I'm constantly surrounded by AI generated art images. I see it in public, social media, from my own family, worst of all I have non-artist friends who use and have Patreons making good profit off creating AI generated images.
As someone who is an artist, I have been feeling devastated for months as AI continues to become more normalized. I have worked very hard, dedicating my life to learning this craft. I feel my skills are essentially useless now. I have lost my chance at obtaining a career within the industry. Art is so easily accessible, anyone can generate anything now.
The vast majority of people don't care about artists, they care about the end product. I can't compete with something that generates faster, higher quality images by the dozen in a matter of seconds. People argue that AI makes mistakes, and can't generate anything of good quality. This issue tends to be the user who is unexperienced that generated something using poor settings, not the AI itself. AI can generate images without errors, and can be trained to work well and look good. I don't think artists realize how much it has improved, because they tend to look away, or are not exposed to it as much as I am within my circle. I know it lacks humanity, but people and corporations don't care. My family and friends don't care. People are becoming popular and getting tons of recognition, and money simply by generating AI images. No one cares.
I am losing my sanity, I don't know what to do. I miss the times of admiring art, knowing it was human made and someone worked hard. I struggle to find the motivation to finish my own works, knowing it could just be generated in seconds with AI, and a good majority of people wouldn't care, or be able to tell the difference. I don't understand why robots are creating art instead of doing our labor work. I thought art was one of the last parts of humanity we had left.
I don't know how my future will be, but I am so tired of trying. I have not used any AI in my work, and I want to remain honest and true to myself and the art community. I know I've set myself up for failure by refusing to accept this new tool into my process. So I will be left behind.
