I think it comes as no surprise that there are a lot of "heated" debates going on between traditional artists and those embracing AI-generated art. Personally, I haven't experienced any negative feedback, but then again I don't really post a lot of images either on forums or even here with the purpose of getting feedback, but more as examples.

But looking on Reddit, there are often posts of people that feel harassed by one or the other side. However this is not really what this post is about, but rather what benefits or negative things you experience or feel AI-generated images have at the moment and in the future once it gets more developed.

As everyone should know by now, AI-generated images are also venturing into the 3d realm fast and it will probably not take that many years before it is a valid tool in this area as well. 

So what positive things do you see with it and what concerns do you have?

(Let's try to respect each other's views :D)

My own view is that im neither for nor against it, I enjoy all new tools and focus on the end product, how one gets there is of little interest to me. 

Starting with the benefits of AI.

Ease of use and speed, that you can turn out images of very high quality in a few minutes is pretty damn amazing. As an indie developer, whether that is you wanting to make games, both computer games or physical games having access to close to an infinite amount of assets is absolutely a game changer. But pretty much in any case where the budget is limited and having to spend a lot of money on artists is simply not possible for a lot of people.

That it is open source is just absolutely amazing, again for small indie studios/individuals this makes it so much easier for them to realize their dreams.

Looking at 3d applications, I think it would probably be possible over time to optimize and improve the quality as well, for instance as many know, hair in 3d is an absolute pain and often look very bad, simply because it doesn't seem to flow naturally, and even doing cloth animations can in some cases be very time-consuming. One could imagine that by mixing AI into the workflow, it might be possible to add natural-looking hair and cloth as an after-effect. One could also imagine it being integrated into the animation of characters so rather than having to animate all by hand one could use a prompt. Obviously, these things might be somewhat into the future, but at least the possibilities are there.  

Looking at the bad things, the most obvious to me at least is that pretty much anyone at the moment can generate high-quality images with very little effort and it is going to harm traditional artists' job possibilities. It might even discourage younger people from even entering the field in the first place, why study for years to become an artist if you can just type it in an AI tool? Even the best artists out there, can't keep up in production with a computer that is constantly improving and is more productive than they are.

Also, a lot of people are taking advantage of these new AI to exploit or "scam" people that have little knowledge of it, meaning that people might risk paying far more for something that they think is an amazing piece of work, but that is in fact generated very quickly using AI.

I don't think traditional artists are in any particular danger and AI have little impact on them. But especially people making a living from digital art or work, whether that is making commercials, photographs, 2D illustrations or even 3D illustrations are facing some very dark times in my opinion.

Some open questions, could be whether creativity could be hurt over time or not? One argument could be that given that as more and more productions start making use of AI, some of the human creativity is lost as it will be more of a "factory" production of just spitting out new things. People won't really be impressed by it for very long. Alternatively, one could make the argument that with AI, there are so many more possibilities, as you don't really have to limit yourself, the AI will spit out whatever you need regardless of how complicated it is. 

In the somewhat distant future (5-10 years), my guess is that the whole industry is completely different from what it is now and if people even do "traditional" stuff as they do now, I have my doubts about, simply because the market for it might not be viable, it is too expensive to hire these people compared to those working with AI, but it obviously depends on where this technology is going, but one thing is for sure it is going extremely fast :)

What are your thoughts on AI both now and in the future?