How Generative AI Could Replace Artists in Creative Industries | WSJ Tech News Briefing

welcome to a special episode of tech news briefing for Monday April 17th I'm Zoe Thomas for The Wall Street Journal this is the third installment of our series artificially minded where we look at how artificial intelligence is changing our lives livelihoods and culture the first two shows AI 101 and your AI questions answered can be found in this feed they're a great way to understand the background and some more interesting things that AI does today we're going to talk about something that has been raising a lot of concern recently artists fear that generative AI could replace them it's just doesn't make sense to pay an artist and to wait three weeks if you can get it like for essentially nothing air generation tools have already been used to make a prize-winning picture comic books and magazine covers and that has a lot of artists worried now there are a lot of questions about the information the art used to build these AI art generators it's even the center of some lawsuits but today that's not our focus on this episode we are looking at the way AI could upend artistic Industries after all mechanization and automation replaced workers in technical Industries think switchboard operators the human computers that were once employed by NASA even some modern day warehouse workers historically though technological advancements have contributed to job creation and economic growth and creative roles ones that rely on the human brain to do more than just a repetitive task have for the most part adapted to technological breakthroughs of the past and workers in these fields have avoided being fully replaced so is this the moment that shifts to understand that concern I want to introduce you to Tomer hanuka an illustrator living in New York City Hanukkah earns what he describes as a middle class income designing the covers of books and issues of magazines like the New Yorker and National Geographic thanks to his distinctive Style the anatomy of the figures is quite expressive and Theatrical there is a limited palette of colors but there are very bold usually and I strive for um unusual combinations of color Arrangements years developing his style his brand his artistic identity calls his cultural capital which is exactly that recognition that name and paired with a certain visual approach and that's something that gives us power it gives us a place in the conversation you know Brands need it it gives us some kind of Mobility and I think when that thing is harvested and sold for a subscription then I feel like it's a very unfair process what Hanukkah is referring to are AI powered tools that generate art you may have heard of programs like stable diffusion Dolly 2 and mid-journey if you haven't used one yourself it's pretty simple type in a prompt like illustration of a woman sitting in a cafe drinking coffee and the program spits back what looks like a drawing of a woman sitting at a cafe drinking a cup of coffee you can even ask for work that evokes your favorite artists say then go or Rembrandt a prompt like a woman is sitting at a cafe drinking coffee in the style of Monet can generate unique results that look like the dead French impressionist could have painted himself and Hanukkah says a lot of people have been typing in his name into these generators to produce work in his style somebody sent me a link of what I'm guessing happened is that somebody went and used my name in a prompt and maybe also the word cyberpunk and created 400 images and then went on Open Sea which is this marketplace where you can sell collectible jpegs nfts and sold this 400 image collection under the title punks by Hanukkah 400 images using his name so here is an entire process of creation and marketing and sale that has nothing to do with me it's a direct threat on what I do and it uses my identity in a way that I just can't control bin C says it has it has developed and put it toward prevent it using human moderators it also has tools to allow sellers of digital art to add attribution with a badge called inspired by and another one called content credentials which says who created the original graphic but for Hanukkah it's not just the places where AI generated art can be sold that has him worried rather it's the ease with which strangers can access his Unique Style for free on ai-powered art tools after all if they can make art like his without him almost instantly Why Pay Hanukkah for his work at all it's just doesn't make sense to pay an artist and to wait three weeks if you can get it like for essentially nothing of course there's a fine line between and and actually copying an artist's work and many supporters of AI art generation programs say these tools are just starting points a spokesperson for stability AI said its tools are assistive the Way digital cameras or photo editing software have been for Photography they added quote we expect AI to open up new opportunities for the creative industry and grow the pie for paid artistic work a spokesperson for openai the maker of dolly also mentioned photo editing software as an example of how technology has impacted artists in the past they acknowledge that AI would likely have an impact on jobs and said quote the nature of many jobs will change jobs that never existed before will be created others may be eliminated mid-journey did not respond to a request for comment painters graphic designers concept artists have all raised concerns that part or all of their livelihoods could be snatched away by people using these programs but they're not the first creative professions to deal with the emergence of new tools specifically the introduction of artificial intelligence for example the film industry has been using AI for a while now and some in the industry say it actually makes their work easier by taking away the more mundane or repetitive tasks right now I don't think anyone would have noticed that I used AI in any of my work because I'm kind of using it for like technical stuff Evan halleck is a visual effects artist who recently worked on the oscar-winning film everything everywhere all at once helic has worked on commercials music videos and films for everything everywhere all at once he says he mostly cleaned up shots removing things from the backgrounds of scenes he also made a lot of versions of Evelyn the main character when she's flying through the Multiverse and during the film and in previous roles he used AI tools to assist in his work these aren't generative AI tools but they help ease some tasks particularly for a process called rotoscoping if you didn't shoot on a green screen and you want to put something behind that object you have to manually cut them out and in film it's 24 frames a second so you have to cut them out 24 times per second it famously used to take really really long periods of time and no one that I know just truly liked doing it it could take like three four days for seven to eight seconds so if you film an actor in a city but the scene calls for them to be on a beach you've got to spend hours cutting them out of each shot and placing them over a shot of the coast but Hallock can cut that time drastically using ai-powered rotoscoping tools and he says the time he saves frees him up to work on more creative tasks the