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Yeah I am not sure how this will play out for professional illustration... You can trace a constantly evolving visual style in web design back to a root cause:

Yeah I am not sure how this will play out for professional illustration... You can trace a constantly evolving visual style in web design back to a root cause: "The need to look modern and legitimate." It's hard to remember, but there was once a time where good stock photography was a way to look modern and legitimate. That birthed a thousand cheap stock photo sites and eroded the effect. So we moved on to a constantly evolving style of illustration. Skeuomorphism, corporate memphis, gradient meshes, clay. Websites use these to signal modernity and legitimacy, but the very use of it erodes the effect and they have to move on. If we can write an ALT tag and get a professional-looking illustration in any style, that will erode the effect, and we will have to find new ways of looking modern and legitimate. Maybe that will involve professional illustrators, or maybe it will move somewhere else, just like when it shifted from photogs to illustrators.

teawrecks 4y ago
Well we already know how to do style transfer. But yeah, it'll be interesting if DALL-E is considered passé in 10 years.
ben_w 4y ago
I saw a similar argument recently, subtly different in that it was claiming the root cause was needing to look like you spent real money as a way to signal your legitimacy. I think they called it peacocking, and it’s the same idea that “virtue signalling” had before that term got used for “politics I don’t like”. Spending money to prove you have money to spend made me think it would be a perfect fit for NFTs. (Not any NFT in particular, just so long as it’s needlessly expensive in any strictly objective sense).
gatonegro 4y ago
If I had to guess, I'd say the trends will still be set by big design agencies and artists who get paid handsome sums to work on a big company's rebranding project. The difference will be that many of the smaller illustration gigs, which essentially boil down to "copy the style of this big company" will cease to exist. Those types of gigs don't require a whole lot of creativity or skill, because the client simply wants a knock-off of what someone else came up with, but for cheap. AI-generated "art" will allow those clients to bypass the human and just get what they want directly from a computer. In a sense, it's going to be similar to what professional photography has gone through in the past few decades with cameras becoming more and more commonplace and affordable. Some people still want a professional portrait taken of them, but the majority of people are perfectly happy with what a mobile phone camera can produce.

teawrecks 4y ago

Well we already know how to do style transfer. But yeah, it'll be interesting if DALL-E is considered passé in 10 years.

ben_w 4y ago

I saw a similar argument recently, subtly different in that it was claiming the root cause was needing to look like you spent real money as a way to signal your legitimacy. I think they called it peacocking, and it’s the same idea that “virtue signalling” had before that term got used for “politics I don’t like”. Spending money to prove you have money to spend made me think it would be a perfect fit for NFTs. (Not any NFT in particular, just so long as it’s needlessly expensive in any strictly objective sense).

gatonegro 4y ago

If I had to guess, I'd say the trends will still be set by big design agencies and artists who get paid handsome sums to work on a big company's rebranding project. The difference will be that many of the smaller illustration gigs, which essentially boil down to "copy the style of this big company" will cease to exist. Those types of gigs don't require a whole lot of creativity or skill, because the client simply wants a knock-off of what someone else came up with, but for cheap. AI-generated "art" will allow those clients to bypass the human and just get what they want directly from a computer. In a sense, it's going to be similar to what professional photography has gone through in the past few decades with cameras becoming more and more commonplace and affordable. Some people still want a professional portrait taken of them, but the majority of people are perfectly happy with what a mobile phone camera can produce.