Microblog Memes

You know, interesting kind of aside here, I haven't seen talked about anywhere at all, but I would like to interrogate everyone here about it to get their thoughts.

I don't think AI is generally going to just replace artists wholesale, or is going to take over without some sort of editing, and that editing will probably necessitate a kind of creative process, and that's probably going to be adjacent to what lots of artists already do. AI as a tool, rather than as a replacement. We saw this with the shift from 2d to 3d in animation. This was accompanied by lack of unionization in the 3d workforce, yes, and was incentivized by it, but the convergence of these mediums, even really only fairly recently, has bolstered artists' ability to make much smaller projects work on a larger scale than they previously would've been able to. If you really need evidence of this, you can kind of look at much earlier newgrounds stuff vs the later work. There's less people using that site now, and the userbase has probably aged up substantially over time, but I do think it's probably fair to say that the quality of the work has gone up (quality obviously being subjective). Basically, Blender is a pretty good software, it's very cool and good.

SO, to the point, if this is the case, and artists are able to substantially cut down on their workload, while still producing similar or larger outputs, or better outputs, will this actually affect art, kind of, as an industry? Is there a pre-allocated volume of art that public consciousness will allow to exist? In which case, the amount of artists would go down. Or is it more the case that there is only a pre-allocated amount of capital that can be given to art? In which case, the number of artists might be the same, and we might just see larger volumes of art in general? I think historically the latter is the case, but that might have changed, or, more realistically, I think it would be dependent on external economic factors.