Artists or Engineers: Who will create art in the next 5 Years

Will pure artists be even around for the next generation to witness

My favorite question to ask recently, to especially my friends who are either in the tech world or purely in the art world, is: In the next 5 years who do you think will be generating art? Artists or Engineers. By art, I mean everything from music, writing scripts, poems, blogs, novels and even creating movies. Given the advancements in AI, we are already witnessing the start of this, and the people behind these generative examples are engineers and not pure artists.

We have already seen how good AI is at generating images, given any prompt, it generates multiple outputs in a matter of seconds. To do the same it would take hours for an illustrator, and to be able to do multiple iterations, we are talking days. Even though the images are not perfect, give it a few months, they’ll match your requests to every pixel detail. So when that happens, will we need artists for visual arts?

That same example can be carried over to text, which was the first field that AI mastered. There used to be professional writers, who you could pay to write business descriptions for your website or write blogs and letters. They are no longer needed. These text capabilities are slowly making their way to writing poems, novels, and full-length books. And given some more character to also songs and screenplays.

Now Imagine the combination of the above 2. Where AI will be able to generate a screenplay and then frame by frame generate a movie. Will we then need actors, directors, writers, producers, and the whole pack of people responsible to put a movie together? So, coming back to the question will it be artists or engineers? If all that needs to be done is prompt these AI machines in a fine-tuned way, then you could just be an engineer and do it.

I asked CHATGPT4 to write a new episode of Friends

In my very personal opinion, I am TEAM ENGINEER. Not because I am a machine learning engineer, but because I am also a Poet and a Standup comic. So being someone who has a foot on both sides, I have the following reasons to believe so.

• Quick low-quality content: If you were to look around the majority of the content that people consume nowadays is via social media, which is really low quality. Either they are repetitive videos of mindless things happening or just a dump of factual knowledge from a random article. The level of depth is surprisingly low. Given that, for AI to be able to replicate that will be extremely easy. On the other side the high-quality content or at least the most relevant and popular content that is being consumed, exists in such great volumes, that it will also be easy for AI to train on and replicate.
• Increased demand: Even though there seem to be endless new digital platforms and streaming services popping up every day, you would think with all that competition, some of them will go out of business. In reality, all these platforms are having record-breaking engagements month over month. Showing the rate of content consumption there is. At first, these platforms were able to get away by re-running old popular tv shows to be able to acquire audiences. But once all those movies and shows run out, they need to create new content pretty much daily to survive the completion. Unfortunately, the rate of consumption will be far higher than the rate of creation, and AI will have to fill that gap.
• Immersive Web3 World: The internet leap is not just only in AI, but also in the immersive world of Virtual and Augmented Reality. Once wearing immersive headsets become the norm, it definitely will in the next 5 years. You’ll have access to content all the time. Imagine wearing one for all waking hours, and having a digital avatar or some sort of content being played, even if it is in the corner of your eye, there will have to be content for all that time, and that to personalized to some degree. The only solution: Generative AI.
• Next Generation: We as a generation can still hold the fort down to defend authentic user-generated content, which anyhow right now AI algorithms are recommending to us. The next generation, they will grow with Generative Content around them. They won’t appreciate the great singers, musicians, writers, and actors of our times, because their ones would be producing something new 24/7, and that too at a personalized level. It would be the same adaption that our generation had to smartphones, and our grandparents were hesitant and rather wanted to live a life without these addictive digital devices. In the case of AI, we will be the hesitant ones towards generative AI.
• Already Happening: 5 years is a long time, given it is already happening where advertisements are AI-generated, to very specifically match our preferences, from our taste of things to our needs. For a visual advertisement, a static image, or a video, is entirely generated and requires not even a single artist. Also, in books and other paper mediums, all the picture illustrations are generated by engineers.

Having asked this question to a lot of people, I do get a lot of Counter-Opinions, that include:

• “It will be both, the creator will be an artist as well as an engineer”. I argue that I don’t even need to know how to draw, but I can still create world-level art pieces
• “It will not be the same as an artist, what an engineer creates”. This is true, but only for established artists. An upcoming artist will not even survive the perfection that an engineer would be able to harness from AI.
• “You will be able to tell the difference”. Given the AI models are trained on data that is human-generated, even art. In 5 years they’ll get way too good to replicate every single detail.

To close it off, for a definitive answer, I would still say it will be the engineers who will create art than the artists themselves. This may evolve into redefining what an artist is, maybe an engineer who prompts well will be known as an artist. Or maybe the engineers will get better at understanding art, or artists become better at understanding AI. As an analogy, just like the leap from live music with actual instruments, went to purely electronic music, the next leap will be from actual musicians creating music to generative music.

Jashan Kaleka