The AI Unbundling
Although we talk a lot about disruption, only very few technologies are truly disruptive. You can tell by the panic and awe in the air whether you're dealing with real disruption or incremental change.Dropbox made filesharing easier. It's a good product, but not disruptive. Nobody panicked that Dropbox would make their job redundant.Uber was hard on the taxi industry, but fundamentally you still have drivers taking people from A to B. First you had to call the cab company now you use an app. It's an improvement, but not truly disruptive. Not like level 5 self-driving cars would be.Amazon and Walmart by contrast did disrupt entire industries. Independent book shops and mom&pop retailers saw the writing on the wall. They knew they couldn't survive facing this kind of competition, and largely, they didn't.Stable Diffusion (and similar tools) fall in this last category of truly disruptive technologies. It's going to destroy the livelihoods of the majority of independent artists in a way that looks inevitable to me. These new tools boost artist productivity by 100x and that means good artists will be producing much more art than ever before. This pushes cost down and quality expectations way up. Some artists will adapt and thrive in this new environment, but the majority won't. It won't be long until making a living with photoshop will become as hard as making a living playing guitar. This is good for society but bad for many individual artists.There will be a backlash. People will insist that SD art isn't real art. Artists will fight back, and lose. Because SD isn't going anywhere. This is what disruption looks like, and it isn't pretty.