From my peers and the Internet Consumer side, I'm seeing happy and feverishly positive reactions...
...and this has made me question our relation to how people consumes ''content''.
Note here: ''NORMAL PEOPLE''
As if artist aren't normal people;
Nope, we're this collective of high elite individuals who hvae gatekept the road and path to illustrative self-expression!
It's almost as if Artist were this annoying gate/wall toward producing beautiful images and people are thrilled they don't need those pesky artists anymore; all of that, after the same big corps they hate so much trained a machine with all the collective work we achieved since forever.
You, see,when I was in College my social circle and peers mostly constituted some of myf high school friends who had opted to study in ''serious'' fields like STEM, Natural Sciences and Math Academics; I was often teased, mocked and made fun of for studying ''CG Art'' as they said it wasn't conductive to real jobs. All of this, despite the fact that we were all massive nerds and ironically, were the type of dudes to drools over Marvel Movies, Anime Characters and League of Legends Characters Announcements; while I was less on the consumer side of things, often prefering classical work.
But to an essence, it's always as if they low-key resented me for choosing the risky ''creative'', happy go luckey (in their minds) Art Path while they had to conform to the given narrative they had to follow a ''serious'' job.
''Creation'' 🤔
In the last few days, my Facebook and Reddit Filed has been filling and overflowing with common/casual people generating stuff in a matter of seconds that'd take me hour/days to illustrate and gasping out stuff like:
''Finally, art has been democratised''.
''Let's go boys, let's show those big corps that now we don't need them to generate OUR stories!!''
Regardless of the fact the art is democratised the moment you put a crayola in a toddler's hands or that it's big corps who have everything to gain and the working people who will lose everything; it seems that the average person really doesn't quite understand how this going to impact the cultural and socioeconimal portrait of their collective as a nation.
One of the exemple of that:
And seeing stuff generated by people who never opened a Canson sketchbook or stroked with a stylus gain tenfold the online recgonition that I do while I've been scribbling and studying since my single digit age makes me feel some type of way, let's not lie about this.
We democratise writing by giving a 7 year old an exercise book and leave him with his imagination.
We cheapen the value of writing when we give that 7 year old a Prompt Bar that was fed on Tolkien and Lewis' work so he doesn't feel he has to study Shakespeare's language to dissect the sense of words and understand their impact.
As someone who REALLY enjoyed the process, I'm trying to wrap my head around around how begginner and intermeddiate illustrators and concepts artists are going to survive this; thinking of the Art of MAgic:The Gathering, Card Games, Book Covers, Graphic Design..sheesh, blocking in from scratch for a lot of artist is what made the whole thing interesting in the first place.
But moreover, how will the casual person perceive ''Digital Art'' and illustrative images from now on?
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That group has some of the saddest most insecure people I've seen on the internet.
I mean if making this art gives them some ounce of confidence to get through the problems of systemic racism maybe its a good thing.
But boy do they have some crazy misconceptions about art and artists in general.
You can see the total lack of knowledge about composition and design, it's just post after post of how cool this plus size beautiful black American woman art looks to raise my self esteem given I get no matches on Ok Cupid.
I'd say let them have this one.
Yeah it will make non-super-pro's work seem stale, this a.i. generated shit is just for corps, to pay even less, i see no other MAIN reason for it, yeah, we ourselves can use it to start off projects and "save time", if you get gratification by using it and doing touch ups, then enjoy.
I can only see children (and child like adults..who never got that wow magnet on the fridge memory) enjoying this since they want the feeling of creating something amazing but when they attempt it the end result isn't what they had in mind.
I can see ai generated stuff can be used for people who want to hire someone to create something themselves, giving the artist 100% of the $ for what they are actually worth and using the ai art as a point of reference of what they have in mind. If these a.i. services aren't already to $ Pay for, that is where i see them heading $ pay to use it, thus removing the artists all together. Same for 3D + anything eventually.
To be honest I am not sure I see lots of changing with AI introduction. The field of concept art and illustrations , book covers etc have become financially unsound for decades already, since digital age emerging .
It's what I tried to do after art school and quickly figured out I will die of hunger if would be persistent in this. The thing is that Illustrative self expression is not a unique skill. It's not even that much of a "creative" job . Neither requires that much of intelligence and thinking. I recall the girls from psychology tried to measure IQ of us, art faculty crowd and they couldn't believe the results . Something is wrong with the tests , they said :)
With digital age a huge wave of illustrative art flooded internet and turned it into just a sort of visual noise nobody really care about or willing to pay for unfortunately. I've seen it for many of my art school mates too who became art teachers rather than artists themselves. Whatever you do someone in the world does almost same and cheaper. My hat off to those who survived that.
ps. I had a math teacher in my Alma mater who once told me: "you have to run from this faculty with as much speed as you can . You still have a chance". Too bad I just shrugged and haven't followed her advise.