The AI Art Apocalypse
As an artist (music, film, 3D modeling&#x2F;rendering, creative writing, portraiture) and an AI engineer, I&#x27;ll admit I have a lot of uncertainty about the future of art. Some days I&#x27;m very scared, other days I figure I&#x27;ll just &quot;go with the flow&quot; and not worry too much about a future I can&#x27;t control.<p>I read the papers. I see the pace of progress. I understand how these models work on a technical level and I am blown away by how quickly they are being iterated on. I expect little to no digital art (images, videos, films, music, writing) will be sold for profit by human artists 10 years from now, and the only reason I haven&#x27;t extended that to physical media like sculpture or street art is that I don&#x27;t know whether we&#x27;ll have dextrous enough robots to make those yet (though dextrous robots will indubitably come soon as well).<p>People <i>love</i> to bring out the painting-and-photography example as a defense for why AI is not actually going to bring an end to the art market, but I just don&#x27;t see it as a valid analogy. Photography and painting both survived because they&#x27;re fundamentally different things and can be easily distinguished in cases where their respective artists choose to differentiate themselves. AI art is different, because its entire purpose is to replicate, and no matter what human artists do with the medium of digital images, the AI will always be right there to gobble up the new wave changes and learn to replicate them.<p>Whereas the advent of photography was never <i>meant</i> to kill the painting industry, these AI algorithms are very much <i>meant</i> to kill the image industry, whether that was the intention of the researchers or not.