Mmm, I don't know about this. At the very least AI lowers the bar for how talented a graphic artist needs to be to produce professional work, which means it'll be easier to undercut them, which means it'll get much harder to make a living as a graphic designer. It amounts to the same thing as killing off the profession, as seen from the perspective of someone in the profession as opposed to someone without skin in the game. It's like saying push-button elevators didn't hurt the profession of elevator operator, because somebody's still got to push those buttons.
I think AI in general, across almost every industry, will shift value away from technical proficiency and toward creativity and taste. Implementation of an idea/vision will be commoditized, but having a great idea, a unique insight, the taste and ability to identify top-tier work will still be highly valuable. This could well remain true post-AGI.
In graphic arts, the overlap between people with technical proficiency and vision/taste is probably quite high, but it's not one-to-one. There are people with excellent taste who can identify great art or design when they see it, and who can perhaps imagine incredible masterpieces in their minds, but cannot draw a convincing stick figure. On the other side, there are people who can expertly make someone else's concept real, but can't come up with a compelling concept themselves. AI will be great for the former, and bad for the latter (or at least force the latter to adapt).
Whether this will have the effect of concentrating wealth or distributing it more widely strikes me as a very difficult question. It may be devastating for certain professions, but could also enable a whole new class of entrepreneurs. I could see it going either way, or the two effects may cancel each other out and economic equality stays about where it is. We're in the realm of complex systems here, so I wouldn't put much stock in anyone's prediction.
> I think AI in general, across almost every industry, will shift value away from technical proficiency and toward creativity and taste.
The problem is that an artist still needs to eat in the 10-20 years it takes to develop "creativity and taste".
What AI will do/is doing is knock out the entry-level jobs. If you can't train humans on the entry-level, you will eventually have no experienced people.
It also raises the bar of what's possible. What counts as "professional level" changes each time some new technique emerges. A skilled artist will always be better than a random person.
The visual entertainment "supply" is not limited by the current state of tools. It's always limited by the skills of the top crop. Professionals are always ahead and hard to come by. The industry's self-regulating mechanism is novelty; what is abundant becomes fundamentally uninteresting and dies.
This is the march of progress. Digital brushes in Procreate lowered the bar for how talented an artist needs to be to create an oil ‘painting’. The camera lowered the bar for creating portraits.
> AI lowers the bar for how talented a graphic artist needs to be to produce professional work
I think it's a different kind of talent, and not automatically a lower bar. The key to being a professional artist is being able to offer variants based on given direction. Either way, it's much much more than pushing a button or holding a lever in place for a period of time.
