this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2025
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Good news! The existence of AI does literally nothing to stop you from pursuing any kind of creative activity!
Fun fact: I experimented with an LLM for creative writing and it was so shit it inspired me to resume work on some half baked story ideas. This year I resolved to take up drawing again and get better at it.
But god forbid if you actually want to make money from your art; the way things are going, it's getting near impossible.
What does it mean to have to do art only as a hobby.
Although there is good news, you have nothing to lose, you can create as dirty art as you want, screw censorship and morality.
I, like 99% of people who enjoy creating stuff, am never going to make money from it. Worrying about that 1% of people is just insane, and really, the small fraction of those people who truly get to be creative, rather than slaving at producing someone's corporate vision, are going to be fine anyway.
This reply that the other person also made is just crazy to me. Isn't lemmy, by and large, anti-capitalist? Why should the ability to make money off something even matter? Are you upset that people who really enjoy laying bricks will be mostly out of work if 3D-printed houses or some other technology replaces traditional building? Technology that obsoletes jobs is always a good thing for society; if the fruits of that technology are only enjoyed by a tiny fraction of society, that is a problem with how society is organised, not with technology.
There is a difference between growing an enterprise that extracts unfair value from your workers, and an indie studio owned by the artists.
The difference is noticeable.
Yeah, many differences, one of which is that the further employs far more people. Another is that the latter is not going to dissolve itself to be replaced by AI when the former fires artists to do that.
There is already very little market for the kind of art we all care about, so maybe we should worry less about the marketability of art.
Go to your local anime convention you’ll find tones of local artists that ask for money for their labour. The non corpo market will not be adversed online.
This festival still needs to be found.
What makes you think those artists are going to be replaced by AI though? I don't think people who buy art off a local artist are gonna go "you know what, let's just print off this Midjourney shit"? I don't at all.
I actually don't think most people put art on their walls at all. The people who do, value a human connection in the art, not just something that looks cool (if you don't care about the ai look).
I didn’t say that, we’re on the same page here ❤️
Oh sorry lol
Because I want to eat.
What about the rest of my comment or hell , sentence 🙄
I'm not about to spend my entire day to try and explain to you art isn't about getting a pretty picture to consoome, and that no, "technology that obsoletes jobs" is not nearly always a good thing. Do you know how many items used to be better before mass-produced stuff took over and artisans were told to go fuck themselves? Or the disastrous effects of the green revolution? Do you understand that humans enjoy making things, that we (most of us anyway) don't live here to just sit twiddling our thumbs and mindlessly 'consume'.
Artisanal things are great, but because they take so much more time for a person to make, fewer people can have them - realised in our society as them being more expensive, but to be clear this is due to the fundamental issue of it not being possible to make as many for the same input of human time.
So, is it worth it to have a table made by a master craftsman versus a table produced in an IKEA factory, when the societal result is that some people just can't afford a table - or they can, but the tradeoff is they can't have something else? We are not a post-scarcity society, these are real questions.
Is it worth rewinding the green revolution and starving half the world population who depends on the higher crop yields due to modern agriculture?
The whole point is that you can still make things. What you cannot do is something 99% of people have never been able to do, that is: feed yourself by doing something that you would still do if feeding yourself didn't depend on it.
But you enjoy the fruits that the 1% has grown for us. How can we grow a new crop of artists if you're born after AI takes over?
As a hobby and experiment, sure.
As a well paid profession? It's getting more and more difficult. You must live under a rock if you missed all the articles about creative staff being replaced by AI.
Good luck turning your art hobby into a steady income.
At the end of the day, if you free someone from having to do their job, that ought to be a net positive for society - that's 40 hours a week (roughly) that society gets back as free time. Unfortunately, the person who lost that job now has to find a 40-hour job from somewhere else, and the extra productivity lines the pockets of some billionaire.
If that didn't happen, and instead the 40 hours a week, multiplied by a million people whose jobs got automated, were given back to society, that's 40 million hours society can choose to spend on creative pursuits - if they want. This has nothing to do with AI. When a new fully automated rail line is deployed, we're not worrying about all the kids who are dying to be train drivers are going to do when they grow up and all trains are driverless, but it's actually the exact same thing going on.
I'm not going to turn my art hobby into income, the same way as my music hobby, video gaming hobby, reading hobby, TV-watching and cooking hobbies are not going to turn into an income stream. I do them because I like them, and I'm not even good enough at any of them to make money off them, but that doesn't matter.
I agree with your general sentiment but I have to ask - why shouldn't a person be able to make a living wage off what they enjoy doing (such as art, music, etc.)? Why not?
That would be great in an ideal world, but there's just no reason to think that they should be able to because the two concepts are simply orthogonal. What you can make a living off is determined by what other people need and want (with the exception of farming), which is completely different from what you want to do. Fundamentally, no individual is going to pay you (or give you food, or whatever) in return for doing something that they don't value.
The only way to get away from that paradigm is UBI or something like it.
Would I prefer to live in a world where my shitty abilities in music, art and writing were enough to keep myself fed and clothed? Yes! But we don't and AI isn't changing that. If we want to move towards that it's economic changes we need to make.
Note that this is still true even if you a well-funded arts council that funds artists as a public good, because while you might not be a slave to what individuals or "the masses" want, you're still a slave to what the arts council is willing to fund - what it sees as a public good. And if people as a whole simply don't value some forms of art that much, there's a very limited extent to which public funding will make up for that. If that's too abstract, if my art passion is recording classical music arranged for the human butt, I'm going to struggle to sell that to ordinary people, as well as struggle to get a grant to fund my passion.
Fundamentally I think this question arises because there is a general sense that people ought to be able to make a living from art. But this has - except for very few people - never been the case, because lots of people enjoy making art, but society as a whole does not value it highly enough to support all those people in doing it.
That's cool and all, but I still have to do my dishes and laundry before I have time to get to that.
I've been waiting for my AI butler since the first time I watched the Jetsons, instead I get AI slop.
Technology means the time you spend doing laundry and dishes is likely a tenth of what it was 100 years ago.
The reason AI, specifically, can do images and language but not load the dishwasher and washing machine is because those latter tasks are far harder and have worse consequences if you do them wrong. If the AI fucks up creating an image, so what? You tell it to make a new one. If it gets them all wrong then so what? You give up on it. If the AI robot fucks up loading the dishwasher, it breaks all your plates and then the dishwasher. If the AI robot fucks up doing the laundry, it tears all your shirts in half and smashes the washing machine.