In the past year my illustration business has dropped more half
54 comments
·May 22, 2025strogonoff
It’s interesting how in music the same application of ML swamps companies like Suno in trillion dollar lawsuits, yet in graphics and text no one cares, even though graphics and text fall victim to the same sleight of hand.
It feels like a big tech company can just ignore the law, unless another big company stands up against it (and hopefully helps the average Joe as a side-effect).
BLKNSLVR
The irony is in their scraping of all data within their significant radius, and yet the likes of twitter and facebook barely let you access anything of thiers without a login.
If they're scraping data from everywhere to feed their beast, then their data must also be open and scrape-able.
This does not, however, help the current situation where they sit upon the shoulders of millions of creative folks and provide no credit whatsoever, whilst also (actively or passively - by their existence and capability) attempting to make those very same creative folks redundant.
Will there be such a thing as AI stagnation if and when creative works for "it" to digest either are no longer created or no longer accessible to 'the great crawlers'?
Maybe artists can sell their works for ingestion in this scenario? Maybe that should already be the case...
strogonoff
> If they're scraping data from everywhere to feed their beast, then their data must also be open and scrape-able.
I think that was the idea behind the original name for ClosedAI.
conception
It’s not big tech. Money can ignore the law.
viraptor
Also, the low cost illustration business was already not amazing with the copyright law. Try ordering a few icons on Fiverr for example and see how many are repurposed from other sites.
On the lower end it's not as much whether the assets are in part or fully stolen, but who does it.
itsanaccount
power can ignore the law, for which money is the most often proxy. we need to get back to talking about who has power and who doesn't as this pretending that we're outside of the nature of such things increasingly has no clothes.
Papazsazsa
Professions die in the face of competition, that's nothing new.
What's more perilous is that the internet will soon cease to be a useful way to access and distribute knowledge, and has been transformed from a resource for learning and sharing into a clear-cut forest which nobody will replant.
But hey, at least sama got a new gruebel forsey.
Waterluvian
I think that transformation is difficult to appraise from within. In the future we’ll have a much more clear sense of how we feel about the invention of the automobile.
I think that the calm, more disciplined take of “the sky is always falling, it’s never falling. There’s other, probably better ways to be creative” is the one.
Today my eight year old sat at the PC for hours using Scratch to make what was essentially a Flash animation. He had PS5 access, Switch access, iPad access. Nope. Wanted to bash his head against loops and timers for hours.
The craving to be creative is insatiable. It’ll continue to take on new forms.
With apologies to the farriers of today.
brookst
The tool is not the art. It never was. People who mistake the two always suffer. I empathize, but there is no way to change that reality.
polio
Yes, but how much of a market will there be for this kind of creation?
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Waterluvian
How much of a market has there ever been for this kind of creation?
__loam
This is not a very substantial analysis of the industry and I'd be interested in a more comprehensive diagnosis. I believe there are coincidental factors in industries that typically employ illustrators and other artists that are affecting the market that are not AI, namely the market conditions since late 2022. To give the games industry as an example, the industry grew unnaturally during Covid, everyone thought that trend would continue and there was a lot of money and hiring thrown into it. The industry is returning to the normal trend line and it's still highly profitable, but layoffs are happening because executives are not hitting financial forecasts. Similarly, marketing budgets have been slashed across industries as the economy slowed down, and design work dried up in tech because nobody is raising money except the people who think they can replace creative labor with AI.
One thing that I'm not seeing in this thread is the reputational risk of using AI, especially in artistic works like games. AI imagery is generic, lazy, and is seeing a backlash from the public. It's a negative quality marker even if it's trendy in tech spaces. There's definitely a lot of people in executive leadership and management who think they can replace all kinds of labor with AI right now, but from what I've seen, that has not played out as expected in the real workforce. The actual reason this guy is losing half his business is probably more due to people cutting back on discretionary spending more than AI taking jobs.
ivape
Anyone that has ever done spec work has already faced just how demoralizing this will all be. When you do spec work for design, it's basically everyone just submitting their designs for the buyer to decide which one to pick. All the designers copy the designs that are getting the "this is going in the right direction" feedback. The average person will now be able to just say "make me something just like that" for free. It's basically the end, and only a world war will reset things. Best of luck all.
I'll add one other thing about war:
Humans are not exactly a peaceful bunch. A bunch of people with nothing to do start gang wars, often on a national scale, country versus country, or country-men versus counter-men. It's a hot-take for sure, but, we're trending towards war and that's especially true if AI can easily be used to rile each other up with ease.
mlinhares
Yeah, this is dead now, never do any "show me your work and we'll think about it" ever again. People will just steal with LLMs and there's not much that can be done.
ninetyninenine
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DontchaKnowit
It still cannot reason, which is the only thing useful a dev actually does. So, sorry, but I still dont feel threatened
travisjungroth
LLM’s can reason, assuming a definition of “reason” that doesn’t exclude them because of the way they do it. Not all of them and none perfectly, but they certainly have passed the threshold.
Try disproving your own theory. Can you craft a problem that requires reasoning that an LLM can solve?
palmotea
> It still cannot reason, which is the only thing useful a dev actually does. So, sorry, but I still dont feel threatened
You should feel threatened. Maybe they missed this time, but they're shooting at you, and will keep shooting at you.
hackyhacky
What is coding, if not applied reasoning?
andsoitis
there are at least two levels of reasoning. the reasoning that makes logical decisions that do not benefit from lateral thinking. and then higher-order reasoning that is fueled by lateral thinking and motivation to achieve. this higher-order reasoning seems to require inputs that human biology provides.
