02/22/2024
Hi, it's me! Your artist friend. Well, one of your artist friends, as I imagine you have a number of artists in your life. And if you know these people well enough, you'll have watched their careers grow from humble art school beginnings to whatever awesome stuff they're doing in the present. Those careers are now under real threat of being replaced, and I'm here to tell you why.
Artwork-generating apps operate on a vast library filled with thousands upon thousands of art pieces that have been ripped from the internet. You can enter a few prompts, and the app will churn out a fully finished piece that took all of an afternoon to make. Yes, they often look really fake and are full of mistakes (eg: the hands), but these apps are getting smarter and more intuitive every day. Eventually, you won't be able to tell the difference between the above illustration and something that came out of one of these apps. And there are even app users who are now branding themselves as artists, and taking commissions from clients. Selling illustrations cobbled together from stolen art.
These days, I'm seeing endless AI images on my feed, and they're often followed by likes, shares and ooh-ing and ahh-ing in the comments. And a lot of these app users/fans don't understand that the art they're seeing was made possible by countless artists whose work was taken from them without consent, without credit and without pay. We have to compete against the algorithms of social media as it is. AI apps have made our fight exponentially harder.
I made this illustration over the course of the last two weeks, in between my shifts as a professional designer. It shows tired eyes, greying hair and the ever-present wrist braces that alleviate work-related pain. It's full of flaws, but they're MY flaws, not glitches caused by artificial generation. It took hours to make from scratch, and from my own creative mind. And if someone asked me to make one for them, you can bet your b***y I'd charge a good chunk of change for it. Artists charge for this stuff because it's how we survive. And it's worth the money. It's worth it because a real, living, breathing person created something like this from the depths of their soul. From years of painstaking education. From late hours and sore hands. And it's a glorious original piece that you can cherish forever (or you can like, re-gift it if you hate it, whatever. As long as we get paid.)
I've been told by my lovely friends (who I'm lucky to have) that AI will never replace me. Sadly, that just isn't the case, as my services have indeed been replaced by AI apps on more than one occasion. I have lost clients because of this. If you can't afford to pay someone to make artwork for you, save your money until you can. If you're not going to hire me to draw for you, that's totally cool. But PLEASE hire another artist. Don't replace me with any of these plagiarizing apps. It doesn't just hurt me. It hurts all artists.
Or hey, learn a few tricks yourself. Making art is really challenging, but it's also fulfilling, and dare I say (GASP) fun.
