How much did photography "steal" painter jobs ?
With all the fuzz about IA image "stealing" illustrator job, I am curious about how much photography changed the art world in the 19th century.
There was a time where getting a portrait done was a relatively big thing, requiring several days of work for a painter, while you had to stand still for a while so the painter knew what you looked like, and then with photography, all you had to do was to stand still for a few minutes, and you'll get a picture of you printed on paper the next day.
How did it impact the average painter who was getting paid to paint people once in their lifetime.
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You forgot a massive step in-between: Digital art / Photoshop.
Which already vastly sped up art creation and made it easier (when you can just use special brushes instead of having to spend hours doing a pattern by hand).
And even though it's a lot easier, you still need artists to produce proper products. Good artists and designers will keep their jobs in the foreseeable future, while more simple one-shot works can be done by AI.
I really hope you are right about the last paragraph. About the rest, I didn't forget, I didn't mention it as it's not what OP made the comparison to.
But you make a good point about digital art creating more disruption to the status quo than photography did. However, AI is still an on steroids comparison if you ask me. You still need to invest a massive amount of time and practice to get good at digital. Creating a whole image can take hours , days, months. And if you don't understand what makes it look good, it won't. This is not the case with AI. You don't need art skills. It helps if you do, it gives you more control to manipulate a result, but the quality you get from the beginning is on another level.
You only get good quality if you use the right model, the right keywords, the right negative prompt, the right settings, .. and then it can still be pure luck.
If you see a high quality AI image that actually looks good (not just parts of it, but the whole composition) then someone probably spent hours with fine-tuning and someone else spent weeks to customize the model.
And even if you're good at that, you'll never get exactly the image you had in your mind. Especially as most models are heavily biased (You can create a portrait of a busty beautiful woman, but the second one you create probably has a very similar face).
This might get better relatively fast, but right now AI art is not a replacement for good artists. Especially if you need more than one image with consistency between them.
It's more like a superpowered Photoshop where you can mess around with and get cool results, just that instead of filters or a magic stamp you generate the entire image.
Super cool tech, but of course artists feel threatened. Except the popular ones who already drown in commissions.
I get your point, but the rate of improvement is jaw dropping. Two years ago you wouldn't be getting these results. In two years from now, I'll be able to add something like a rough sketch or perhaps two images to be used as reference for pose or light or color palette, add what I want in words, and get the results. And the images of course could be pinched from anywhere. Sure, your idea may not be replicated fully but you would be very close. And more often than not, people don't have a clear cut idea of what they want before making art, and/or they're open to changes on the spot, accidents, etc. So that doesn't really make a difference in the argument.
I don't think there has ever been any other tool that progressed faster than this. I'd be really surprised to see it plateau as it is right now. That's the threat yes.