Dall-e and Photography
August 29, 2022
There is sentiment on the internet that things like Dall-e and GPT-3 will eliminate the jobs of a whole class of creatives in the coming years. A lot of people are talking about the rise of AGI, how it will replace human consciousness, and how basically we’re all going to be fucked in the near future, but creatives are going to be a bit more fucked a bit sooner than the rest of us given the high quality of results we are seeing with Dall-e right now.
I’m not of the same mind on this topic. I think that there are a lot of people who want to believe that technology will replace a lot of what humans do, but we’ve seen in the last 200 years that it simply is not the case. People who think like this are too focused on the immediate term. They see that people can do X, a computer did X-2 three years ago and now is doing X-1, so they think that it will do X soon and that’s it. Now, people won’t do X anymore because a computer will do X, and what do you know, now we’re out millions of jobs for real human beings and the machines are taking over.
We’ve seen with the cotton gin that something designed explicitly to take away “jobs” from humans (replacing slaves who pick seeds out of cotton with a mechanical device) was unsuccessful and drove up the demand for slaves due to the high efficiency that it allowed farms to produce cotton at. Other machines of the industrial revolution did make some jobs obsolete, but they replaced those jobs with many more jobs in different areas. Looms removed all but the most skilled clothing makers, but with the volume of cloth we were now able to produce, it produced jobs in factory design, machine design, supply chain, and more…
A direct analogy to the situation at hand is what happened when photography was introduced to the masses. Many painters and artists were employed because of their incredible ability to paint and replicate reality extremely well. Artists were commissioned to paint portraits, scenes from the Bible, landscapes, and more things from this earth. Then photography came along. At first, it was bad, and then it got better, and then soon you were able to get a full image that perfectly replicated what someone would see with their eye. So many artists who were focused on painting portraits or landscapes as commissions were out of work! The camera replaced so many jobs!
But we all know that’s not entirely what happened. Photography now is a whole industry in its own right. There are so many photographers now, and there are so many professional photographers who focus on their craft and art in a variety of areas. There are so many jobs in the manufacturing of cameras, film, and more. Now there’s digital photography, which is its own whole industry with people who edit and publish.
And then there are the painters whom photography was supposed to obsolete: they’re still around! They don’t do the same things as before. Not many artists are commissioned to do faithful reproductions of a person’s face for them to hang in their home, but photography unlocked the human mind to wander into so many different areas. Now unchained from the need to replicate reality, our museums are filled with art that explores other areas of human emotion and creativity.
I expect Dall-e to do a lot of what photography did 100 years ago. There will be a class of people who lose their jobs as a result. “Unskilled” artists who are producing stock footage or simple jingles for commercials may be out of a job, but the unlock in creativity for the people who wish to wield it will be amazing. We’ll see individuals who are able to create the sounds of a symphony by generating pieces with Dall-e and putting them together. We’ll see artists who are able to leverage generated images to iterate on their work so much faster. We’ll see a whole new industry around this come up! And it’ll be exciting!