What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG

I am a 2d artist and I have similar feelings.

Are you as full of loathing for all the HN people saying “just integrate the AI into your practice” as I am? I like drawing stuff and I love that this pays my bills and I really have zero interest in becoming a “prompt engineer” instead.

I think a strategy of creating an image of AI art as cheap and tacky is useful. For how long, I don’t know. If we’re lucky then it’ll turn out that getting these things out of the domain of creepy claw hands is a lot harder than anyone thinks it will be, and there will be a lot of obvious tells for a long time.

It may also be useful to try and get your professional associations to bring some suits against these things for playing fast and loose with “fair use”. The legality of these things is debatable, and so’s where “fair use” should fall - personally I feel like nobody posting work on the internet anticipated their stuff being scraped and fed into a giant neural net designed to take their job. Make this shit a lot pricier by demanding that it be built on art explicitly licensed for machine training.

Figuring out where the intersection of “art you like to make” and “art the AI sucks at” lies is worthwhile. If your passion is realistic painterly work then you’re fucked, what do you enjoy doing that isn’t that?

Auto-generated content has a tendency to raise only the baseline in industries. For web development first it was Dreamweaver, then WordPress templates, then SquareSpace and Wix. Bootstrap came along, then Material and a thousand other prepackaged design languages. While these advancements reduced the income from building mom & pop restaurant websites, the demand for high-end curated sites never really changed.

Just focus your efforts on continuing to produce quality work, those clients never dry up.

Some excerpts from your website in the future:

"We use AI to optimise our early-stage iterations"

"AI is great for generating initial concepts. Here are some of ourfavourites, and some that didn't turn out so well!"

"Did you know AI can reduce our turnaround for clients by up to 50%?"

In other words: it'll help. It won't replace you.

AI for long time will be just another tool to improve your production. It will probably reduce the more repetitive boring part of the work. Quickly generating content will let you try out a lot of ideas faster and seeing the different results will inspire you more. Some of the simpler work will probably go away but most likely it will be replaced by other work that currently is considered more complex but becomes easier and cheaper with AI so more customer can afford it.

AI+human will produce better results than just AI for a long time but you have to learn how to use it.

One of the interesting possibility will be to train your own AI on your private creative work/dataset so others could not have it if they don't have access to your private dataset, and it would produce your style better than some general AI. There will be services that will do it for you as for example Emad from StabilityAI already mentioned they will provide something like that.

But yeah, if AI keeps improving the end game is a little scary.

Add these technologies to your toolbox.

It is not easy to do "prompt engineering". Keep in mind that most generated material looks awful -- there is a huge selection bias going on.

The outputted stuff needs to made production ready also, distribution, etc.

If anything, the emergence of these technologies should greatly expand. You will have a new customer base that was not available before, and you will be able to deliver new products.

The only constant in life is change. There is no guarantee of stability or order in life, despite the human desire to carve it out where it doesn't exist. You can either embrace that change, or fight against it.

Embracing the change means learning the new tools and adapting your job around them. Fighting against it means lobbying the government to create protectionist laws for your industry to prevent new technology from disrupting you.

The former is easier if you are more flexible and open minded. The latter is easier if you have a lot of money and are well connected. Neither is inherently easy, which is why most of us just complain instead.

No offence, but all this moral panic induced by a spectacular AI demo looks really myopic. It puzzles me how many creative professionals are unable to see their edge somehow. The main value of your work is always conceptualization, even if you see yourself as a pixel pusher (if that's the case, it's most likely wrong), and it's not easy to master.

Maybe you're just not aware of the current state of these tools, and their potential in near future? It's really easy to fall under impression that it advances at light speeds but once you take a deep dive to be aware of the limitations, you'll be much less impressed.

You won't be out of your job. You will have a powerful tool to create with, though. Visual content generation based on text will always lose to compositing, just because of its inefficient nature. "Prompt engineering" is a nonsense gimmick. AI-powered tools won't "replace" you, ever. They will make possible things that are impractical right now due to the sheer amount of manual work involved. (30's animation style comeback, anyone?). You'll always be able to create something with 10x value, compared to a non-pro.

Just keep your nose to the wind, as changes won't be immediate. Embrace it and learn how to use it, to be ahead of everyone. Or at least be aware of your surroundings.

