Art Waring
nevermind...
ATM, from the perspective of a client that hires professional artists, I agree that starting from scratch is more cost effective. Any random artist has their own artistic process and a workflow, which IMHO is interrupted by incorporating gen-ai outputs. The artist has to clean up the gen-ai image, remove any artifacts, fix anatomy and fingers, adjust colors, lighting, shading, and posing. It is a complete waste of time for professional artists that already have the relevant skills, not to mention a waste of a clients time as well.I think there is a lot of overhype about the current capabilities of AI. Right now, I think AI offers something of a solution to producers that can't afford to pay for artwork, but that I can't even reliably use it to illustrate my own home campaign. I can't imagine anyone with the money wanting to send out uncorrected AI content that a human illustrator hasn't touched up, and so that comes down to something like Disney's reuse of animation cells - is it harder to touch up animation than it is to draw completely new ones. Ultimately, Disney found back in the day that tracing over animation cells had no cost savings compared to new animation.
This is where I will have to disagree, as the most current research from MIT concludes that gen-ai tools help lower skilled workers more than those that are already working at the highest professional levels.Now, I do think that the writing is on the wall that the industry is going to change at some point and that these tools are extremely powerful in the hands of good designers and will only get more powerful - for example more or less perfectly drawing the cells between any two closely related cells is certainly going to be a thing in the medium term. And certainly, if you are an artist you ought to be heavily investing in getting used to using these tools and learning how they work and how the train them for specific tasks. If you are in college right now and some enterprising professor isn't teaching that, then you're going to have to take up the task yourself because it will become a thing.
“Generative AI seems to be able to decrease inequality in productivity, helping lower-skilled workers significantly but with little effect on high-skilled workers,”
It certainly helps low-skill workers, but it actually starts to hinder top tier workers as they actually possess professional training and are (currently) more skilled than gen-ai tools.