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There was a clear career path for anyone out of a job due to photographs though. Become a photographer. Which was a perfectly fine career for a very long time.

There was a clear career path for anyone out of a job due to photographs though. Become a photographer. Which was a perfectly fine career for a very long time. It still is, really, despite the high quality cameras available to many people, because it requires artistic and technical skill. The career path for an artist trying to find something else while AI is developing at this pace is...less clear, and definitely scarier.

eternalban 4y ago
Conceptual art remains a possibility.
notahacker 4y ago
Photography didn't replace visual art though (which is just as well for painters and sculptors really, the skill needed to operate an early camera was pretty orthogonal). A subset doing the grunt work of simply recording details for prosperity had a competitive alternative, but even in the subset of image production where photorealism is considered desirable, people still commission painters for "lifelike" portraits and Canaletto renderings of Venice are still worth a fortune despite a near infinitude of similar images on Instagram. Same goes for this really, but perhaps even more so. It's impressive at producing eye-catching photos quality images of simple concepts you might use in advertising campaigns, and can do a good job of reproducing well defined cartoon styles. But the artists working in those sort of roles are already working digitally and using image libraries, and this is a massive productivity boost for them - dozens of "$brand on beach" concept images for no effort at all, and they'll still need all the retouching and layering and colour balancing and combining with other images. And as soon as the brief gets more precise about details of layout and colour scheme or what they want the model to look like, they're either back to their original creative flow or designing text prompts and curating images for the brief is an advanced skill in itself. Non artists can produce "good enough" images too (looks great for memes), but much like non-artists wielding cameras they're mostly satisfying their own whims rather than competing with the business of art

eternalban 4y ago

Conceptual art remains a possibility.

notahacker 4y ago

Photography didn't replace visual art though (which is just as well for painters and sculptors really, the skill needed to operate an early camera was pretty orthogonal). A subset doing the grunt work of simply recording details for prosperity had a competitive alternative, but even in the subset of image production where photorealism is considered desirable, people still commission painters for "lifelike" portraits and Canaletto renderings of Venice are still worth a fortune despite a near infinitude of similar images on Instagram. Same goes for this really, but perhaps even more so. It's impressive at producing eye-catching photos quality images of simple concepts you might use in advertising campaigns, and can do a good job of reproducing well defined cartoon styles. But the artists working in those sort of roles are already working digitally and using image libraries, and this is a massive productivity boost for them - dozens of "$brand on beach" concept images for no effort at all, and they'll still need all the retouching and layering and colour balancing and combining with other images. And as soon as the brief gets more precise about details of layout and colour scheme or what they want the model to look like, they're either back to their original creative flow or designing text prompts and curating images for the brief is an advanced skill in itself. Non artists can produce "good enough" images too (looks great for memes), but much like non-artists wielding cameras they're mostly satisfying their own whims rather than competing with the business of art