The reason that society isn’t currently freaking out about AI taking artists’ jobs is mainly that we’ve historically thought of artists’ jobs as inherently precarious, and so a new report of them being precarious for new reasons doesn’t surprise anyone. The moment it takes a “so stable your mom wants you to study it in school” job, that all will change for the stable folks, but not the artists, unfortunately. After all, they’re just artists...
(If you say that this means that I don’t care about artists or their financial challenges, you’re wrong. This sucks, I’m predicting, not endorsing, a likely scenario.)
I hope you’re right that job losses in more ‘stable’ fields will catalyze interest in a constructive response, but I was surprised over the last 20 years or so as the market power of workers in various traditionally stable industries collapsed for mundane economic reasons and not much changed in the policy world. Professors, lawyers, accountants, civil servants, and even some types of physicians have all been squeezed fairly heavily in the US just from globalization, monopolization, and deregulation. There was some brief pushback around the time of Occupy Wall Street, and then after that increased job insecurity became part of the new status quo.
Entry level software engineers are now facing serious pressure. It’s debatable whether this is from pandemic-era over-hiring or from AI, but until last year “software engineering” was the paradigmatic example of a job more stable than art, to the point where artists went to coding bootcamp if they wanted to sell out. Now bootcamps seem mostly dead, but I don’t hear serious cries to save them.
Worked as a translator just over a decade ago and I can confirm that there was a point when the freelance market started flooding with lower-paying MTPE (machine translation post-editing) jobs which started to displace standard translation gigs. The advent of LLMs certainly meant that one could now forget translation as a career option.
Another factor here is that artists are mostly self-employed, so you don’t see headlines like “ArtCo closes factory; lays off 3,500 workers.” Instead, a diffuse group of people spread all over the country just have a harder time finding work.
I think it is also worth considering that “artist” is very broad.
Digital artists (and potentially songwriters?) seem very vulnerable, but I expect that my role as a programmer/CS researcher will be 100% automated before I can hire a robot to be even a mediocre photographer. Photorealistic image generation probably reduces the demand for some kinds of photography (stock photography?), but not the need to capture real events like weddings. Painters*, sculptors, and other physical-medium artists seem even less exposed. Even if a robot could paint something nice, I suspect that people buying paintings will prefer that they were made by a human (I would).
It would be interesting to see a breakdown of AI-vulnerability by type of artist, as well as how much society cares about preserving each form of art as something that humans should do.
* Additionally, I wouldn’t be surprised if “person who physically paints” is the first kind of artist people think of when they hear the word “artist.”
I expect that my role as a programmer/CS researcher will be 100% automated before I can hire a robot to be even a mediocre photographer.
I think image models are getting good enough at fidelity that you could, hypothetically, have some random guy take pictures of an event, and then postprocess them with an image model to make the lighting and perspective better without it being visibly AI-generated.
Even if a robot could paint something nice, I suspect that people buying paintings will prefer that they were made by a human
This isn’t limited to art. Even generic, boring cubicle jobs prefer humans on the basis that they can be held accountable and can (usually)explain the reasoning behind anything they did. Also, because of the variousbullshit job reasons(Flunkies, box-tickers, and goons definitely can’t be automated).
>I think image models are getting good enough at fidelity that you could, hypothetically, have some random guy take pictures of an event, and then postprocess them with an image model to make the lighting and perspective better without it being visibly AI-generated.
I have done this with the best recent models, and almost nobody has been able to tell. It is absolutely trivial to take a photo on a phone, and ask Nano Banana to “make it look like it was taken by a professional photographer using a DSLR applying expert color grading.” Easy as that.
Creative careers like “artist” are incredibly depreciated because supply vastly outstrips demand. There’s not a lot of art you need; people don’t get their walls painted with frescoes any more, they don’t get portraits. All art is highly reproducible in one way or another (e.g. art for games, art for book covers, etc). Meanwhile it looks fun or at least somewhat fulfilling, definitely more stimulating than doing some boring drudgery, so ton of people try. As a result anyone who wants art, especially at a low-ish level, has an embarrassment of wannabe artists to search for the lowest price (which sometimes can be “zero”—the infamous “exposure” or even negative!).
I always assumed it’s because in western society, the career of “artist” is smeared and sneered at for being “not a real job”. My creative friends often mention the risk of being “taken advantage of” when it comes to payment and remuneration—that since they love what they do, they should be expected to “do it for free” or be underpaid.
And at society at large there’s this idea that you get paid to suffer—and jobs aren’t expected to be appealing or fun. So you shouldn’t expect to be paid for making art. This does dovetail as a cause of financial precarity you’re alluding to—but I believe there’s more malice or disdain behind the reaction than just neutral risk assessment. Therefore when A.I. comes and gobbles up paid opportunities for artists, the view is “well that wasn’t a serious job anyway—it’s just a hobby, a passion. You don’t get paid to do what you love, you get paid to do what you hate.” rather than “it’s a valid job, but good luck making a living”
To be honest, I’ve never actually looked into this to back it up. I’m making a lot of assumptions here and putting a lot of thoughts/words into a nebulous group known as “society”. The closest is I’ve read some historical analysis about the shift in views of genius (including artistic) from the romantic era and into the industrial age that underscore a shifting sentiment from being driven by passion or inspiration (passive), into patience and discipline (active).
