Live music didn't disappear but the industry took a huge permanent culling when any cheap venue could just play a track. The replacement doesn't have to be great to trash an industry. It just has to be good enough for most. This is.

How about the fact that you can go on github today and find a thousand ml based music generators probably, and yet people still like going to concerts and seeing an artist play an instrument.

Not a meaningful comparison. Seeing an artist play an instrument is a fundamentally different experience. It's visual, much more impressive sound, a social experience, and so on.

With imagine generation you just look at output. There's no difference between seeing the output of a human-created image or an AI-created image, people can't tell.

Ok, but you still see people passively listening to real artists instead of ai generated music. Provenance matters for music and for art. Maybe if you design retail art for Target without your name ever put on the work you have to worry.

It's not a good comparison.

A better comparison is like saying AI text generation bots will replace authors, or that AI drug testing will replace drug development - which clearly isn't the case. The core issue is that people with no idea what the creative fields offer are throwing their hat in with what they think is going to happen. People with experience are saying the opposite because they know better.

At best, this will remove those websites where you can pay $5 for "a designer" to make you "an image" - is this a loss though? Such things have never been a threat to creative fields.

You pose it like an all or nothing equation, which it isn't.

The way I see it, if you'd consider the art world a pyramid, the bottom is about to fall out. A lot of commercial artwork serves no deeper meaning but pretty decoration.

The emphasis will move to ideas instead of just execution. Artists will soon find out about the avalanche of people that have creative ideas yet can't draw or paint. They'll be unlocked.

In context it is all or nothing - because people on HN think illustrators and artists are what they find on fiverr.com. They're making hugely naive blanket statements saying that this will destroy an industry and make creatives unemployable. These doomsayers have literally not the faintest idea about the job they think is being erased by txt2img.

If people were saying "oh hey this is going to give the lazystock on iStockPhoto a run for their money", I wouldn't debate that point, it's true. However that's not the industry, and it's certainly not where the money is - neither in # of customers nor total spend. Those people who you might think are customers simply put: aren't, they get by with images stolen from google images and bundled clipart, or frankly: nothing at all.

Now this isn't to say that txt2img isn't useful or exciting. I can say that it is the largest and most significant expansion of creative tech since the advent of DTP. This will absolutely accelerate and open the door to not just higher standards, but new ways of rapidly ideating concepts. I've already seen fantastic examples of txt-to-image-to-mesh-to-live animation. All automated through AI.

This is also why I speak against the other kinds of naysayers: the ones that think this tech is unimportant. These types are being incredibly short sighted and acting like we're looking at this tech's endpoint, rather than its infancy.

tl,dr: No creatives are not being put out of the job. Yes this tech is incredibly important.

I agree with you. I think it's understandable that non-artists commonly associate art with what they interact with or see the most: illustration and decoration, stuff found at artstation, the like.

Surely you have a point that this does not cover the entire world of art, but I think it would be helpful if you constructively explain which parts are less or not affected, instead of calling people ignorant.

I’ll definitely continue to call people ignorant when they make grand unsubstantiated claims, that frankly are nothing more than trollish internet behaviour.

A better approach for people is to ask questions, rather than trying to write controversial falsehoods.

Right now there is at least one high ranking submissions on HN where a creative details how this won’t end their career, but you don’t need to read it - social media is filled with creatives literally rejoicing - no one is sweating this.

So to that: I say that ignorance to this is definitely a choice.