3D-Mobster opened this issue on Aug 09, 2023 · 28 posts
3D-Mobster posted Sun, 13 August 2023 at 6:31 PM
Yeah, social media can be rough, try chatting about movies and people will go nuts if they disagree with you :D
Anyway I found this article, which I think is interesting.
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Freelance illustrator Amber Yu used to make 3,000 to 7,000 yuan ($430 to $1,000) for every video game poster she drew. Making the promotional posters, published on social media to attract players and introduce new features, was skill-intensive and time-consuming. Once, she spent an entire week completing one illustration of a woman dressed in traditional Chinese attire performing a lion dance — first making a sketch on Adobe Photoshop, then carefully refining the outlines and adding colors.
But since February, these job opportunities have vanished, Yu told Rest of World. Gaming companies, equipped with AI image generators, can create a similar illustration in seconds. Yu said they now simply offer to commission her for small fixes, like tweaking the lighting and skewed body parts, for a tenth of her original rate.
...Chinese video game companies, from tech giants like Tencent to indie game developers, have begun using these programs to design and create video game characters, backdrops, and promotional materials.
(Tencent might not be well known by a lot of people, but it is a massive company owning I don't know how many gaming studios. And have a net worth of 402 billion dollars.)
“AI is developing at a speed way beyond our imagination,” Xu Yingying, illustrator at an independent game art studio in Chongqing, told Rest of World. Xu’s studio produces designs for major game developers in China. Five of the studio’s 15 illustrators who specialize in character design were laid off this year, and Xu believes the adoption of AI image generators was partly to blame. “Two people could potentially do the work that used to be done by 10,” she said.
AI-generated art was so skilled that some illustrators talked about giving up drawing altogether. “Our way of making a living is suddenly destroyed,” said a game artist in Guangdong, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of being identified by her employer, to Rest of World. Yu, the freelance illustrator, said it was “despicable” that algorithms — trained on vast datasets that took humans decades to produce — were on the verge of replacing the artists themselves. Still, Yu plans to train AI programs with her own drawings to improve her productivity. “If I’m a top-notch artist, I might be able to boycott [them]. But I have to eat.”
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And still, we are only in the early ages of AI, so it doesn't look too good for traditional artists I think, unfortunately. Im wondering if there is anyone out there that has a solution to this or whether they just hope that it will somehow solve itself or just accept that this is how it is going to be?