>>2472542I think artists are wholesale over reacting to the current realities of AI. We are still hilariously far from any AGI and even when such a thing is accomplished you still lack a compelling input mechanism to get what you want. Instead digital artists, like software devs are just facing a major shift in work pipeline structure. And even if such things did occur, artists would still have a major advantage in that have a far better ability to evaluate, modify and contextualize the slop.
While I absolutely see why the producers of still images are panicking, the most "employable" parts of their industry have a chance to become much better in all facets. There is major room for change.
Consider how much animation has evolved since computer assisted tools entered the market. Rather than annihilate the industry, it allowed tons in savings, drastically lowering the investment ceiling, meaning far more content was produced than ever. Everyone simply just responded by increasing content length, tailoring market preferences (since you could survive off smaller user bases than before) and greenlighting smaller projects they never would have otherwise. I can easily come up with a use case involving even current concepts: Nvidia and it's (admittedly barely working) frame generation for video games. Reducing the amount of work artists have to put in to have a basic exposition scene from 24 frames to 4-10 depending on complexity be huge. You could massively reduce team sizes, allowing far more input from each person on the team, rather than having the factory assembly line type setup of today.
Obviously video games are another avenue. By pretty everyone's approximation, the teams behind AAA games are WAYYYY to big to actually produce a coherent product, especially when you add in all the support studios who barely even know what they're working on. It would far far better for the art team to be scaled back down to 10-20 people. And this doesn't touch on how much easier it could be for an artist to make genres which were previously cost prohibitive for them. Not needing to hire someone for features like a npc scripting, or multi-player, or collect in game statistics, drastically increases the chance that a single person or small team can make something unique.