Are artists doomed in the age of image generators?
Automated content generators made several breakthroughs in 2022. Text generators, starting with ChatGPT, garnered most of the hype, but image generators such as Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, or Midjourney could, at least in the short term, have more impact. Last summer, a man won the top prize at an art fair with a picture that was automatically generated [The New York Times, Sep. 2022]. Amazon already lists 59 books illustrated by Midjourney. Countless others probably were, too, but did not credit the tool. I talked to various illustrators and graphic artists in Berlin and Paris. They're not that worried about the competition from image generators. One said that it takes as much time to create a finished illustration from an automatically-generated picture as it takes to create one from scratch. Another pointed out that people already announced the death of illustrators when softwares like Photoshop came out in the 1990s, and again with the rise of Canva, a popular tool for graphic design
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