If AI comes to dominate the artistic fields as it seems to be doing, from whence will come new styles?
AI does nothing but regurgitate existing content. It forms a word and image salad from piles of harvested content and then spits out replies synthesized from that content. As far as I can tell, it seems to suggest that our current art will be preserved in aspic if the artists turn to AI as their content creator.
My old, Southern man and his cat series are essentially all the same. Here's today's rendering.
I could request it as an oil painting or line drawing or even anime, but it would all be drawn from existing content. How would a new style arise?
Further, if what you want isn't represented in sufficient quantities in it training data, you're out of luck. The frogmouth helmet was a style of helmet used in 15th and 16th century tournament jousting. It looked like this.
Because the frogmouth helmet was so niche, there aren't many of them represented in artwork. Here's what Gemini thought was a frogmouth helmet.
The dude looks like a duck. Ridiculous.
If I can't teach it how to render a frogmouth helmet, for which pictures exist, how am I going to get it to help me develop a new style? If independent, non-AI artists get priced out of the market, isn't art, whether it's prose or poetry or music or images or video, going to be fixed for all time?
1 comment:
I think you are right that this is going to be a problem with mainstream, commercial art. AI is so much cheaper than a human artist that the entire market for "it just looks nice" art is inevitably going to be taken over. And it will always look like that forever after.
There are always going to be the artists that buck the trend, though, although they are going to be hobbyists. My older daughter is a good example. She has completely sworn off of AI, and is entirely working with paper, pencil, pen, and occasionally watercolors. I think she has gotten pretty good, and the things that she generates are clearly hers, and not at all like the standard "AI" styles. She has no illusions about being able to make money selling her work, mainly because even before AI existed, making a living in art was touch-and-go at best. But people who see her art are still impressed by it, because it is, in fact, different.
There's always going to be some niche for the people who want to do it the hard way. Like the shop in the next town over, that refurbishes old-fashioned hand-cranked sewing machine, and teaches people how to use them (the name of the shop is "Sew Cranky"). We just need an economy where people can have a job that pays for their livelihood, while leaving the time and mental energy for their hobbies.
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