Perhaps in the short term you do nothing. It will be many years before this moves from “toy” to “tool”. The industry is made up of humans and humans adapt at human speed. You don’t have to outrun the AI bears, you just have to outrun your colleagues.

Perhaps this will just make your job easier and not impact your ability to make money. Maybe you will make even more money.

And if at some point the industry dries up completely, you will move on and do the best you can. We all will.

Create an agency of one (yourself) and use the AI tools. Profit from the margins between the cost of the AI (likely near zero as time goes on) and what you charge customers.

This is not without precedent. DesignJoy is run by a single designer who makes over $1.5 million a year by himself, doing contracts for 20+ clients at a time [0].

[0] https://www.indiehackers.com/post/broke-the-1-5m-arr-mark-as...

I am not an ad person, but to me they always contain a specific subject (thing, place, etc). If you are making an ad for widget XJ900, you don't want it to actually show the XK800. What's harder, trying to prompt the AI into generating content on your specific subject, or just modeling/filming the subject with current methods? Which is harder to incorporate client feedback? So far, slight tweaks in prompts can produce radically difficult results. Paint back can help, but we'll see.

I have yet to see a stable diffusion output that is high quality work. They often lack any compositional sense, and all the lines are weirdly wavy. It's like someone trying to do realism but with the motor skills and spatial awareness of a toddler. The picture that won the state fair awards looked really terrible on further inspection. Basic composition elements like the horizon line or the giant circle in the middle were all skewed, and not in an attractive way. Any elements beyond the central figures are just noise. I see that story as more about bad judging than anything else.

Stable diffusion has its own version of uncanny valley, and it may be a long time before we can cross it. The people who decree stable diffusion as the death of human art don't often to have a firm grasp on artistic or design fundamentals.

I'm not so sure it will be that easy to exactly control the output of the AI algos. This is not that important when doing art for art's sake but, for commercial purposes, if you can't make that can of coke slightly bigger or more redder, or have the teenage in the picture hold it slighlty differently (all as per client's feedback), the tool might be a failure.

While I think humanity is bad at predicting what the future will look like (where's my damn flying car..), _my_ prediction is that AI video generation will not be a major disrupter to ad agencies / film makers.

It's a nice experiment, but I really doubt the level of artistic direction required to meet specific customer requirements will ever be replaced by "AI"

People like you will do 10x the amount of work in the future. So we don't need about 90% of you.

For this I think you should try to be one of the 10% that's left. You're on HN and you're really early in this AI image generation game.

I think you maybe getting ahead of yourself. It’s one thing for AI to produce art that roughly aligns with a prompt, which is as you well know right now what it is capable of. It’s another to fulfill the exact vision of what a person wants. That requires a much higher level and more detailed and more intuitive understanding of what the expectations are and what the vision of the director is. AI is not capable of that level of understanding yet, as far as I know. I suspect it might turn out like the issues we are encountering with self-driving. Autonomous vehicles may be able to deal with 99% of all driving situations right now but that last 1% is the killer. That last 1% is the reason self-driving isn’t good enough. Furthermore, while the first 99% may have taken only 20% of the total time to adoption to solve, I suspect that last 1% may take the remaining 80% before self-driving gains widespread adoption. Just as it could be many years before we can fully rely on self-driving technology to cart us around, it could be many years before AI really starts to supplant human artists, before prompt engineering becomes enough of a precise art to no longer need people who can exactly translate a vision into a visual work.

Of course, feel free to print out this comment, hang it on the wall and throw darts at it in a much fewer number of years when my prediction turns out to be totally wrong. It's really just based on an intuition.

If anything the number of jobs will increase. Simply because technologies such as what you describe are enablers. Suddenly everyone and their cat will want good looking ai generated videos. But someone will need to make that little tweak that makes them look good. For instance, i wouldnt be able to produce nice content regardless of how many ais you throw at me simply because i dont have an eye for it.

But suddenly john in marketing is able to create a few amateurish sketch videos, crappy and naive, but they will lead to ideas for proper videos that he can collaborate with someone like you to turn into professional content. Similarly you will be able to iterate ideas faster and thus keep clients happy.

Its the same with web development. The more libraries the more tools and the more automation the more jobs out there. John in marketing or Sandra the ceo are now able to experiment with mockups, show them to stakeholders and gain their attention much quicker. As a result there are more funding and more product development leading to more tech jobs.

Therefore, enabler tech like this will lead to growth.

