What creative field will be safe from AI?

I thought the same thing after seeing the Dall-E productions. As others have noted, they look good enough for a lot of commercial purposes—book and album covers, magazine and website illustrations, advertisements. My daughter is a professional illustrator, and I wondered how safe her career will be in the years ahead.

My tentative guess is that creators whose individual personality and identity are an important part of their appeal will be protected from obsolescence for the time being. Some commercial artists, like many “serious” artists, have public identities and distinctive styles that are part of their appeal; they should be able to continue charging decent rates for their work. But a lot of commercial art is anonymous, without the creators even being credited by name. Content producers will be happy to replace their work with cheaper, faster, easily customizable AI-generated work when they can.

A person starting out now as an artist, musician, or writer, in order to succeed, probably needs to put as much effort into creating a distinctive and attractive public personality as into honing their skills and producing superior work. Some creative people will be able and willing to do that, but it will be difficult for a lot of others.

All of 'em. All of them will be safe. AI generated content is devoid of meaning and randomly generating some pictures isn't indicative of anything to me. Human works of creativity are so much more than randomly generating things from prompts - and don't forget you're not seeing ALL of the pics that have been generated, but some of them.

As people start to generate crap at tremendous volume with AI, more value and emphasis will be placed on creative works made by humans. I very well could be wrong, but either way it's not happening anytime soon.

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Games like go and chess are different, of course computers are better for calculating and optimizing moves and branching paths - no creativity is needed. This portion is completely irrelevant to the discussion of computers trying to generate art.

First of all, this stuff is not AI. It is machine learning. Art is about human expression. It is less about the end product and more about the journey and expression that got to that end product. This machine learning art generation skips all of that.

I personally wouldn't worry about it. Yes, as the saying goes in investing, "people can remain irrational longer than you can be solvent", but if it happens that "AI" starts to replace entire professions wholesale, then we'll have bigger problems. Do you really want to spend your life running from niche statistical machinations?

> Our hope is that DALL·E 2 will empower people to express themselves creatively. DALL·E 2 also helps us understand how advanced AI systems see and understand our world, which is critical to our mission of creating AI that benefits humanity.

This stuff is so far up its own ass, it's comical to me. I get the feeling that OpenAI has a similar problem to the critiques of the MIT Media Lab, in that they're both demo factories in order to generate more funding.

I wouldn't say safe, but safEST is probably writing. Like creative writing where the narrative is something that spans hundreds or even thousands of pages with plot interactions that aren't directly apparent in the text itself.

At least until a true AI/HCI is created.

Most "AI" things are pretty superficial pattern recognition that are just better at unbiased processing of large "shallow" datasets.

Do something where there's no training data available.

The AI companies are re-encoding large corpora of human creative work as a kind of compressed, conceptually-indexed representation. This allows that work to be mixed and the patterns regurgitated in very flexible ways.

Everybody's output (our creative work) is assimilated by the AI, and becomes the AI's output.

For example, OpenAI's Codex is trained on about 54 million public GitHub repositories.

This allows Microsoft's CoPilot to regurgitate pieces of that code without attribution. Code from many sources is blended together and regurgitated for Microsoft's customers (without any acknowledgement of the source).

It is perhaps the greatest theft of intellectual property in the history of Man.

Any multidisciplinary / multi-domain design problem of sufficient complexity is not readily suited to automation.

If you want to stay on the visual creativity wicket, consider getting in to VR educational experiences (massive opportunity: far superior to traditional teaching methods in many cases) and computer games (huge money in the industry, if you can get it).

I think this may be a little pre-mature? As with lots of things that last 20% is going to take the same amount of time as the first 80%. We are currently still no-where near Lv5 AV. And I made the bet in 2018 we will barely get to that point by 2030. And lots more work to be done post 2030.

Another thing with Art is that the current low to mid level art work could be outsourced to a much cheaper labour country. In terms of Web Design, Stock footage etc. They are a much bigger threat now than AI.

My 2 minute take: Anything that needs an understanding of the big picture context.

So creating interconnected or intersectional works, and weaving them together repeatedly and meaningfully over long periods. I'd say that sort of thing is quite far off, and possibly not even coming without another tech breakthrough.

It cant write songs, stories, long jokes, create brands, create videos, create businesses...

We might start to see commercialized products having some success at figuring out static things like style though in the next 5 to 10 years. Fashion and interior designers have "things are a bit harder in 3D" as a shield at the moment, but it might just be a matter of time for them... it will likely depend on how much manufacturability constraints can be trained.

