Is AI Going to Hurt My Illustration Business?
A friend asked me if I was worried about AI taking over my job. I told him this:
The thing about AI art is it still takes a skilled person with good aesthetic and communication skills to produce it. And to cause it to produce exactly what my clients need from it would take as much time as just drawing it. In fact, I do use AI as a tool to produce my work, but instead of making my work faster it just makes it better. I don't use the direct results of the AI work as a stand-alone image. I use it to create parts of the image I'm custom building, or to generate ideas, colour palets, etc. But mastering the prompting and iteration process to make a very clear and specific communication piece is not easier than drawing it. Unless, of course, the AI artist doesn't actually know how to draw, in which case the AI is their only option and they're stuck with it.
I suspect it will be similar to the dawn of affordable digital cameras, where amateurs could access the technology and suddenly decided they wanted to quit their jobs to be photographers. Then they discover that being a successful photographer is about a lot more than owning a camera and having some talent. Most of those people dropped out of their photography fantasy careers due to the challenges of running a business, and the fact that they were competing against a bunch of real pros who also had great tech, plus a lot of other expertise that goes into it.