Artists are losing work, wages, and hope as bosses and clients embrace AI (Brian Merchant)

[highplainsdem]

Latest in Brian's "AI Killed My Job" series. There are lots of individual stories in this article, but I'm going to excerpt just part of one of them below.

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/artists-are-losing-work-wages-and

-snip-

Lastly, in my role as a graphic designer, we often now have to deal with clients sending art files in for screen printing that were generated with AI. It's a pain in the ass because these files are often low-resolution and the weird smudgy edges in most AI images don't make for easy color separations. When a human graphic designer sits down to create a design, they typically leave layers in place that can be individually manipulated and that makes my job much easier. AI flattens everything so I have to manually separate out design elements if I want to independently adjust anything. The text is still frequently garbled or unreadable. The fonts don't actually exist so they can't easily be matched. These clients are also almost invariably cheap, and get upset when they're told that it's going to be a $75 per hr art charge to fix the image so it's suitable for screening.

Also, and here I don't have any data, just my personal anecdotal experience, but it feels like some of these companies have laid off so much of their in-house graphic design staff that they are increasingly reliant on us as a print service to fix up stuff they'd formerly done for themselves. I get simple graphic design requests every day by people who should have had the resources to handle this themselves but now they're expecting me to pick up the slack for the employees they've let go for the sake of our working relationship and keeping them on as clients. It's become such a drag on our small business that my boss is considering extra fees. (Which, considering the slim margins in the garment industry, is really saying something!) I am convinced Microsoft does not have any in-house graphic designers left at this point. Okay I joke, but man, it's bleak.

I have no way of knowing how many gigs I've lost to AI, since it's hard to prove a negative. I'm not significantly less busy than I was before, and my income hasn't really changed for better or worse. There's more stress and fear, greater workloads cleaning up badly-done AI-generated images on behalf of people looking for a quick fix, instead of getting to do my own creative stuff. And it felt deeply and profoundly cruel to have my life's work trained on without my consent, and then put to use creating images like deepfakes or child sexual abuse materials. That one was really hard for me as a mom. I'd rather cut my own heart out than contribute to something like that.

There's a part of me that will never forgive the tech industry for what they've taken from me and what they've chosen to do with it. In the early days as the dawning horror set in, I cried about this almost every day. I wondered if I should quit making art. I contemplated suicide. I did nothing to these people, but every day I have to see them gleefully cheer online about the anticipated death of my chosen profession. I had no idea we artists were so hated—I still don't know why. What did my silly little cat drawings do to earn so much contempt? That part is probably one of the hardest consequences of AI to come to terms with. It didn't just try to take my job (or succeed in making my job worse) it exposed a whole lot of people who hate me and everything I am for reasons I can't fathom. They want to exploit me and see me eradicated at the same time.

-snip-

They want to exploit me and see me eradicated at the same time.

It is really hard to watch what's going on - especially when people who know damn well how generative AI models were trained are still fine with using them. At the very least it shows contempt for real art and artists. But I've seen hatred of real artists in AI users' social media posts as well, usually mixed with very obvious envy because the wannabe using AI never had the talent and commitment to become a professional artist.

[KT2000]

1. Surcharge!!

[highplainsdem]

2. ????

[KT2000]

3. The $75 charge

to fix AI's failing to provide an acceptable image. Technology has always left working out the bugs to the consumers - free of charge. We have to turn the tables on that.

[highplainsdem]

4. What we have to get rid of is the unethical attitude that it's OK to use illegally trained generative AI.

[KT2000]

5. good point

A friend called a local car dealership to get her car repaired. AI took the call and at some point my friend said it had an attitude. It replied it did not have an attitude.

I was with her at the service desk and she told the manager about the exchange and he looked down and shook his head. He said they were getting a lot of complaints about the "AI attitude."

[haele]

6. Another problem is that consumers don't want to pay royalties for use...

The average consumer, be it a person ordering art or a graphic design for a family get together or a someone at mid-sized company looking to adapt a popular cartoon for a branding meme to use as a product (like pissing Calvin window stickers), don't believe the designer or artist should be paid beyond the sale of the initial art.
Royalties give the artist the time to be able to keep doing art between the performance or original sale. Most people don't realize that, nor do they understand the time and effort it takes to make something beautiful.

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

7. Kick