Not hiring artists

One of the major tropes I’ve seen around generative AI art is that it is already or going to soon take jobs away from artists.

I suppose it may be true in certain circumstances, but for my use it is simply not so. That is, I would never be able to afford hiring dozens of artists to produce hundreds of images to use in ebooks. It’s not a question of whether or not I respect the work/effort/learning etc of artists, because I am one. I just don’t have that kind of money for fun small side projects, nor do I have the managerial capacity to organize all the work of others that would require. So it’s not like, okay I have $50K to spend on art, that I am now not spending.

If anything, the only artist I am potentially replacing is myself, because in all likelihood, I would be the one executing on a small fraction of the image ideas that I have. And if I was lucky and had a ton of free time to commit, I might be able to push out say six decent quality images for a book in a few weeks. And that would still be an accomplishment. But with these tools, I can blast out ideas and images that allow me to construct my interior worlds externally. I can achieve things an order of complexity greater than what I could by hand. And that is exciting as shit, whether or not other people are happy about it.