Tech advancements allow individual artists and smaller companies to compete with giants
With the ongoing advances in artificial intelligence (AI), more and more people are concerned about their jobs becoming obsolete.
One of the most affected groups are artists.
Many artists — painters, animators, vocalists, writers, actors and dancers — have expressed concern that AI will one day make their professions obsolete.
Their arguments tend to be similar. From the artists’ perspective:
— At some point an individual will be able to reproduce whatever I do at the click of a button and my job will become obsolete.
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— Art is integral to culture, a human is required to create art and allowing AI to take over risks destroying our culture.
In reality, the only thing that matters when it comes to art is the consumer.
The most successful movies are the ones that make the most money after adjusting for inflation.
When it comes to popular culture, people vote with their wallets.
There are different ways the goalposts can be adjusted with regard to calculating the value of any particular artistic endeavour to society:
1. Expressing it as a percentage of GDP, as opposed to a dollar value, to adjust for rich countries.
2. Considering gross or net profit.
3. Adjusting for marketing campaigns as a variable.
4. Using some other metric.
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At the end of the day, if no one wants to buy the art, if there is no demand or market for it, then people have voted with their wallets in deciding it is worthless or has little value.
If art is judged to be priceless, people will often vote for their government to protect that form of art, in the public interest.
This has a cost which people pay in taxes.
The point is the public, and the market, still have to like the art being produced, and a human still has to tell the AI program what to create.
A professionally trained painter, for example, is going to be better at providing prompts to AI technology to generate images than a lay person.
This is similar to the skill difference between a novice internet researcher and a professional academic researcher.
Academics are good at telling a search engine what it should find out, compared to a lay person.
An artist that knows how to prompt AI is going to massively outperform a non-artist trying to do the same with the same AI.
When the coal industry was scaled back, the specialist workers in that field were told to switch careers, often expressed as “learn to code.” Very little sympathy was extended to them.
In the case of artists, their skillset is transferrable, but it is not obsolete. They just need to learn how to use these new AI tools.
Technological advancements are also allowing individual artists and smaller companies to compete with giants.
Take for example, Palworld, a video game made by a small Japanese developer, Pocketpair Inc., whose development team used technological advancements to market their product to the largest media franchise in the world: Pokemon.
The game, released on Jan. 19, has already sold over 19 million copies, and has the second-highest concurrent player count of all time on Steam, a video game digital distribution service, at more than 2.1 million.
Palword thus made a lot of money in a short period of time for a small company with low operating costs.
In some industries, where speed is important, advancements in innovation allow small companies to compete with giants.
Artists don’t need to learn to code, which is a lot of work. They need to learn to prompt, which can be done in days.
Once trained professionals start prompting, they’re going to blow away the competition.
— Alex Vezina is the CEO of Prepared Canada Corp, teaches Disaster and Emergency Management at York University and is the author of Continuity 101. He can be reached at info@prepared.ca.
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