"Not gonna lie, didn't expect "illustrators" to be one of the first human jobs that artificial intelligence completely displaces but here we are"
Sound of child crying after sticking fork in the socket
Sizzle of the hand after touching the hot stove
I told you lot loads of times!
It only defies common sense on the absolute surface. When you seriously think about it, it makes so much more sense.
It's much easier to automate jobs that are based on using medium rather than jobs based on direct physical action. All it takes for the former is disembodied digital automation methods and subjectivity in most cases. The latter involves robotics and concrete physical actions that don't leave any room for subjective interpretation.
In the former, if you need someone to draw a stylish image of a bear in a top hat riding an 1890s bicycle, there's still trillions of possible configurations and ways to make it even with those parameters. Whereas in the latter, if you need to pick up trash in the park, there is no "subjective interpretation" involved: you take your behind into the park, bend over, pick up the trash, and drop it into the rubbish bin. You either do the job correctly or you don't. This paradoxically requires a lot more intelligence precisely because of the physicality and lack of room for error.
The entertainment industry was always doomed to be the first industry automated away by artificial intelligence. It was our collective reactionary disgust at the thought that computers could ever mimic human creativity that kept this industry far away from the breadlines. It was just too horrible to think: that AI could EVER replace artists. And the nuance between "art for art's sake" and "art as career" wasn't apparent because we were so adamant that art in general was something the computers could never replace. Even most science fiction ran with this assumption, that AI would be a great augmentator and replacer of physical jobs and logical pursuits, but the artistic domain was something uniquely "human" and irreplaceable. That at most, AI would create ultra-corporate soulless art but everything of actual skill and talent would require a human hand.
The reality's going to be devastating. The next decade is going to be a horrible time for creatives, white-collar talent, and media figures. And unfortunately, this is one of the least "labor-protected" industries so AI's going to burn through it in no time.
The only bright spot is that art for art's sake will never actually be automated.
Actually, another bright spot is that art will be democratized. Anyone willing to put in the time to it will eventually be able to create anything their mind desires at any level of quality. Now, I can imagine the costs of rendering things will be a major barrier to some levels of quality depending on what you're trying to achieve, but realistically, everything you see on your screen no matter what it is, whether it's a shitty 4-year-old crayon doodle or a 200 million dollar Marvel movie or a da Vinci painting or a Faulkner novel, is ultimately bits and pixels. Our knee-jerk reaction is to imagine that maybe AI will allow us to create choppy low-quality cartoons that look like a bad episode of Family Guy, but all that separates such a thing from a Pixar movie is the density of details depicted on your screen. Same deal with animation quality, colors, length, etc. We intrinsically tie our perceptions to the human labor costs and therefore tie our expectations to what seems easier to do for humans, when synthetic media AI will essentially work in reverse. It creates the final product from scratch, from the expectation of what it's supposed to look and sound like. It's a lot like imagination. You can easily imagine an MCU-level movie in your head just the same as you can imagine a South Park-tier cartoon; your brain doesn't use any more metabolic energy to "render" the former even though it's so much more audiovisually impressive. This is how AI is going to work. Thus, once synthetiic media starts to really get going, progress in that field is going to feel exponential, like we hit the knee of some curve. One year, we'll have fairly rough and scattered tools to create rudimentary images and sounds; the next, we'll have early magic media machines; the next after that, the entire industry will be in a state of upheaval.
That's another aspect that I've long thought about, something that even factored into my 2017 epiphany. Unsurprisingly, few people have thought about it quite as much as I have
Media has historically been commission-based, and ~98% of it has been commercially oriented.
Or maybe that's the wrong way to put it.
Perhaps "meant to be publicly shared and enjoyed" is a better way
What do I mean by that?
Well, our thoughts are our own.
We all have them, it's as easy as simply imagining something in our heads. Then again, a few people do have a disorder that prevents them from creating mental images or having an inner voice, but for the vast majority, this is our own personal "magic media machine" right in our heads
Anything we can think of comes to life in our heads at any quality, no cost required except for the pure metabolic costs of keeping our brains alive
Then you move out one step
Art we personally can create
With zero outside help beyond the collective shared knowledge needed to learn how to create said art
This is almost always very low quality, though some people can create masterpieces.
When it comes to text, we can write whatever we want but only at our skill level. Similarly to images. When it comes to music, we can either hum or tap things or buy instruments, but there's still that skill barrier.
Nevertheless, when it's down totally to us, we can create whatever want to consume, but it has to be within reason.
Moving out from there, when you can use the skills of others to bring what you create in your head to life, you can employ whomever you feel can best do this, but costs may run too high depending on the amount you plan to do.
So where am I going with this?
Well, it's simple
Fully matured synthetic media is the digital equivalent of a molecular assembler.
It's the equivalent of ripping what's in your brain and putting it onto any medium you can think of, at any quality
In text, the difference between a rustic scene of a man and his daughter sharing a heartfelt conversation and, say, an epic intergalactic war for the fate of the universe is a few good scribbles
But translate that into an award-winning movie series and the cost differences are outrageous.
The first could win you awards and get your name remembered as a director for decades off a $5 million budget.
If you try making the latter with anything under $50 million, it's probably going to feel amateurish and need to be pared back
If you want Pixar to animate this, then again, those costs go way up in both cases
If you want John Williams to score it, you're pushing costs higher and higher
It's free to imagine in your head, but it could cost a hundred million dollars making a movie out of it
This inherently limits the range of art you can make
You can't make, say, a Clockwork Orange-style movie in the style of Pixar where Disney princesses in jumpsuits do a bit of the old ultraviolence against cutesy cartoon animals in raw depictions of brutal bestiality set to classical music. Well, you can, if you yourself can make it on your own dime. The vast majority of people can't. (Note, this is just a particularly extreme example to prove a point)
I'd go so far as to say that, if you want it to be Pixar quality, no one person can do it.
If you want a $200 million budget for your turbo-bizarro 6-hour art flick where everyone's a giant butt and communicates in farts, this literary-fiction auteur plotline of some peasant family in Fascist Italy trying to ward off an evil juggalo who is developing Greek fire to burn down an old church, you're probably going to be arrested and carted off to a mental institution if you even bring it up to a movie studio
And finally wrapping up this essay, my central point is that matured synthetic media erases the cost barrier to create such things
It becomes wholly possible to create a billion-dollar-looking movie, or music album, or video game, or novel epic of any conceivably subject at any conceivably quality on your own PC, without the need to ever share it with anyone else, which mitigates the need for self-censorship and cutting out "uncommercial" elements that literally every artist has to do when bringing their art to life
Whatever you imagine can be realized. Power without limit.
Unless the people running the server farm or training the network sets limits