Graphics Artists In China Push Back On AI and Its Averaging Effect (theverge.com) 32
Graphic artists in China are pushing back against AI image generators, which they say "profoundly shifts clients' perception of their work, specifically in terms of how much that work costs and how much time it takes to produce," reports The Verge. "Freelance artists or designers working in industries with clients that invest in stylized, eye-catching graphics, like advertising, are particularly at risk." From the report: Long before AI image generators became popular, graphic designers at major tech companies and in-house designers for large corporate clients were often instructed by managers to crib aesthetics from competitors or from social media, according to one employee at a major online shopping platform in China, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from their employer. Where a human would need to understand and reverse engineer a distinctive style to recreate it, AI image generators simply create randomized mutations of it. Often, the results will look like obvious copies and include errors, but other graphic designers can then edit them into a final product.
"I think it'd be easier to replace me if I didn't embrace [AI]," the shopping platform employee says. Early on, as tools like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney became more popular, their colleagues who spoke English well were selected to study AI image generators to increase in-house expertise on how to write successful prompts and identify what types of tasks AI was useful for. Ultimately, it was useful for copying styles from popular artists that, in the past, would take more time to study. "I think it forces both designers and clients to rethink the value of designers," Jia says. "Is it just about producing a design? Or is it about consultation, creativity, strategy, direction, and aesthetic?" [...]
Across the board, though, artists and designers say that AI hype has negatively impacted clients' view of their work's value. Now, clients expect a graphic designer to produce work on a shorter timeframe and for less money, which also has its own averaging impact, lowering the ceiling for what designers can deliver. As clients lower budgets and squish timelines, the quality of the designers' output decreases. "There is now a significant misperception about the workload of designers," [says Erbing, a graphic designer in Beijing who has worked with several ad agencies and asked to be called by his nickname]. "Some clients think that since AI must have improved efficiency, they can halve their budget." But this perception runs contrary to what designers spend the majority of their time doing, which is not necessarily just making any image, Erbing says.
"I think it'd be easier to replace me if I didn't embrace [AI]," the shopping platform employee says. Early on, as tools like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney became more popular, their colleagues who spoke English well were selected to study AI image generators to increase in-house expertise on how to write successful prompts and identify what types of tasks AI was useful for. Ultimately, it was useful for copying styles from popular artists that, in the past, would take more time to study. "I think it forces both designers and clients to rethink the value of designers," Jia says. "Is it just about producing a design? Or is it about consultation, creativity, strategy, direction, and aesthetic?" [...]
Across the board, though, artists and designers say that AI hype has negatively impacted clients' view of their work's value. Now, clients expect a graphic designer to produce work on a shorter timeframe and for less money, which also has its own averaging impact, lowering the ceiling for what designers can deliver. As clients lower budgets and squish timelines, the quality of the designers' output decreases. "There is now a significant misperception about the workload of designers," [says Erbing, a graphic designer in Beijing who has worked with several ad agencies and asked to be called by his nickname]. "Some clients think that since AI must have improved efficiency, they can halve their budget." But this perception runs contrary to what designers spend the majority of their time doing, which is not necessarily just making any image, Erbing says.
More garbage (Score:2)
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Enshittification, where even the most modest of talents is pushed aside by someone writing "Draw me a picture of a Florentine woman with a smirk" in ChatGPT.
Re: More garbage (Score:3)
There's SOME good stuff out there (Score:2)
The Netflix' series 'Adolescence' is the most brilliant thing I've seen for years; I defy you to watch it without bursting into tears at some point. But yes, the suits are ever less willing to put money on something totally new, so we mostly get much the same thing reheated. And having expanded far too much in the past few years, the retrenchment underway in the film / TV is especially painful. Here's hoping that the trickle of good stuff will not disappear completely...
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Movies are the same as they ever were. What has changed is now if you wait 3 months (or less) you can see the movie at home on a streaming platform. So for one month of a streaming platform, you may pay $25 (give or take $5). Well shit, the cost of a movie ticket is nearly $15 and that's for one single movie.
If I want to see a movie, I will wait for it to hit streaming, then I'll get one month of that streaming service, watch the one movie and often times find a few other titles worth my time as well. By th
MOST artistic output is garbage (Score:2)
In other words, AI will just continue the trend we have seen towards uninteresting garbage in every form of art since the 70s. There worst part is that people don't even seem to care, they just keep consuming it.
Do you really believe this has got worse since the 70s? Nah...
Especially in advertising, but in a lot of other fields as well, it's all instantly forgettable garbage and always has been. If the 'artist' is lucky, it will still attract enough paying customers to keep the artist in spondolicks.
Just occasionally true artists will arise who change what the world appreciates. They are rare, and usually even much of their output is actually less than amazing.
And very often governments fall for the idea that they
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Indeed. Athough personally, I have lost interest in the crap. If I see an AI slop picture on an article, for example, I do usually not read it because clearly not much effort was invested.
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The argument that artists will "always" retain an edge by fixing artifacts or choosing lighting mistakes a temporary bug for a permanent feature. The "human touch" tasks like fixing artifacts or choosing lighting are a temporary patch on an improving technology. You assume human qualities like taste, and originality are insurmountable moats but AI is already not just an apprentice executing an order. AIs are collaborators in discovery. Their "misunderstandings" and unexpected outpu
Re: Welcome to the new reality (Score:2)
So when you have an emotional response, you are just projecting your insecurities onto her.
