AI Is Coming For Commercial Art Jobs. Can It Be Stopped?

"Is AI Coming For Commercial Art?" rendered by Stable Diffusion, prompted by Rob Salkowitz Earlier this summer, a piece generated by an AI text-to-image application won a prize in a state fair art competition, prying open a Pandora's Box of issues about the encroachment of technology into the domain of human creativity and the nature of art itself. As fascinating as those questions are, the rise of AI-based image tools like Dall-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, which rapidly generate detailed and beautiful images based on text descriptions supplied by the user, pose a much more practical and immediate concern: They could very well hold a shiny, photorealistically-rendered dagger to the throats of hundreds of thousands of commercial artists working in the entertainment, videogame, advertising and publishing industries, according to a number of professionals who have worked with the technology. How impactful would this be to the global creative economy that runs on spectacular imagery? Think about the 10 minutes of credits at the end of every modern Hollywood blockbuster. Same with videogames, where commercial artists hone their skills for years to score plum jobs like concept artist and character designer.