Thread by @JoshWComeau

Woaaah — An AI that can generate delightful illustrations from text captions.

This will be GOLD for folks who want custom illustrations to visually explain a concept. The content creator in me is *pumped*.

openai.com/blog/dall-e

Heard from some folks that are concerned about the effect it'll have on artists. Wrestling with this a bit.

In my view, it's similar to the effect that Squarespace had on web developers. There's still plenty of demand for us, but it changed a bit.

Essentially things shift upwards a bit. It's less common to get paid $500 to build a website for your local bakery, but still plenty of opportunities building dynamic products for businesses with big budgets.

I do see that this makes it harder to get started, since early in your career, those kinds of entry-level contracts can be really beneficial.

But I also kinda feel like the "just" thing is to make websites available to local bakers who can't afford $500.

I struggle with the notion that we should shame technology for making certain things redundant when the overall effect on society is so positive. It's a great thing that resources are becoming available to a wider set of the population, not just those with deep pockets!

Often the choice isn't between "pay a human for labor" and "get it cheaper from an AI", it's "have a nice thing" or "don't have a nice thing". That's how I see these illustrations: I'd love to sprinkle them in blog posts, instead of it being all-text.

And when I do want custom illustration work, like my 3D mascot, I feel like I'll always pay for that. Can't beat the ability to collaborate 1:1 with a human and get *exactly* what you want. I paid many hundreds of dollars for that art, and it was 1000% worth it.

But yeah. I'm the first to admit that I don't know much about the graphic design world, and maybe this is a super unfair comparison. Let me know if I've got it wrong!

I think maybe I have gotten it wrong 😅

Or at least, there's another side to this; it is kinda funky that a company will charge for derivations of unlicensed art. The value is sourced from all artists who have published online, but captured by the company writing the AI

Kinda feels like there should be a Spotify-like royalty model, except that's probably impossible since presumably it's not as simple as "these 3 illustrations in, this new one out".

I am very out of my depth here 😬