Everybody in the world is carrying a camera with them full-time. I'm still dodging pro photographers shooting weddings, graduates, and teens every time I ride through the park.

I suggest becoming an expert user of generative AI systems. You can start by exploring Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, then move on to video systems once those start becoming available.

Effective prompt design is a very deep subject, and one that is changing all the time.

My optimistic version of all of this is that people like yourself will be able to continue doing the work you are doing today... but better, and faster. You'll be able to produce higher quality work because the generative AIs will be able to speed up a whole bunch of the more time-consuming tasks for you, allowing you to spend more time on the creative and editorial side of things.

I believe people with genuine skill, talent and taste will produce better work with the assistance of generative AI than people that do not have that existing background.

I might be wrong! I hope I'm right.

Learn the new AI tools and market yourself as an AI video production consultant.

Get out of the race to $0.

Develop business relationships.

Good clients are mostly insensitive to price.

That’s what makes them good clients.

Good luck

For any large company (with a brand team) these tools will only ever be a starting point to get a general direction. It might remove some initial back and forth working through some basic things that a junior might do. The output might then be used as a prompt for the creative agencies they work with. The brand is the sacred and I doubt anyone would take the risk with anything that isn't 100% controlled (photoshoot, CGI etc)

For the smaller companies, the mom and pop ones mentioned elsewhere in the thread, this will probably kill any creative work from them.

Also, consider going in-house into a large corporate. They usually have marketing and comms teams, if not external facing then internal. Then when these tools mature you could leverage them to knock out internal work at tighter deadlines.

Learn how to write. It's as simple as that. These models will require well-crafted prompts to produce the desired outputs.

Your way to get ahead of this is to learn how the models transform a prompt into a video or image. You will quickly realize there's way more nuance and need for precise terminology than the shelf examples you're seeing.

These models are only as good as the prompts they receive. Someone needs to write those precise prompts. You are way ahead of everyone else because you already understand the concepts, terminology, and process of video production and CG.

If you were able to retrain in the same industry on different jobs 3 times, learnt web development, you are reading HN / are tech literate and are aware of the coming changes in the industry such as Deep Learning : don't worry. You're on top of the rest of workers in this industry. You will eventually find your new niche skills, and even if you don't, being on top of your current field you have a few years runaway ;)

A lot of people are telling you to Deal With It. I would argue that people are way too hyped about these AI developments. It looks cool and it can generate something interesting, but can it really generate what you need? Can it make something good enough to work like an ad (or whatever) made by people who know what they're doing? Maybe sometimes, but usually the answer is No. Will it do that soon? Nobody knows for sure, but I think a lot of techies are too optimistic. What the AI does is an interpolation of existing image data. It doesn't know how to draw what you really want, and it can't reliably produce output that's usable (let alone "good") for highly specific purposes. And any real application of CG/videography is highly specific. It's easy to imagine all of that is the next step, but I think that's a lot harder than what the AI does at the moment.

> There’s loads of work that ad agencies will just hire an AI prompt guy to generate for ads.

I am really skeptical of the idea that soon, working with image AI will involve purely prompt writing. I bet it will involve some prompt writing but still plenty of original art creation, and even more photoshop combining, as now.

Think about how much more time a modern employed artist spends fucking around with photoshop tools, as opposed to literally having their pen on their wacom tablet. It's just a continuing trend in that direction -- or at least that's my educated guess which could be wrong.

In a broad sense, we can think of the economy in terms of resource inputs to society and the dependencies that result in goods and services. This is the kind of thing you can plot out, industry by industry, with Wardley mapping.

Now, clearly, resource extraction jobs aren't going away. The methods change as we go from "ape poking at insects with stick" to "hydraulic fracking", but someone has to have some oversight of the process.

But everything leading to a resulting experience fulfilling some human need is subject to change with AI in the picture, because we can imagine machines in the loop doing all the processing, moving, coordinating, and final delivery. Experiences that used to be jobs don't have to be anymore.

And therefore the whole social contract of industrial economies is subject to a gradual shift towards indifference: if I have some land, some machines, some access to raw materials, I don't need a job, or to sell things, or to run an organization. But, counterbalancing that, there still have to be voices coordinating and controlling access to those things, because there are too many ethical dangers involved in making it completely permissionless.

