Dear Creatives: #AI Is Here To Take Your Job — And Make It Better, Faster, And Easier

Creatives understandably question the value and ethics of AI art.

They raise valid questions such as "Who owns the right to AI art based on another artist's style?" and "Who will hire artists when they can just use AI?"

Still, it's important not to dismiss AI too quickly. As a creative, AI can be more useful to you than you think.

Let's start with the most common argument against AI art — that it's not "real art."

Dismissing #AIArt for not being real art is like dismissing people who drive automatic cars as not being "real drivers," or dismissing those who shoot photos on Auto Mode as not being "real photographers."

As an automatic car driver with a manual car license who ran a photo studio in a previous life and mentored other photographers, these arguments are laughable.

Any car will get you from A to B, stickshift or not, and any camera can capture a moment just fine, manual mode or not.

Passengers don't care what gearbox your car uses, and clients don't care what camera mode you shoot on.

More importantly, you don't really care, either.

Think about it — when was the last time you saw an Instagram post and wondered whether the poster shot the image with their phone or a DSLR?

Did you lose any sleep wondering whether they edited the pic in Lightroom vs. VSCO?

No. You double-tapped it all the same.

As for the argument that “AI is simply ripping from existing artists” — isn't that how art works?

There’s nothing new under the sun — even your best work today was inspired by something you saw beforehand.

AI?just does the same thing faster.

Automatic cars reduce the mental and physical cost of driving. Digital cameras make photography faster, cheaper, and easier.

Similarly, generative AI tools reduce the speed and cost of creating art — for everyone, including artists. Instead of fighting generative AI, it's time for creatives to work with it.

Here are four reasons why:

1. AI helps you work faster

In the past, painters needed studio space, supplies, time, and years of training to produce good visuals. Today, a laptop, Wacom tablet, and Adobe are all you need to create stunning art.

Photographers previously needed rolls of film to produce good photos. Today, digital cameras have greatly reduced the cost of photography and exponentially increased the number of creative photos we've produced.

Computers and digital processors reduced the speed and cost of creating. AI is merely accelerating that trend.

2. Other industries are already adapting to AI

There's precedent for the use of generative AI in creative work.

For example, before AI, writers would spend hours brainstorming the perfect headline and landing page copy for a campaign.

With the rise of GPT-3, tool after tool can now generate oodles of copy in mere seconds.

I wrote about this copywriting obsolescence in my newsletter back in 2020. As a content marketer, it was a development both fascinating and depressing to witness.

The first time I used Copy.ai , it felt like magic. Feed it a brand name, URL, and description, and it'll generate any type of marketing text you want.

I had two choices: complain that AI was about to take my job, or learn how to use the tool. Of course, clients don't pay me to write — they pay me to think.

Today, content marketers use AI tools to generate landing pages, emails, headline, and ads.

There are more open roles for content marketers today than just a few years ago, and nobody's content marketing career has been waylaid by AI.

If anything, AI has helped content marketers work faster for the same or higher pay. As an artist, you can cash in on that, too. Instead of fighting the rise of #AIArt, incorporate it into your workflow.

Use AI to generate concept art, icons, and backgrounds quickly. Then, edit the results to perfection. That’s less work for the same (or higher) pay.

Also, newsflash — clients don't care what you use to generate art, as long as the art is good.

Most clients couldn't be bothered to master AI tools (just like they never bothered to master Photoshop), so you'll always be in demand.

3. Prompt engineering will be the most important AI art skill of the next decade

As an artist, the greatest skill you can learn over the next five years is not how to use Adobe, Figma, or Lightroom, but prompt engineering using AI.

In layman's terms, prompt engineering is the art of feeding the right inputs into AI to generate the results you want.

It's the difference between telling a four-year-old to draw a cat vs. telling them to draw a brown cat with long whispers and large eyes.

The more specific your prompt, the better the results you get.

Here’s an example of #AIArt I generated in 30 seconds using Midjourney with the prompt “one sneaker with flowers sprouting out of it, intricately detailed, octane render, 4k, particulated, artstation, --v 4”.

If you have a Midjourney account, you can replicate this generation. Each generation took me 30s or less. Different AI tools also let you generate variations of a specific result you like.

There’s an entire art to prompt engineering, and once you get the hang of it, the sky is the limit. You can generate almost anything you can think of in seconds.

Here’s a “bored rich pig watching movies at the cinema”:

Here’s that same rich pig watching Netflix at his penthouse. Again, I generated each of these in under 30 seconds.

4. People will always need human creativity

As you can see from the above examples, AI is imperfect. This means people will always need a human editor or curator to deliver polished visuals.

More importantly, the most valuable aspect of your craft — your creativity — remains untouched.

A photographer isn't great because of the camera they use, but because of their unique eye.

A designer isn't defined by the Wacom tablet or Apple Pencil they use to create digital visuals, but by their creative process, mental inputs, and previous experience.

It's no different with generative AI. As an artist, your value will lie in how you're able to bring a client's vision to life using AI, not by the specific AI tool you use.

This is where mastering different prompts, learning about different art styles, and experimenting will come in handy.

Test the waters first

Play with?#AIArt?tools before dunking on them. These generative tools are like magic — and their time savings alone are worth their weight in gold.

No matter what art or design field you work in, AI can help you work faster.

You can use AI to generate text and visuals, as we've seen — but also music, games, website wireframes, and even architectural drawings.

Over the next few years, new tools will come out to help creatives generate specific types of creative work even faster.

You can moan about the rising tide from the beach, or jump in and ride the wave.