Artificial intelligence picture generation has drawn interest of many (me included) and has given rise to a lot of discussion. I assume many of you reading this blog post tried some of the engines yourselves or at least saw what they are capable of producing. At first sight it is very impressive, although the technology still has a lot of limitations, it is progressing rapidly especially that many codes are publicly available.
When it comes to Graphic Designers Industry, accordingly with IBISWorld, its market size for 2022 is estimated as $43.4bn which ranks this industry as 9th among the Global Business Activities industries. With such substantial size, it is inevitable that AI picture generation will find its place in this industry. Whether its influence will be big or small, it will most likely substitute or support many of the processes, in the same manner as increasingly more sophisticated graphic software did over the years. To back up my claim, I prepared for you a short case study.
When you need a graphic, be it an illustration, book cover, logo, or a physical depiction of the wild dream you had last night, if you were not an artist yourself, you would most likely look for outsourcing to one. Feverr is one of the websites that rallies freelancers of various fields, graphic artists included. I would like to present you the results of youtuber “Ten Hundred” after hiring artists on said website to make a graphic for him about his alleged dream for various prices. Below you will see a comparison of four pictures:
Two top ones were generated by me in nightcafe.studio which took me less than 3 minutes. Yes, they are of different styles, but I am sure that a person more familiar with the generators and one having more free access would be able to prepare a more fitting comparison. The two bottom pictures were ordered by abovementioned youtuber Ten Hundred for 155$ and 205$ going from the left, and he waited for the results around a week after paying extra for quick order execution. The funny part is, he explained what he was expecting to receive by text message, similarly as you type prompts to the current AI picture generators, and most of the artist he hired missed some of the details requested or added their own interpretations. Nevertheless, the mentioned order was quite detailed and abstract, I do not believe it would be easy for the AI to cleanly cope with such a prompt, and here emerges an opportunity for freelance artists, although not only, to use this new tool as a base of their works. On Fiverr alone there are already a lot of people offering their expertise in using the generators for 5 to 10$, but also artists that offer to generate and tweak or enhance AI generated pictures. While making a digital image, you will most often create layers, and even being able to quickly generate an original and detailed background scenery is a huge timesaver.
I personally believe that the interest of digital artists in this technology will grow more strongly than their aversion towards this potential competition and the industry in general will be affected.
References:
https://www.youtube.com/@TenHundred
https://www.ibisworld.com/global/market-size/global-graphic-designers/
Images, generated by AI, are truly impressive. I suppose, that it might be a trigger for digital artists to start worrying about their work’s demand among people. After reading this article, I would definitely turn to AI in case of a need for a certain image to be done for me. It would be senseless to pay a digital artist for work that could be easily performed for free by simply using a public website. And I guess that the same train of thought will have, for instance, writers who need to create a peculiar book cover or insert a certain image in their book. However, in my opinion, in correlation with the increase of AI demand in digital art, the similarity of works will grow as well. The problem is that AI generates images on the base of other digital artists’ works’ available on the internet. This leads to the issue of slight resemblance between images created by Artificial Intelligence and consequently results in the issue of plagiarism among digital artists who use AI generators as assistance for their works. So, I am poised to assume that such AI picture generators could be of great use to simple people who want to save their money, but digital artists should evade this technology in order not to lead to the vanishing of their creativity and uniqueness and hence to their obsolescence.
Seeing how human artists are concerned about growing presence of AI art we could really see they could be replaces. However, looking at the art produces DALL E it’s clear to see it still fails to reflect small details unlike real artists. So most likely demand for highly specific personalized art will remain intact by AI in the nearest future.
AI is a very powerful tool in many aspects. I believe that it will revolutionise our lives in many ways. Moreover, I believe that pictures and films used for advertisement, will start to be generated through these tools in the near future.