What financial systems(hence money, wages, etc.) do in controlling access is a way of assigning credit, so that you gain general permissions to stuff. If you do things that persistently assign credit to yourself, without also turning it into a reassignment of credit that makes enemies(power-monging etc.), you survive in any economy.

The role of anything artistic in that is, broadly speaking, going to be one of storytelling and aesthetic presentation of information. And I think the key insight to take from the tools we're getting is that direct prompt engineering is going to be taken for granted; but prompt engineering as a layer on top of or beneath a more specialized skillset will still produce distinguished results.

That is, if you can glue a little bit of API code together, you can create a job where 90% of your creative time is still spent in a more hands-on mode, but then you send it through the machine as the last step. The trick is in not getting too dependent on someone's platform control play in the process.

Find the weaknesses of AI generated imagery and do the things that it can't.

I understand you're not interested in learning a new tool set. That totally sucks especially when it at least appears orthogonal to what you currently know (not to be a dick but I would underline appears).

As a related thought, if not an upside, did you read that story about the guy who outsourced his job to China? He worked for some telecom and just hired out whatever they wanted him to do to randos overseas and basically ended up doing nothing other then going to meetings that set up scope.

I believe he was fired but - end result aside - it's not hard to see how this might fit into your situation.

Human language is inexact and context sensitive. This means the precise meaning of words in communications is unique to the time, place, and members of the communication.

Because of this, there will never be a 100% reliable "text prompt to AI image" generator. Someone will have to get to know the AI and figure out how to make it do what is wanted, or modify it to get what is wanted.

Kinda the same way Google and other information repositories have not made researcher's jobs obsolete.

Current AI puts out weird output that is not suitable for publication. There will be working fixing it for the foreseeable future.

Same feeling as a software developer. Programming as we know it will be completely transformed before the end of the decade.

AI wouldn't steal your job. I guess your clients require specific taks, nothing that can be precisely done by AI. Sure, it can help to speed up creative process, but if AI generated images/video is enough for your clients, than nothing new and innovative is made.

It seems fairly hard to predict to me. There have been huge improvements in computer art generally, but that seems to have come with rising demand and quality expectations.

If prices for this sort of art does fall, demand will also increase. It's hard to guess how big that increase will be.

AI as it stands is a massive legal liability for companies as it interpolates between plagiarised images.

The image gen projects are extremely unethical and immoral IMO as they rely on scraped data created by artists to ‘train’.

My practical advice: Plan for your future from a blank state of mind. Reduce all unnecessary expenses, invest into more self-sufficient survival.

The race between semi-pros and professionals is marketing driven, same applies in AI situation, AI will not be as good as the best in the business, but clients/corporations will use the AI argument to lower the reward for professional labor.

This is normal. This is the Surveillance Capitalism. And is the direct result of the lack of ethics behind the tech overlords. They simply don't care. And now their social position of demigods and keepers of "the knowledge" will give them the ultimate power over peoples imagination and thoughts.

So be it. I cannot stop this. And the "adaptation" argument is utter nonsense. But I can move into the woods and live a simple and happy life. I can create my own paper and paints from surrounding materials, and I will paint for myself and my friends.

The majority of the next generations will have no problem to be controlled by AI. Corporations will package this as a "progress" and people will swallow it willingly.

So what? It is a choice, a minority will refuse to live in AI induced comma and will search for human touch, human emotions, human produced reality.

I would say add these AI tools to your toolbox and use them to get things done quicker.

Being proactive is always a good thing. Use the AI as a tool in your process.

Doesn't this art need to be trained on original human art? Eventually the styles being copied by ai will get stale. AFAIK these ai image generators aren't actually creating new styles

Unfortunately, it seems that technology is showing no signs of slowing down. If it's any solace, you're only the first set of victims, and the rest of us will soon follow.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

However, I don't think it'll replace much or even a lot of work, especially where a minimum level of quality is desired.

It probably depends upon you.

Is AI a tool or a trap?

Can it make some of your jobs iterate more quickly and weed out the cruft or heavy lifting?

Or is it only something that gets in your way of production?

It is up to you.

If you can lift at least 35 pounds and pass a drug test, Amazon is always hiring. I also hear trucking and paralegal are booming fields.

Become a plumber. It'll be a while till robots can replace you in the trades.

Working on ads is a profession with significant moral hazard: thought manipulation is inherently antisocial. Being disrupted out of the industry could end up being a blessing for your mental wellbeing.

Be valuable :)