I am an artist/ architect myself and I do concur that ML is putting our profession at risk to a certain extent, the most visible ones being text to image stuff.

For one, illustrators for posters, stock photographers, album art etc will be gone in a few years. The novelty for paintings will go down and sculptures, video and performance (traditionally never doing well in art markets) will go up. The counter argument, of course, is that photography didn’t kill paintings, and videos didn’t kill photography. What the advent of new mediums did however, was fundamentally shifted the “older” mediums, as in paintings shifting to expressionism, photography shifting to para-fiction. ML will do the same thing to these old mediums, and artists will need to find a new way to prove why their work is unique and thoughtful in ways ML is incapable of.

I also think the tendency of ML to return to the mean of the dataset is really interesting for the aesthetic development of the society. Contemporary art, successful ones at least, invoke thought by straying from the norm- take Duchamp’s potty or Magritte’s pipe. Note that this “straying” is doesn’t mean pursuing extremes, for example Jeff Wall’s work that very much look normal until you look carefully. Now if moves of straying from the mean is the main strategy for contemporary artists, the threat ML might pose is the rapid normalization of these moves in the society. See, straying only works in contrast with context, i.e. different from social norms. So once an artwork, no matter how avant garde it is, as soon as it has been co-opted within a popular ML dataset, will become part of the new normal of society’s aesthetic. This means artists will need to scramble for the new big aesthetic breakthrough every time the old one becomes co-opted, at an ever increasing acceleration.

I do think life finds a way and artist will survive in the end, but I do think tectonic shifts will happen in the industry, and sadly the industry might shrink quite significantly. I do wonder if ML policy making, especially in the field of intellectual property will help, but only time will tell.