[Nick Zwar]

I am very pragmatic about it; A.I. is here, it’s there to stay, and it’s going to get a lot better. If now everyone can do simple nice A.I. imagery for rudimentary purposes, then yes, artists who do just rudimentary imagery for rudimentary purposes are no longer needed. Lots of jobs are no longer needed. You don’t need lamplighters anymore, because streetlight go on and off by themselves. Automatic speech recognition means you don’t mean scribes anymore. We don’t need switchboard operators anymore. We don’t need clerks in video rental stores anymore, so they had to become film directors. No one needs to plow a field with (animal or human) muscles anymore, we’ve got machines for it.

But every technology also brings new chances. Yes, if everybody can now produce pictures with cats on unicorns, you don’t need simple commercial designers anymore to produce images of cats and unicorns, and it can replace all those artists who produce pictures of cats and unicorns that are, as Malte said, merely “bland and without any personality”. Why wouldn’t it? But the key is: since everybody can now produce bland pictures without personality, you still need actual artists if you want to stay ahead. So the good ones will be in demand, perhaps more than before, no question about it.

As I said, I view things things from a rational perspective: if any technology, in this case A.I., can do something cheaper or faster or better, let the technology do it.

Anything a technology can do where the results are as good or better or faster (sometimes even combination of these things, no one would argue that machines cannot plow better AND faster than any human could) than something that a human can do it, let the technology do it. The technology will do it anyway, so I might as well go with it.
That’s what my personal view comes down to; I don’t complain or lament about something that I see as inevitable (and I do see new technologies replacing old ways as inevitable), I move straight to the next step, which is to integrate the new technology efficiently and let it replace the old wherever that makes sense, leave the old wherever it makes sense, and let it create new opportunities wherever it makes sense.