Something I believe:
The reason that society isn’t currently freaking out about AI taking artists’ jobs is mainly that we’ve historically thought of artists’ jobs as inherently precarious, and so a new report of them being precarious for new reasons doesn’t surprise anyone. The moment it takes a “so stable your mom wants you to study it in school” job, that all will change for the stable folks, but not the artists, unfortunately. After all, they’re just artists...
(If you say that this means that I don’t care about artists or their financial challenges, you’re wrong. This sucks, I’m predicting, not endorsing, a likely scenario.)
I hope you’re right that job losses in more ‘stable’ fields will catalyze interest in a constructive response, but I was surprised over the last 20 years or so as the market power of workers in various traditionally stable industries collapsed for mundane economic reasons and not much changed in the policy world. Professors, lawyers, accountants, civil servants, and even some types of physicians have all been squeezed fairly heavily in the US just from globalization, monopolization, and deregulation. There was some brief pushback around the time of Occupy Wall Street, and then after that increased job insecurity became part of the new status quo.
Entry level software engineers are now facing serious pressure. It’s debatable whether this is from pandemic-era over-hiring or from AI, but until last year “software engineering” was the paradigmatic example of a job more stable than art, to the point where artists went to coding bootcamp if they wanted to sell out. Now bootcamps seem mostly dead, but I don’t hear serious cries to save them.
Wasn’t translator supposed to be a normal stable job? Allegedly they were hit hard by google translate even pre-llm
Worked as a translator just over a decade ago and I can confirm that there was a point when the freelance market started flooding with lower-paying MTPE (machine translation post-editing) jobs which started to displace standard translation gigs. The advent of LLMs certainly meant that one could now forget translation as a career option.
Another factor here is that artists are mostly self-employed, so you don’t see headlines like “ArtCo closes factory; lays off 3,500 workers.” Instead, a diffuse group of people spread all over the country just have a harder time finding work.
I think it is also worth considering that “artist” is very broad.
Digital artists (and potentially songwriters?) seem very vulnerable, but I expect that my role as a programmer/CS researcher will be 100% automated before I can hire a robot to be even a mediocre photographer. Photorealistic image generation probably reduces the demand for some kinds of photography (stock photography?), but not the need to capture real events like weddings. Painters*, sculptors, and other physical-medium artists seem even less exposed. Even if a robot could paint something nice, I suspect that people buying paintings will prefer that they were made by a human (I would).
It would be interesting to see a breakdown of AI-vulnerability by type of artist, as well as how much society cares about preserving each form of art as something that humans should do.
* Additionally, I wouldn’t be surprised if “person who physically paints” is the first kind of artist people think of when they hear the word “artist.”
I think image models are getting good enough at fidelity that you could, hypothetically, have some random guy take pictures of an event, and then postprocess them with an image model to make the lighting and perspective better without it being visibly AI-generated.
This isn’t limited to art. Even generic, boring cubicle jobs prefer humans on the basis that they can be held accountable and can (usually) explain the reasoning behind anything they did. Also, because of the various bullshit job reasons (Flunkies, box-tickers, and goons definitely can’t be automated).
>I think image models are getting good enough at fidelity that you could, hypothetically, have some random guy take pictures of an event, and then postprocess them with an image model to make the lighting and perspective better without it being visibly AI-generated.
I have done this with the best recent models, and almost nobody has been able to tell. It is absolutely trivial to take a photo on a phone, and ask Nano Banana to “make it look like it was taken by a professional photographer using a DSLR applying expert color grading.” Easy as that.
Creative careers like “artist” are incredibly depreciated because supply vastly outstrips demand. There’s not a lot of art you need; people don’t get their walls painted with frescoes any more, they don’t get portraits. All art is highly reproducible in one way or another (e.g. art for games, art for book covers, etc). Meanwhile it looks fun or at least somewhat fulfilling, definitely more stimulating than doing some boring drudgery, so ton of people try. As a result anyone who wants art, especially at a low-ish level, has an embarrassment of wannabe artists to search for the lowest price (which sometimes can be “zero”—the infamous “exposure” or even negative!).
Is AI taking artists jobs?
I always assumed it’s because in western society, the career of “artist” is smeared and sneered at for being “not a real job”. My creative friends often mention the risk of being “taken advantage of” when it comes to payment and remuneration—that since they love what they do, they should be expected to “do it for free” or be underpaid.
And at society at large there’s this idea that you get paid to suffer—and jobs aren’t expected to be appealing or fun. So you shouldn’t expect to be paid for making art. This does dovetail as a cause of financial precarity you’re alluding to—but I believe there’s more malice or disdain behind the reaction than just neutral risk assessment. Therefore when A.I. comes and gobbles up paid opportunities for artists, the view is “well that wasn’t a serious job anyway—it’s just a hobby, a passion. You don’t get paid to do what you love, you get paid to do what you hate.” rather than “it’s a valid job, but good luck making a living”
To be honest, I’ve never actually looked into this to back it up. I’m making a lot of assumptions here and putting a lot of thoughts/words into a nebulous group known as “society”. The closest is I’ve read some historical analysis about the shift in views of genius (including artistic) from the romantic era and into the industrial age that underscore a shifting sentiment from being driven by passion or inspiration (passive), into patience and discipline (active).