Artists as Digital Assets
Last year in a paper (that you can find here) I wrote about the risk of loss of work for creatives and models that comes with the rising popularity of text-to-image models. Unsurprisingly, this prediction has only gained more evidence.
Returning to our old friend Promptbase (you can read about its pornography habit here), I searched for several artists by name and found plenty of people offering to sell you their style. One particular merchant seemed to specialised in selling prompts to ape a particular artist’s style - Romid, who describes themselves as a graphic designer. Whilst many of the featured artists work(ed) in physical mediums - meaning digital copies are not a direct competition (except perhaps to sales of prints) - the same cannot be said for example for Disney cartoonists and Hayao Miyazaki.
One might argue that a graphic designer pivoting to selling prompts is a smart move to future proof one’s career. I find it to be a disappointing betrayal of their fellow artists. Their use of the phrase “truly original artwork” in almost every listing seems particularly unjustified given what we know about models copying their training data. For more on this topic, there is an excellent blog post by Gary Marcus and Reid Southen looking at the recreation of specific, famous and copyright scenes1, plus peer reviewed literature by Somepalli and colleagues2.
