How AI art is changing the employment market in creative industries

We thought creative jobs would be immune to automation as we believe being creative is quintessentially what makes us human. This tune is bitterly out of date now. Text-to-image generator platforms, most notably Dall-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion can now turn text prompts into high-quality images in under 10 seconds. There are numerous platforms out there, all one is needed to do is to choose which platform they want to try (mostly for free).

Generative AI is all the rage

The debate of whether AI art can replace human creatives remains theoretical until August 2022 when Jason Allen won the Colorado State Fair’s annual art competition with a work generated on Midjourney. That wasn’t an one-off incident, Boris Eldgasen also won Sony World Photography Awards with an image created by Dall.E2 earlier this year.

The power of AI has dreaded professional artists. They also called AI unethical because their artworks were being used to train different AI programmes. Tomer Hanuka mentioned to the Wall Street Journal that his artistic style that took him years to develop was stolen via generative AI — a set of 400 images were sold under his name in Opensea but he got nothing out of it. In December 2022, artists staged mass protest against AI-generated artwork on ArtStation, a platform for artists to showcase their digital art, by placing ‘No AI Art’ images in their portfolios. The protest had not stopped ArtStation showing AI generated art.   

While some professional artists are humiliated to have their work listed next to AI generated works, others voted with their subscription. Midjourney has gained 13 million users in just a year and became one of the hottest new businesses of the tech industry. Its popularity also enables the self-learning machine to morph into something more potent and error-free. An upgrade from version 4 to version 5 only took this 10-person company a few months. When this article is written, version 5.1 has just released.

How AI is transforming creative industries

AI is now everywhere in the creative design process. Assistive AI has been extensively used in special effect production. Evan Halleck, the visual effects artist in the Oscar winning movie ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ was singing praise to AI tools as it can make rotoscoping a breeze. They used to outsource this laborious and painful process to third parties, but it was expensive. Netflix has also recently launched an anime with an AI generated background.

Other than being assistive, AI could also take a centre stage in the design process. For product design, it can spit out 40 different design ideas for a yellow cup in under 10 minutes [CH1] which can drastically speed up the iterative design process. For game design, generative AI can produce what concept artists used to produce at a fraction of the time (and cost, obviously.) The multitude of use cases in content creation, information analysis, content enhancement and post-production is increasing every day.

Layoffs and doors shut

The integration of AI into the creative workflow has kickstarted waves of layoffs. Designers such as game designers, concept artists, illustrators are among the first taking the blow. Most recently, a medium-sized game company had slashed over 50% of their game artists attributing it to AI. It is also possible that other designers such as interior designers, UX/UI designers, graphic designers, etc. will also be quickly displaced by the next version of AI.

AI can both create and disseminate content. Entry or mid-level models may be dispensed. The merchants on Taobao are now using AI models instead of human models that used to cost them RMB4-50,000 for a professional photoshoot. In this way, perfect photos can be churned out regardless of weather and human illnesses at a low cost.

The introduction of AI had posed tremendous threats to existing creatives. It will also close many doors for entry-level positions as well as volunteers, interns or unpaid workers which were considered to be the pathways to get into the industry.

New opportunities driven by AI

A host of companies are now looking for prompt engineers to help them train existing AI tools and generate more accurate and relevant results. Although a computer engineering degree might not be required, a prompt engineer will need to demonstrate strong problem-solving skills, and be familiar with AI, natural language processing, machine learning and AI-generated content development.

As we see the skill-biased technical change unfold in front of our eyes, knowing AI is like knowing MS word 20 years ago. For job seekers, understanding different kinds of AI art software is highly preferred when looking for a job in content creation. Professional artists are also learning how to work with AI for their own advantage. An encouraging example is that Rootport, a Japanese comic artist, received much positive feedback for his Midjourney assisted 100-page new comics that was completed in under 6 weeks. 

The democratisation of artistic creation through AI has also created opportunities for new businesses or side hustles:

Sell your prompts:

As people are catching up with prompt writing, accurate prompts are high in demand, and could easily be sold on various prompt marketplace, such as Promptbase, Prompt Hero, PromptSea, etc.

Sell your NFTs:

Midjourney could also be used to generate multiple versions of your NFT work as a set of collectibles to be sold on OpenSea.

Sell your AI art:

Create your AI art and sell them on DeviantArt, Etsy or other social media platforms.

It is almost a cliche now —if AI is inevitable, we should stop fighting it, starting to understand it, or even using it for our own good.