Artists aren't doing it for the money. With advanced tools like these they wouldve iterated much faster and created much grander designs.
Art is about pushing limits of what's possible and AI just raises those limits.
That is unlike any artist that I know and I know quite a lot of them. They love their work and the process but they also need to eat. And that included those mentioned above.
Agree that if you are Artist this is not going to be a big concern to you.
If you like art, then you don't necessarily care about the process, you just want it to keep being produced. Artists obviously want to engage in their profession, because they have the passion to pursue the creation of art. Said passion is now twisted into gatekeeping.
When you take a look around the internet, you can see an incredible amount of beautiful art being made through manual processes by artists and they voluntarily publish a lot of their work for free. The cost and personal enrichment argument is pretty weak here. If anything, the causality could even go in the opposite direction: Artists might want to earn money to pursue their passion.
Let's be honest for a second here. It's legitimate to feel that human created art is expensive and cost prohibitive for your particular needs. Art for professional or personal purposes is usually commissioned, aka made to order, hence it cannot be a mass market commodity.
These manual processes are also inherently limited due to the fact that the entire scene (character, outfit, pose, lighting, perspective) is baked in. If there is a process that doesn't have this limitation that's great, but if the lifting of limitations in one area isn't enough to counteract the loss in quality in other areas that the manual process didn't use to run into? Suddenly that is gate keeping even though the issue at hand is that the quality isn't good enough yet?
There's also an obvious parallel to frameworks and libraries in software development. If the software ecosystem lacks flexibility and customizability or has the wrong abstraction for the problem at hand, you will need to drop down a layer and do things the old fashioned way. A manual artist can produce a character template, a set of clothes or a background design from scratch and combine it with the higher level tools. An AI-only artist is inherently limited in that regard and yet that's supposed to be the future?
It seems like what people like you want to build is a matrix style "life in a pod" world, the most optimal way to spend life: as cheap as possible, as easy as possible, as bland as possible, no struggle, no hardships, no efforts, nothing matters as long as it's cheap and "better" (while not being able to define "better")
That's engineering, if that.
Art isn't, and has never been about that.
AI is well on the way to eliminating human made art since the skills to actually make art will be lost to the skill of being able to describe art. You know, since the only thing that matter is reducing costs.
It will be a golden age where the core differentiating factor is true talent and ideas and execution and not any gatekeeping by degrees, connections or budget.
The only thing AI art makes possible that wasn't possible before is the scale of slop
Says who?
Being an artist means different things to different people, but at the very least I believe it requires an interest in your craft, a desire for personal growth, and a yearning to express yourself.
