As an artist I am concerned about AI image generation

One thing that makes me a little hopeful is that every image I've generated with DALL-E 2, even the best ones, would require non-trivial work to make them "good".

There's always something wrong, and you can't tell the model "the hat should be tilted about 5 about degrees", or "the hands should not look like ghoulish pretzels, thanks".

There's also this fundamental limitation that the model can give you a thing that fits some criteria, but it has no concept of the relationships between elements in a composition, or why things are the way they are. It's never exactly right.

It's like the model gets you the first 90%, and then you need a trained painter to get the second 90%.

But yeah, it will certainly devalue the craft, don't get me wrong. And anyone who is callously making comparisons to buggy whip manufacturers should consider how it would (excuse me, will) feel when AI code generators pivot to being more than a copilot, and suddenly the development team at your office is a lot smaller than it used to be, and maybe you aren't on it anymore.

If you spend a lifetime mastering some skill, and then it's just not valued anymore, it sucks, and you get pretty mad about it.

Call me a doomer, but I think this makes the possible consequences even worse.

Remember the 80/20 rule.

A lot of modern product innovation is not really about improving quality - rather, its about introducing lower-quality versions of existing products which are significantly cheaper than the original but still "good enough".

Dalle2 and friends could fall into the same bucket. If they produce artwork that is objectively worse than a human-painted version would be, but still "good enough" for many mundane usecases - stock photos, concept art, etc - we might still see a wide adoption and displacement of human artists from those usecases - along with an overall drop in quality of artworks.