If you have any kind of interest in the psychology field, art therapy is a good candidate, as is based entirely on the value of the artistic output a human being can produce to help him/herself.

If you think art or creativity have been automated then we must be looking at two very different "AI" fields.

Food factories exist, it’s relatively cheap and easy to get a loaf of wonder bread. But, that hasn’t completely killed off bakeries. There is always going to be a demand for artisan versions off mass produced cookie cutter things. No matter how impressive an AI generated art can become it will always be devoid of real emotion and passion and people will realize that, even if only subconsciously.

I don’t believe something like Dall-E 2 would make a visual artist’s job worthless.

Some of the cherry-picked examples were impressive, but the others, not so much. The output lacks the deliberation & thought that an artist’s work would exhibit given the same prompt.

Not to mention that most of the results are not not completely cohesive (e.g. a rabbit missing an ear) so not sure about their usability.

In the renaissance paintbrush skills were a prerequisite for being for an artist, and maybe tomorrow’s artists will use giant GPU cluster with some ‘AI’ in them as paintbrushes.

Maybe, the only creative skills that will matter in the future (from a future art historian perspective) will be the ones to program or use AI.

Bu I don’t think the game is over:

- if you find AI art tools too demeaning and they make you feel that you’re only a dumb prompt writer, become or convince a programmer to build a better tool that connects with your own creative mind

- Or, come up with a new form of art that rebels against the current technological things. Your predecessors were able to raise a middle finger to photography by inventing new abstract forms of art

AI is the best at chess but you would not pay to see two AI play chess while its still interesting to watch Magnus win or lose.

So, likely just because you can make AI works of art, it doesn't mean people will value them equally.

I believe all creative fields will be safe from AI because machines cannot be creative. Whatever machines can do, we will need human ingenuity to apply those in creative ways (which are acts that includes things like being mindful of others, or culture, of psychology of ethics and so on). The problem is the definition of this word creative and whether you see it as a word used to describe particular kinds of human experiences (which take culture, psychology and other contextual issues into account) or the more "modern" view of creative which is about a "power" in the mind to produce outputs which we can ascribe things like "novelty", "value" and "significant". (You can trace this back to Guilford in 1950). We should think of AI as another tool to support and challenge and provoke the creative human experience of both making work, but also in in providing us with new approaches to appreciate the outputs of others. Creativty is an attitude, a state of mind, a curiosity about the nature of things .... go back and read Deweys "Art as Experience" and if you want to see a more recent take on AI from this perspective check out:

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/26094/1/arts-08-00036....

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/26094/1/arts-08-00036....

An ML model like DALL-E can only generate something that looks like what it has already seen. It is literally trained to do that. Best human artists try to make original art, something that is unlike anything else out there. But yes, there are plenty of artists who don't need or want to make original art, and those are in trouble.

On the other hand, we still don't know how to teach AI to distinguish between good and bad art. So perhaps a lot more humans will become professional art critics.

> and Dall-E 2 has made me realize that my skills will soon be almost worthless.

How did you come to this realization? We will always need artists. Art, painting was always a zero-sum game with very few on top making millions and millions making peanuts. Dall-E 2 will further this divide. Art will venture further in the zero-sum area.

But we will always need artists, and people will continue to create art no matter what. Some of those created art will garner attention and many of them will speak to many of us. We will pay. I regularly pay for art.

> My role, if it continues to exist, will consist of prompting the software and selecting among its outputs.

No. Non-artists can do it comfortably. I have used CLIP-guided diffusion generated art in many web pages, that I picked myself, that replaced some art jobs.

> My artistic skills, my craft, has been automated.

But not your identity or you soul. Art always had a personal component.

> Go master Lee Sedol announced his retirement from professional play

I don't know why he did it. Chess was solved before AI with IBM Deep Blue, and during AI with Alpha Zero. Yet Chess continues to be extremely famous. Chess is more popular than ever. People are going gaga over Magnus Carlsen, Vishy Anand, and matches in general. Chess and Go will be famous even after a century or five.

> What creative skills will be safe from AI?

People will like to draw even after Dall-E version N. Teachers will be needed. Art teachers' jobs are safe.

People will love to listen to a live concert no matter what. Musicians' jobs are safe.

I can go on. Art, of any kind, was a field of lack of symmetry. Barbers, plumbers, accountants, tailors, tellers make similar amount of money all over the world (considering the PPP). But artists don't. Art was always a field of huge disparity.

One barber can do one person's hair at one time. But a musician can stream to millions and play live to thousands. Art always scaled and was thus always a field of wild inequality.

What AI will do immediately is further the divide. It will wipe out the vocation of many at the bottom.

