even be able to control, or understand it? That's the kind of question we should definitely be asking, as is why there's such a focus on the 'safe' development of AI.

Again, I know how crazy this sounds, but this is a sub about this very concept.

Who’s tryna play the last of us zombies in fdvr? We will know what’s it’s like to die when we respawn over and over again lol. We will be desensitized to death.

These “tools” don’t “integrate into my workflow”, they replace my entire job on the personal level (or will). Software dev and artist are not comparable fields on any level, we do not have insight regarding how this affects each other.

Well, the job of an artist is more than just creating waifus in a square canvas or landing pages for company websites. Someone needs to do all the CGI on movies or create textures and models for videogames and in many cases you want something very specific and not just a rough approximation from an AI, so you need someone who knows exactly what it needs to ask the AI to get what you want and they need to have an eye for what looks shit and what does not. Artists are the perfect people for this.

This is an issue that will be a problem in every single field unless you let AI take full controll, but that is still pretty far off and would need an AI that governs an entire industry on it's own and at that point, everyone is unemploeyd anyways.

So if you want my honest oppinion, become a plumber or bricklayer, those will be the last jobs that will be replaced. Governments need to reform how our society works at some point in the future anways, so the only question is if your job is made obsolete before or after we reform our economic system, aka before or after you get thrown on the streets and become homeless. Artists were allready in a rough spot so I would say from a purely financial standpoint, becoming an artist now is a pretty bad idea, most likely, nobody knows what the future really holds.

To answer your second point from the POV of a software dev: No (white-collar) job will be done the same way in the future compared to today. Many currently used frameworks for example will be outdated in less than 5 years. People that don't adapt to new technologies and paradigms will be left behind and have difficulty finding new jobs.

The safest bet is to try being up-to-date regarding emerging tools. It's important to think how to integrate these new tools into your workflow and whether they will improve your overall productivity.

Frankly, I'm of the opinion that AI will either be so incredibly good that we cant imagine it or we all go extinct. It will be such a huge fundamental shift in both our society as well as our species that it may just be the most important thing we do.

Personally I want it to be good obviously...but if we all die, then it is what it is. I'll be dead, so I doubt I will care either way. still, what's the point of being so wound up about a potential bad future, when its certainty is not guaranteed?

We humans cannot predict with any real certainty what the future holds for us, that much is true, but what we do know is that AI will be a huge part of it, and work might be phased out completely because of it.

Now the million dollar question is obviously: what do we do when we don't have to work?

Realistically there is no "real" answer to this, as I've said, we cant really know how everything shakes out.

You're right that there isn't infinite resources on earth...but we wont be solely bound to our planet forever, there is infinite space around us and thus functionally infinite resources among the stars. But there's an even simpler way to make it so you can live your dream life of excess, FDVR, matrix level VR. You can live infinite lifetimes, do as you please for as long as you please.

Boom problem solved.

BUT that too is something we are in the dark about. We just don't know how it will shake out for us. Could be infinite torture with no escape...or infinite pleasure...who knows. But nothing we say here in this reddit thread will change the inevitable answer.

What you are looking for is an answer to the unanswerable. We can't know what its going to be like till it happens. We can't know how people may react to the change (though given our history violence is a usually a good guess >.>)

The answer is, we don't know. Nobody does.

The whole point of the term singularity is that once AI becomes smarter than humanity, our ability to understand what it will do next goes away completely. Superintelligent AI is going to solve every problem humanity can imagine, and it will solve problems too complicated for us to imagine.

So there's no way for anyone to have any idea what that's going to look like.

Not sure what you're referencing! All the content I've read is free. 🤔

Lesswrong has some interesting content for sure, but the whole "give us money or the all knowing AI will know you're against it and torture you someday... Maybe today!" stuff is a pretty big turn off

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I agree most of it looks pretty bad and samey (even counting the diversity of styles possible) but people don’t generally seem to care, they just get goggle eyed over what machines can do now.

He could and should have used a deepfake of his own voice, lipsynced and then stopped moving his mouth while it played. 🙃

AI art is a fad. It all looks the same and is already quite boring.

Okay, let’s not use euphemisms here, it’s not “speeding up the workflow” of “artists”. It’s generating art as a replacement for human artists. There is no “workflow” in generating AI art. People who make manual modifications to it are a tiny fraction of people who post and use AI art and the goal is for nobody to have to do that anyway.

I'm not sure this directly addresses your questions - here's a crazy optimists take on what it means for artists:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_pvb8085Lw

This is a fate that will be a reality for any job that can be done on a PC within the next 10 years, so unless your alternative is something like plumber, it only delayes your fate and does not prevent it.

Also, artists will still be needed, no matter how good an AI is, it can't produce something good if you have no clue what "good art" even is. Or if you need something very specific from the AI, you need to be able to ask the right questions, it's like when a client who knows nothing about art tries to comission an artist, no matter how good the artist is, if the input from the client is incoherrent garbage, he will never get what he wants and this is a more fundamental problem of information, AI cannot fix this unless it can literaly look inside your head.

Competition within the field will be pretty brutal though, AI will majorly speed up the workflow of almost every artist, so a lot less artists will be needed in total unless the market scales accordingly, which i doubt will happen. AI will displace a lot of jobs but it wont completely replace them in many cases.

In short, this will be a problem you will face in your life no matter what you do, just pray our governments don't fuck it up to badly so might as well do what you want.

Thank you for this well written and researched post !

I think yes, you can forget about a reliable source of income. The downward economic force this thing will have on the writing and visual art communities will make jobs scarce and pay shit. But there will still be ways to reapply these skills indirectly. Physical artists might have the last bastion of hope given how much robotics are lagging compared to the language models. Ultimately though, no job is safe.