I finally talked to a real painter about AI art and it hit different

Last week I was at a coffee shop in Portland and got talking to this guy who does oil paintings full time. He's been at it for like 15 years, shows in galleries and everything. I brought up AI art tools and expected him to be totally against them. But he actually said something that made me pause. He told me that his worry isn't that AI will replace artists, but that it will flood the market with a million cheap images that look good enough for most people. He said companies will stop paying for custom work because they can just type in keywords and get something close enough. That really hit me because I hadn't thought about it from that angle. It's not about AI making bad art, it's about how it changes the value of human effort in the eyes of buyers. Has anyone else had a conversation with an artist that shifted how you see this issue?

2 comments

2 Comments

wood.uma4d ago

The same thing is happening in other creative fields, I've watched it play out with stock photography and graphic design over the last ten years. Once a tool makes it easy to create something that looks okay for cheap, the demand for custom work drops off a cliff. It's not about the quality of the final piece, it's about how much a company is willing to pay for "good enough." We are seeing the same cycle in writing and music now, the tools get better and the market for human made work gets squeezed.

theas284d ago

Wonder what happens when AI training data runs out of new human work to copy.