My guess is that AI’s first big victim for graphic design will be stock art. Previously, crap like that background asset would just be stock purchased from Getty or Adobe stock. Now it can be generated.

I’m already starting to use it instead of paying for bullshit licenses.

I’ve been using AI for school and work, as God intended: give it the raw, have it do the grunt organization work, and then proofread to correct anything.

It’s a tool, one of many in my toolbox. People who are just flat against any and all AI or LLMs are behind the curve.

Pretty much.

People very frequently complain about AI taking the jobs of artists. But if the money was never actually going to be put on the table for artists to claim, I really don’t think that was going to help much.

That doesn’t mean I hate artists what do, absolutely not. It’s just that artists are people and people are limited in how much they can do at any single time.

For the past couple of months. I’ve currently been waiting on multiple artists to finish up their commission queue. And one of which I’m worried I’ll have to turn away because of a variety of life changes in my life that’s led me to losing my job and me having reduced income.

As of right now, the costs of generating a picture with a tool like Stable Diffusion or DALL-E has been pretty low, the former even being free if you have the right hardware. And these systems manage to be almost always available, as well as being capable of working in a matter of seconds.

Of course, that doesn’t change the fact that these tools are only good at painting the bigger picture. They have a tendency to choke on the smaller details. And I would personally rather wait for an actual person to be available to work on something original that’s also capable of filling a niche that AI models have yet to be trained on.

This entirely disregards the fact that the training of these models was done on human artists’ work without consent or renumeration. As it is, it is not “AI”, It is just a glorified plagiarism machine. Not to say it isn’t impressive, but it has already stolen work already done by artists and further stealing upcoming work by mashing together older works.

There’s ways to do it ethically by training on artwork with permission kind of like how Adobe is doing it, but that isn’t going to have as wide of a reach as the other free ones.

but it has already stolen work already done by artists and further stealing upcoming work by mashing together older works.

You keep using that word "stolen", I do not think it means what you think it means.

Also, AIs do not "mash together" works from their training sets. This is a very common and very incorrect conception of how they work. They are not collage generators or copy-and-paste machines. They learn concepts from the images they train on, they don't actually remember fragments of those images to later regurgitate in some sort of patched-together Frankenstein's Monster.