[thelazyone]

Well put. Big fan of the "Commercial illustrators will keep their jobs, but will mostly need to learn to use AI as a part of their workflow to maintain a higher pace of work" part.

I'm a sometimes-illustrator (but my style is pretty far from what Generative AI is doing), and I recently published a 1.1 of a game manual which uses Midjourney images. I'm currently investing in a "proper" illustrator because the MDJ images lack character, but it's also true that in a few months from now this might change: I'll stick with the illustrator to have more consistency in the images, but probably the AI could do a fancier job there.

Besides, the "things will change in 2 months" point is a good one, but it's been used since a year and a half and things haven't changed yet. Sure, the quality of the produced images improved, but not in a qualitative scale.

Side note: the link civitai to leads to https://sambleckley.com/writing/civitai.com/images which is a dead link.

[rcarr]

> I'm a sometimes-illustrator (but my style is pretty far from what Generative AI is doing)

Why not train your own personal AI on your artwork? Corridor Digital did this in the latest attempt to automatise animation, they hired an illustrator to create an animation style for them, then trained the AI on their drawings.

Link: https://youtu.be/FQ6z90MuURM?t=329

[woolion]

I've actually done it [0], I'd like to have an AI assistant that I could directly use the results from, and the results were really terrible, mostly laughably terrible. I think it was too far from what the models handled correctly at the time, and given that issue it was not enough training images. Although I had also tried with a model that was better at handling stylised 2D. I'd like it to work, but I don't think it's viable for most people.

[0] https://woolion.art/2022/11/16/SDDB.html

[toasted-subs]

Seems kind of shady imo. I know businesses is businesses but that's seems a bit too mean for my tastes.

[thelazyone]

That's an interesting take! Currently I see two reasons why I wouldn't do that:

1 - Since I'm either working for game companies or for my own project (https://fsd-wargame.com/) using AI-generated things is kinda damaging in terms of marketing. You never know when some uproar could arise against a project/game solely based on more or less petty outcries against AI. I generally sympathize with artists, but sometimes it's just whiny.

2 - My illustrations are line-art and cartography (https://www.artstation.com/thelazyone) , which are not the easiest to handle with AI. I'm sure that with enough effort there's gonna be a good model, but I haven't seen any so far.

[atleastoptimal]

The question is, since commercial illustrators can be more efficient using AI, will the total number of jobs in the space lower, or will the expectation for commercial illustration increase, thus increasing the workload and keeping the number of jobs the same.

[satvikpendem]

In all of human history, work has always increased. This is akin to Parkinson's Law, where work expands to fill the time (and now resources) available.