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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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Such art is only really threatening things where the graphic design budget is next to $0, e.g. stuff like placeholder art or stock images.

It already works well enough that I'll likely use it to generate all the profile art for characters (in a text rpg), and also various fantasy background images. It won't be perfect at representing what I want, but the tools are already there to do all of that for free. The art is likely also higher quality than a lot of the stuff you can use commercially for free. People are already experimenting at doing things like changing the characters expression and clothing without making the image distort/change undesirably.

I don't have any particular reason to believe we've just now basically hit a wall. I expect that NSFW art just needs to be finetuned on, and then it likely can do it quite well.

These predictions have not panned out, however, and both technologies remain a gimmick.

I'm not sure why you think VR is a gimmick? While I agree that people overhyped it, it seems to be steadily growing and has a good enough library to be more than worth playing. (I'm also not sure what you consider a 'major issue' in VR that wasn't fixed?)

You should likewise be skeptical of claims that artists are going to be out of work en-masse any time soon.

I do agree that a large chunk artists are unlikely to be out of their jobs in a couple years. However, it seems reasonable to expect that there will be simply less artists needed in lots of areas over time, and I don't expect it to take twenty years to replace many artists by AI art.