Waterluvian
Depends what kind of dev we’re talking about. Millions of coders are just doing automaton work.
coolcase
Yeah "dev" is as informative as "sales guy" which can be anything from a used car salesman to head of sales for a large corp.
dboreham
It's definitely reasoning. Or at least it's doing the same sort of thing as what you call reasoning. A few orders of magnitude less good at it than you, for now. But there's no bright line.
ninetyninenine
If you can’t follow the trendline then you can’t reason yourself.
Not even joking here. If that’s the bar for “reasoning” AI has already beat it.
osigurdson
In terms of capability, the trendline from 2020 to 2023 it is impossibly steep. From 2023 to now is much shallower based on my usage / experience with AI.
necovek
If you believe trendlines are guaranteed to remain pointing one way, can you reason?
afavour
> Guys we all know this. Follow the trend lines. Where is AI going?
This assumes constant progress. I remember during the early days of self driving cars we were told the same: look how far we’ve come already! We’ll all be in self driving cars within 5 years. And yet, here we are.
I have no doubt we will see a ton of progress. I also have no doubt AI will take over a lot of the tedious, basic coding work people do. But replacing coders entirely? I remain skeptical.
osigurdson
It is always tough to predict the future. Two years ago I would have agreed but today it seems that we are on the asymptotic part of the curve - waiting for another breakthrough of some sort. AI helps a lot but is nowhere near replacing anyone (for coding at least).
It seems that should be able to replace 1st level support for a bank or something like that but those industries move very slowly so even that could be years away still.
mrbungie
> It seems that should be able to replace 1st level support for a bank or something like that but those industries move very slowly so even that could be years away still.
Klarna is similar to a bank and they tried replacing 1st level support with a chatbot. Spoiler: it didn't work for them, so I wouldn't keep my hopes so high for banks.
necovek
We've given AI self-driving 15 years, and we still don't really have it. And nuclear fusion, what, 75 years?
And possibly never might.
Sometimes, there is a cap to the capability, and maybe we've already reached it. Yes, there will still be small, incremental improvements. Yes, we can change the "rules" to make new tools more valuable (eg. introduce communicating roads and vehicles to make it easier for cars to be self-driving; or introduce some forms of orthogonal resiliency into software that allows us to live with the slop from LLMs).
And yes, possibly you are right too, but there is nothing definitively confirming that.
olalonde
Sure, eventually, but does it really matter? When AI obsoletes humans, humans can focus on enjoying life. And if you still love coding, nothing’s stopping you from doing it as a hobby.
brookst
But what about people whose childhood dream was being a typist in a giant room of typists, all typing away at documents they didn’t write and barely pay attention to?
conception
I hope you support really really progressive tax structures because pretty much all human history shows that when humans aren’t needed those with money/power do not provide for them enjoy life.
I mean, people died to get two days off a week and only work eight hours in the US. That isn’t guaranteed for a wide swath of the world population. And the idea of working only four days a week is crazy radical talk.
simonw
You only risk becoming obsolete if you refuse to learn anything new.
ninetyninenine
That’s what AI said.
enraged_camel
>> Follow the trend lines. Where is AI going?
I mean, there's a reason "past performance is not a guarantee of future returns" is a well-known idiom.
tock
It's a great indicator. Just not a guarantee.
ninetyninenine
Yes the future is unknown but if we had to predict by logic you’d choose the most probable outcome and that outcome is the end tip of the trendline.
null
SchemaLoad
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pfdietz
So, how well does generative AI work on furry art?
SchemaLoad
Mixed results. It can produce a generic piece of art, but people don't want a generic piece of art, they want their exact character with all markings and colors exactly correct. It also produces a very distinct style that everyone will pick up on and call you out on.
You also won't be allowed to share your AI generated piece on most furry websites or group chats.
sneak
AI didn’t take his job, the commodification of a low-effort task did. AI might be the proximate cause but it isn’t the source of why his illustration side hustle got undercut.
Tons of boiler room illustrators in low income countries would have happily undercut him, too.
tsunamifury
This is cope. Ai took his job.
brookst
AI did his job, equally or better, and cheaper.
Better to say AI took his market.
sneak
No, a large scale popular website where one can pay to get tasks done quickly took his job.
The fact that it was done by AI is actually immaterial to the economic claim.
Tangentially related: Recently I was thinking of commissioning an artist to do some album art for me. I had a specific concept in mind and it needed to have a certain look to it but I didn't mind if the actual art was physically painted or digital.
What struck me is there's no website for hiring an artist. ArtStation has a Shop section (pre-made art for sale) but no Commissions section. Fiverr has some artists taking commissions but none I could find of really good quality, and there's AI art spam now as well (takes commissions but just sends you an AI prompt result). Reddit has two art commission subreddits but there aren't really many artists there. And both Fiverr and Reddit's main selling point is cheap art commissions, but I was happy to pay more for something good.
Unless you know an artist already that suits the style you're after, and they're currently taking commissions, it seems quite hard to find anyone. I kinda thought I'd be able to go to, like, CommissionArt.com and filter by Traditional -> Oils -> Landscapes or whatever to find someone perfect.
To everyone who says hire a real artist instead of using AI - where do you go to find them?