All true, except the parrot part.
Seriously, you wrote a thoughtful comment, but I can't see commercial graphic arts surviving the tidal wave of barely good enough generated crap.
My observation is that management and customers have no taste. They usually love the worst ideas, which they came up
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See this advertised all the time... think it's Wix or whatever... a website generator/host where you give an AI a prompt/description of what you want the website to be, and it just makes it for you, and you're all happy about your new website!
Remember when building a website was a several day affair with editing HTML, adding Javascript and Flash images, and you could have as many pages as you wanted? It required a skill to do. You could even make a few bucks at school by designing websites for your friend
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You say that like it's a bad thing. The entire history of human innovation has been a relentless drive to eliminate toil.We replaced farmhands with tractors and are now replacing tedious coding with AI. This is the endgame we've been building toward. The WALL-E scenario shouldn't be seen as a warning about technology. It's a critique of what humans might choose to do with an existence free from mandatory work. The
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Oh... you mean like the Animatrix episode, "The Second Renaissance"? 'Cause, that ended well.
It's far fetched, but not terribly... send the robots to work for us, expect them to wipe our butts... so, if the machines do our shopping, how do we afford stuff? If we're the WALL-E fat blob who's already lazy enough to get to that point, why would we give a crap about creativity or exploration or any of that crap... I can just have the dispenser give me more Kaf-Pow with blended cheeseburger and ask the magic s
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I remember when making a website was painfully easy because we all had shitty tools. You could produce something professional fairly quick because everything was cutting edge. Then we shifted to new tools that really put a glossiness to everything and then we moved to scripts to do cute things with images, etc.
I don't see a problem with AI churning out a usable, informative webpage with someone prompting away. Those tools are getting better as well.
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> Remember when building a website was a several day affair with editing HTML, adding Javascript and Flash images
Then came Wordpress around and now over half of the web are insecure Wordpress installations for people who do not want to do more than write the pages without learning HTML, CSS, or server administration.
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Wow, that comes off as elitist and presumptuous. So only a trained artists can produce "real art" of "quality" and all the untrained masses come up with "stupid stuff". Well, gee, maybe might want to hide your contempt for your customers and their stupid ideas. They are the ones paying after all.
Honestly, most artists are starving and that won't change. AI to generate good enough graphics and video is just that, good enough. Given "quality" is entirely subjective, the 99% of us untrained masses don't give a
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>Given "quality" is entirely subjective, the 99% of us untrained masses don't give a hoot about what the elitist think about their "talents".
Right. Agree. The vast majority of the unwashed masses (I can say that now that I'm elite) don't give a hoot... about artists, talent, art, or commercial art. They are tasteless and accepting of the lowest quality by any and all measures. Same goes for the businesses that use commercial art. They don't see any value in outputs exceeding "good enough
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There is another argument to be had, however, but if you think it's elite to have devoted 10's of thousands of hours of my life to music and art, then I accept your label with pride. If I'm elite, it's because I made myself elite. I made those choices. I made the time. I slaved over the basics, and next levels to arrive at some level of virtuosity. I paid the price and I reaped the rewards.
That's fine. Everyone needs a hobby. I hope after your 10k hours, you made it to the big leagues and reaped some rewards or at least had a good time doing your hobby. I'm not saying art is bad or you shouldn't enjoy doing it.
What I am saying is, especially regarding commercial art, that good enough is just that, good enough. I don't need Picasso to make an ad for my widget. I can easily get away with a high school student's output just fine or at this point, AI!
There will always be space for people to be cr
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What people do in private is up to them (Score:2)
We don't bother to prevent orgies or other forms of 'interesting' behaviour as long as it doesn't frighten the horses. Where the problem lies is that artists have come to believe that they have a right to taxpayers' money.
In other news (Score:4, Interesting)
Now, clients expect a graphic designer to produce work on a shorter timeframe and for less money
In other news, furniture craftsmen announce that Ikea and Walmart have really changed their customers' expectations about what furniture should cost and how long it takes to obtain it!
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Sorry Chinese Artists (Score:2)
Your work is not special enough for survive AI, either!
I guess the government could restrict AI. We'll see. That would be interesting.
Not halve (Score:2)
Not halve the budget per unit of work. Cut it down at least 90%. And increase work load by about 3-4 times. Where before you could ask for two samples to choose from, now you can ask for six to ten to choose from in a shorter time frame.
There's zero argument for "quality" in relation to AI in advertisement/image maintenance commercial art. Commercial art is safe, averaged out stuff. Exactly what AI is so good for. There's a reason we call the current corporate art style "corpo art". It's deisgned in that sp
Construction tv shows (Score:1)
A friend of mine who's a renovation contractor told me that the worst thing that ever happened to residential renovations was the "fix-it" tv programs.
When he quotes someone on doing a job and says it'll take two weeks the prospective customer thinks he's trying to rip him off because he just saw a similar job in (supposedly) three days on tv.
The average human (Score:2)