first time he used it was about two years ago and he's continued using it but the thing is halleck a freelancer hired by films often used to Outsource this work to others who could make anywhere from 500 to over a thousand dollars a day he says now with AI tools he doesn't need to hire them and as these tools become more common in the industry even helic acknowledges they could have a big impact on who gets hired and how much money films put towards tasks like visual effects I think eventually rates may go down as things get easier rotoscopers famously it can take five six days to do things and if it only takes a day your budget goes down quite a bit or maybe not even raids but timelines might go down the rates might stay the same but the actual like timelines that you get will go down and it's really hard to say just because everything is just changing every three months I hear of like a new really exciting thing Hallock Thinks Big visual effects houses places that hire thousands of VFX artists to work on Films will be hit hardest so what is this pace of development mean for the future of the creative Workforce as we said at the beginning technology has impacted jobs before but often the elimination of jobs by technology leads to the creation of roles that couldn't have been imagined before there were no web developers before the internet but a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman is hard to come by these days research from Goldman Sachs found that two-thirds of occupations could be partially automated by AI the bank notes though that AI could lead to the creation of new roles and new ways of doing things some artists are already gaining Fame by using technology to create art Mike winkelmann who works under the name beeple broke art sale records with his collection of digital images that sold for 69.3 million dollars though they weren't made with AI artist Trevor paglin's Bloom a series of AI generated prints resembling photographs of flowers is on display at an exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and Jason Allen a games developer took home first prize in an art competition at the Colorado State Fair with his work created via AI art generator mid-journey but concerns about technology coming for more jobs have been rising lately especially as more generative artificial intelligence tools have been launched including AI art generators like Dolly stable diffusion and also chat GPT which can write research papers and compose poems nearly 20 of the U.S Workforce could be impacted by this Tech including mathematicians coders and writers according to a study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and open AI the maker of chat GPT which stands to financially benefit if more of this technology is adopted all of this is making this moment feel different than past developments the easy thing to point to to say now is different than it has been up till now is the rate of adoption and use of this Technologies that's Matt Bean a professor of technology management at the University of California Santa Barbara Bean says to understand why generative AI technology could impact earnings and opportunities for the future Workforce you have to understand how it's adoption impacts workers who aren't totally replaced by technology and to understand this concept fully I'm going to let Bean introduce a piece of academic jargon skill biased technical change that's skill biased technical change the basic idea there is that when you have a new class of automated technology there's some period where no one quite knows how to use it but when it's we start to sort of figure it out then if you have skill and privilege in your job already and by Pro I'm not I don't mean capital P privilege here I mean you sort of have resources you have discretion in your work you have a quote unquote good job that change accrues to you in your career in a way that enhances your lot gives you better things to do more interesting work whereas if you're sort of below the water line skill wise you are you're in a job that doesn't require that much of you that much complicated skill those are the jobs that tend to become simplified over time because they're more immutable to Automation and so those who are below that water line tend to often land up with less opportunity lower pay the jobs are lower quality and you know they can be more monotonous for example result according to some human workers end up doing very simple repetitive roles they interact less with skilled or senior staff and therefore learn less and have fewer opportunities to grow in their job or put simply if a technology allows an expert to do more better by themselves then they need less help from somebody who's a novice who's trying to learn so why does this matter for Creative fields Bean says creative fields are the Canary in the coal mine because if you stop asking novices to do basic roles filling in the background of a large image or design or cutting out an object 24 times for a single second of a movie they have less chance to get their foot in the door develop industry knowledge and hone their skills under a more seasoned artist this is what Evan halick is already seeing in visual effects and what Tomar Hanukkah fears will happen to illustrators remember historically economists say technological innovation has created more jobs and added more wealth to the economy the thing is Bean says the speed at which AI technology is being adopted is so unprecedented it's hard to know the impact on society the pace and the extent of change that alone is unprecedented and should lead us to pay attention in new ways and not to assume that it's all going to be the same creative destruction that has come before artists and researchers we spoke to including the three we introduced you to today none thought the role of artists would go away entirely but as more of their tasks are replaced with AI Hanukkah helic bean and others told us it's likely only a small number of the very best will find well-paid work as artists and what that means for the world we've yet to figure out next week on the fourth episode of our AI series artificially minded who's responsible for generative AI if it behaves badly until then you can catch regular episodes of tech news briefing in this feed and if you want even more Tech news check out our website wsj.com Today's show was produced by Julie Chang we had editorial support from Eric Bellman Falana Patterson and Robert wall our supervising producer is Melanie Roy and our executive producer is Chris sinsley this episode was mixed by Michael LaValle I'm your host Zoe Thomas thanks for listening [Music] foreign

Channel: Wall Street Journal

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Keywords: generative ai, ai art, creative work, artists worried about ai, how generative ai could replace artists, tech news briefing, wsj, midjourney, dall-e 2, open ai, microsoft bing, chatgpt, everything everywhere all at once ai, ai art generator, ai generated art, stable diffusion, artificial intelligence, skill biased technological change, creative fields, beeple, ai generated prints, ai art generation tools, rotoscoping, stability ai, opensea, ai art generator free, art, techy

Id: l19wl3CHvjg

Length: 16min 38sec (998 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 17 2023