I think it is more accurate to say that AI is threatening a lot of the ways artists use their skills to create economic value. Making corporate logos, creating visuals for products, etc.

Art won’t go away, just a lot of the ways artists support themselves.

I personally highly doubt that any company worth $100 million or more will have an AI-generated logo in the next 30 years.

Product visual mockups also aren't art. The product design itself is art, but I sort of suspect that a human designer will be the one driving the AI to make the visual.

The artists at the firms making the logos are absolutely going to be using AI to come up with ideas to pitch to their creative director (with some human tune up).

Yes, exactly. This kind of AI is a tool for artists, not a replacement.

The trouble being that replacing drafts people creating options for the Art Director with AI creating options instead is that it removes a central path by which artists gained skill and experience in their industries (and the same is true across all disciplines). All will go well so long as people who came up the old ways are the ones using AI. Eventually they’ll be gone and all the experience and discernment will go with them.

To put it in more immediate terms: the goal of business is profit. Cutting costs is a great way to do that immediately. It’s only over a longer span that things like Boeing reveal the issues. The goal of artists and the art industry is to create art that moves other people, at acceptable costs. Cutting costs with AI is a great way to do that immediately…

You see where I’m going. Sure maybe we’ll have figured out an entirely new economic paradigm by the time this bill comes due. But I wouldn’t count on it.

And hey, maybe you think art isn’t a career path worth any sort of consideration on this front, and that society will keep humming along just fine when AI takes over in that regard. I sure hope so, because that seems like the obvious conclusion of all current incentive structures.

Well, for now at least.

So?

An awful lot of the economy is made up of companies much smaller than $100M. If I walk down the street, I see all sorts of small shops & restaurants. Cars and trucks go by with logos advertising local plumbing services, nursing home care and catering. Yesterday I took a tour of a brass foundry which forges brass sculptures that hang on the walls of churches. How big is the company? Its one guy. One guy and a small warehouse of equipment.

I think a lot of incidental work is already increasingly being handed over to AIs. Business cards. Images for the wall of a cafeteria. The logo for a bakery. Whatever. Photoshop is full of AI assistant tools. So is Divinci Resolve now.

AI is slowly nibbling away at creative work from every angle it can find, to reduce cost and automate. I think we should expect this process to continue for quite some time.

The problem is that AI needs good training data to work well. However, everyone knows that training AI on AI generated content has poor results. Therefore, the more market share AI generated art commands, the worse it will perform. It is inherently non-sustainable.

You don't think there is enough training data with our entire civilization's history of art to sustain AI forever?

Majority of artists are working for companies worth less than $100 millions. The SME sector is the bulk of our economy.

If 'the artists are not going away' involves either paying the artists less or reducing the number of artists or the meaning of being an artist being redefined I would not immediately agree. ... but the third one is doing a lot of lifting.

I think you will find that neither will be the case. There have always been a vanishingly small number of artists who can make money on art, and that pool (and their value) will not be decreasing.

Much of that pool is doing live performance art, like dancers and musicians, and when Napster and Spotify came to "destroy" the musician by giving everyone infinite reach, what actually happened was that more people succeeded as professionals.

The photograph was also a tremendously good thing for visual artists, bringing in the impressionist era and opening up a whole new field of art in itself.

As to the concept of changing the nature of the work of the "artist" - I can't think of an artist whose work wasn't changed by the technology of the time. From Prussian blue to the electric guitar, artists are usually made great by showing the new possibilities of the new technology of the age.

There's some nuance here. Industries such as stock photography and audiobook narration are indeed artistic forms but can mostly be replaced with AI equivalents.

I have not yet met an AI system that can get close to what an audiobook narrator does. I assume that more audiobooks will get lower-quality narration, but narration of audiobooks is often done either (1) by the author or (2) by someone who is very good at doing a dramatic reading. The former won't be replaced because the author's own reading of their work provides emphasis and nuance that shows their intentions, and the latter is still far beyond the capabilities of current text-to-speech.

AI is very good at giving you an average-quality output. Art, by its very nature, is almost always a superlative expression of something.

Hence the mostly: audiobooks with extra benefits as you mention will be fine, but there's a massive long tail where average output is sufficient.

When you say "mostly replaced," then, you mean "grown through new capabilities." That is different from replacing the people in the industry.