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Centaurs (humans using AI tools) don't last forever. They are a transitional stage until the AI gets good enough to replace the humans entirely.
And maybe that would be fine if we had figured out a way to compensate the losers with money and sexual access, but here in the real world, going from being an artist to being unemployed because now suddenly everyone has an artist in their laptop is a huge blow. It's not just envy and greed that other people now have access to your talents; it has real material consequences.
Most artists are artists because they love art, not because of the money (it's a notoriously badly-paid field). Telling them, "nope, sorry, you can't even keep earning a marginal living by drawing now, you will have to take some other job flipping burgers or sweeping floors and maybe draw in your spare time if you want but keep in mind you will never be as good as the machine and nobody will ever look at your drawings because everyone can have infinite high-quality drawings of whatever their niche interest is created on demand" is soul-crushing.
Even with rapid AI advances, I predict this is a long time away. Sometime in the 1900s, amidst rapid technological development and automation (e.g. TVs, microwaves, washing machines), we thought the world would be like the Jetsons by 2000. AI’s creativity has actually regressed since around GPT 3; the newest models can produce images that look better and follow more instructions, but unprompted details are no more interesting.
Even the fine details like strokes are worse than an (albeit good) artist, so those artists still stand out from the centaurs, just less so. And those who want to up their game will still go to art school.
How many artists today make a living wage? If anything, AI improving productivity and automating boring tasks may give them more time for art.
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I would argue that a large part of art is connecting with another human being through a shared experience. I think that's why so many artists are up in arms about making art so "easy," because it drops the human connection in many ways. The only human in the loop is prompting.
My view is that things will adapt. The human connection is still needed and there will always be art done the "old fashioned way." People still drag around large-format cameras to take pictures or simply shoot on film. My friend does painting and is trying to make a business of it.
At the same time, things have gotten easier. You don't have to be a "good" photographer to take a good photo with your phone's camera -- because there's already so much AI in that loop making things better. Same with so much other human-made art (and beyond). It's so much easier to get to the joy of creation. With photography, you can be creative with your phone and don't need the traditional thousands of dollars of gear to start creating.
The removal of those gates, both financial and the gate of years of practice, is what allows for that creation. I think we should celebrate that, not regulate it. Why does not "paying your dues" make your contribution invalid?
If your art, regardless of how it's made, helps you connect to others, I say that's a good thing.
I have a lot of other ideas in my head I'm trying to get out and make into a coherent argument, but I'm having trouble. For instance, we've had computer spell-checkers for decades now and no one blinks at that. We've had simple grammar checkers for a while as well, predating the AI everywhere thing we're seeing now, and no one really cares about that. It's only a matter of time before AI does more and people don't care. The only thing that really frustrates me is when people give up their agency to AI and stop thinking for themselves. AI is an amplifier of a human's ideas and abilities. But humans are still important.
A good way to think about artists, writers and the sort is to recognize they're performers who use their specialized mediums as a basis for their performances. This is to say the performers themselves don't fade into the background. Their work isn't judged alone and by itself as technically evolved curiousities. The works are frozen in time like amber, yes, but like in any other performance art, their personalities are fully on display everytime those works are perused, every time they make a public appearance or remark to boost their own publicity. It's those parasocial bonds they create which engender a following. AI would need to become not only competent at manufacturing the underlying goods but fulfilling all the other roles these freelancers take on. For freelancers, the whole operation is a one man show where they must become not only technical experts, but also frontmen who can appeal to crowds, manage public images, deal with other professionals. So an AI would need to be able to cover all of those bases in order to directly replace the individual doing them, or at least to turn them into proxies the AIs can micromanage.
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That was already the status quo for artists, though- they were already waiting tables.
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You could say that about photography as well, that the humans controlling cameras are a transitional stage until the cameras get so good that they don't need people. Yet it's been over a century, there's uncountable hours of photography being captured at all times all over the planet all the time and yet almost none of it is interesting outside of like the nature wildlife automated photography that some people like to look at. I could probably find beauty in automated traffic cameras if I felt like it but I'm in the minority and most people would rather see a human produced and curated series of photographs than a randomly generated or algorithmically curated series of photographs
Again I am an artist and designer and no one is telling me I'll have to flip burgers right now, I can think of 50 other more creative tasks I could monetize before I'm going to sweep a floor. lol. Besides that the bottle neck in the economics of art has never been supply side but rather demand side and AI has NO answer for the demand problem. I could already produce thousands of t-shirt designs a day if I wanted ten years ago, the technology was already there, but the demand for this variety of t-shirts does not exist.
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