Not traditionally considered a "creative work", but teaching jobs will be safe for quite a long time.

Have you considered illustration jobs, design jobs? Generating one image is far from a finished designed, well-thought layout. What about game art or animation studio?

As far as music is concerned I expect AI to become a producer's and engineer's assistant. Instrumentals for practically all genres will be trivial to generate. Lyrics and rhymes will be co-written by algorithms, though authentic story telling will be hard to impossible to fully automate. Actually I'm wondering we don't really see this yet - the music generation process is waiting to be disrupted.

Technical writing will be safe, but only if writers embrace computer-aided writing.

https://passo.uno/posts/computer-aided-technical-writing-is-...

To be honest I don't think any. My creative focus music seems especially periled. Music already has mathematical foundations so its especially ripe. I say this as a longtime musician and hobbyist producer. Can't imagine the field in 10 years

This will be a great tool!

Think about how many hours you’ll save creating concept boards. The only trick will be to get this thing to spit out several different styles of the same image so you can match the style your going for.

I’m not seeing much competition for this thing to create a visual language for an idea.

Things like Dall-e are tools for humans and will let ambitious artists create more immersive, interesting and large scale works of art that simply haven’t been imagined yet.

They will no more replace artists than photoshop or illustrator did.

Anything that involves emotional intelligence such as empathy

I wouldn't fight against using AI as a tool. Ironically, if you had asked most people 15 years ago what sorts of things AI wouldn't be good at, they would've said something like "creativity" or "idea generation." I think most people would've expected AI to do some level of polish while the people were the fountains of creativity.

Reality has given us the exact opposite situation. AI has proven to be basically a bounded RANDOM function that can instantly throw countless weird and unique ideas our way in seconds. Fighting against this is fighting against a great tool. The power of a concept artist designing a new landscape to just describe a few things, have AI output a few ideas, and then off you go, sampling interesting color palettes, taking forms or ideas from here or there. The power of a composer to have gone through 50 AI generated melodies to find a couple of hooks that they probably wouldn't've thought of, only to inspire a new variant, or to pull them in and build around them.

TL;DR don't fight it, use it as an idea generator to give you some Lego blocks for a particular creative Enterprise. Your role will shift more to the taste maker, where you'll be expected to have good artistic taste for curating and assembling and guiding AI outputs.

Can you combine your talents with AI to make something better than either could alone?

There are areas of art where the main draw is that it was made by a human. Despite cameras and image filters, hyperrealistic pencil drawings are still appreciated because they're an impressive demonstration of human talent.

However, I'd assume those employ very few people compared to more "functional" creative jobs where the end product is what matters most, like creating clip-art for a company website or character portraits for a video-game. I think there's a large risk here that teams of artists will be collapsed into a single "art director" job, for cost-saving and faster results.

In terms of creative jobs that have safety due to difficulty in automating, maybe something involving bespoke physical products like prop/set/costume/lighting design for a movie?

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It hasn't yet been 10 years since AlexNet (often seen as kicking off the current deep learning trend, though not strictly the first at anything). I think people are being overconfident in the idea that current specific DL weaknesses will remain weaknesses in the upcoming decades of your career.

I've set a long-term reminder to look back at this thread since I'm interested in seeing how well predictions/sentiments have held up, some I'll collate below along with questions for my future self:

> This really isn't going to change much. DALLE-2 has and will likely for a long time have a lot of imperfections that will never be fixed.

> Even if AI can mimic style with style transfer, it will never achieve greatness this way.

Using baseline of a human artist, do generated images still exhibit a large number of imperfections? Do blind tests show generated artworks are considered inferior quality to human artworks?

> Due to the inherit way that these GANs work it's not going to force anyone really out of business.

> Art is about human expression. It is less about the end product and more about the journey and expression that got to that end product. This machine learning art generation skips all of that. I personally wouldn't worry about it.

> They will no more replace artists than photoshop or illustrator did.

> All of 'em. All of them will be safe.

Have any artists been made redundant due generative models? Should artists starting their career in the 2020s have been worried?

> There is also something cool and interesting about AI generated art currently because it is new and fresh. At some point though that will wear off.

Has the interest in generated art worn off? If so, was that because it was passing fad, or because it's now so commonplace that it's considered normal?

Where human creators are valued.

It's going to be the same as with everything low level labor intensive jobs will go away and then rest will survive. With an AI, especially an descriptive AI like DALEE needs good instructions to give the desired results and not only a result that's ok.

Any field that requires intelligence is safe,

as intelligence requires self awareness