To newbie artists who are confused in the AI age

Originally written in Vietnamese on 6 April 2023, translated into English.

A few things to make clear first:

I won’t argue about whether AI is legally right or wrong. At this point it’s clear the big players have all jumped on the trend, and the demand for labor has changed and is still changing. I’m small fry, I can’t stop it. If you ask me in short whether you should learn to use AI, my answer is yes. If you ask whether you should learn to draw: absolutely yes.
Just as I dislike the kind of prompter who types a few words and then goes off to bully artists, I don’t support any behavior that disrespects other people’s effort.

On to the topic. Many people are wondering what a newbie entering the art profession should do these days, when AI is threatening or heavily affecting both the structure of the workforce and the pipelines of the trade.

1. Understand the relationship between “drawing for yourself” and “drawing for others”

I’m not going to talk about anything as lofty as fine art versus popular art. To me, drawing goes in two main directions. Let’s call them “drawing for yourself” and “drawing for others”:

Drawing for yourself is like when you were a kid and picked up a pen because you liked it. It’s also the moment you decided to pursue drawing because you loved it and wanted your pictures to carry your own identity, not because you thought there was money in it. The truth is that even now, if you say you’re learning to draw to earn money and get rich, plenty of people will still think you’re crazy. So hold on to that spirit if you can.
Drawing for others is drawing for someone else’s project, drawing the commissions people hire you for, burying your head in feedback round number 108 and so on. Often you like drawing environments but people keep hiring you for characters. Often you like drawing lewd stuff or furries, but you’re afraid of being judged, so you find another direction to draw in to make a living. In short, in this group you draw to earn money. You draw to survive.

Why are the two connected? Because “drawing for yourself” is the motivation that gets you through “drawing for others”. You like drawing, you dream of growing up to draw for a living, so you study drawing more. You start working and realize you don’t get to draw what you wanted, but at least you get to draw, so the job still holds some joy and you keep doing it. Drawing for others also gives you an income, which lets you do the things you love in life, including drawing for yourself when you can. On top of that, drawing for others puts pressure on you to strengthen your skills and knowledge.

This also extends to “work for others, draw for yourself”. You can do a different job entirely, as long as you’re happy and the income covers your life. Nobody is forcing you to draw for money, and in many cases your family doesn’t want you to either. I’ve seen that plenty of times. If you feel the AI era makes it too hard to do art for a living, feel free to choose another path and keep drawing as a hobby on the side. Turning a joy into a job often makes it stop being fun. The art profession may change a lot, but the spirit of enjoying art will remain.

Drawing a clear line between these two kinds of drawing helps you manage your expectations about how much of your ego goes into a product made for a client. It can also help you feel less guilty, less insecure, or less of whatever feeling society is currently attaching to the use of AI, especially when the job you live on requires it. And when you go looking for your own joy, what you draw with is your business, as long as you don’t harm anyone.

If you have the strength, or enough luck, to balance both directions, congratulations. Honestly, I don’t know when I’ll stop drawing. I’ve been working for more than 8 years, not much compared to many of my seniors, but I’m more or less burned out from constantly drawing for others. In most cases I no longer care about putting myself into the product. I just draw to earn money.

In this post I want to spend more time on “drawing for others”, or in other words, drawing as a job.

2. Understand the value of people, products and the market

2a. Your value compared to the value of most current AI art

I recently started an art team and learned a bit about business. Although my business model has so far fallen flat on its face, I learned a lot of lessons about the relationship between the artist and the market.

Imagine you’re a business owner, a project owner, or simply a client. What do you always want? To invest an amount and get a good product back, right? That is always the point of view of someone hiring an artist, or of any business: they want to put in a sum of money and receive a good quality product.

AI art arrived and caused a huge problem right here: it’s cheap and it produces art at a “good enough” level. The trouble is that for a lot of users, who aren’t art people and don’t have a refined eye, that quality is enough, and it’s cheaper too.

Say you draw a picture for $300, at a quality of 8/10.
AI draws a picture for $15, at a quality that may even reach 8 or 9 out of 10 (in the client’s eyes, not yours).

For people without big requirements, 8/10 quality for $15 is obviously a bargain. However, not every project needs only the picture. They may need you to do other things:

You can handle extra technical requests from the client. Your 2D work can be split into layers so they can rig it for a game project.
You can advise them on a different art style that better suits the storytelling or the audience of a book project. You help the client figure out what they actually want.
You’re willing to sign the paperwork on usage rights and ownership of the work. You guarantee your picture wasn’t lifted from anyone else.
You’re able to fix your own picture if something turns out wrong, which means you can offer a warranty.

What’s the point here? Your picture brings them more accompanying value than the AI’s picture does. Beyond that, you may have other abilities that bring even more value to the project:

You know how their game engine works, and you help them handle and improve visual issues in the engine.
You can propose designs that fit the game’s gameplay better.
You can be creative in ways that relate to the product being made.
You give people the feeling of working with a human being.

Those are things that, in the near future, AI art can’t give a buyer and only you can. You have every right to charge more than AI art, and people will still accept it.

2b. The value of a product in the buyer’s eyes

I want to stress this further. As buyers, clients usually only care about what the product brings to them. They don’t care what value your drawing holds for you. That means however much artistic meaning there is, and whether or not the work has a soul, doesn’t matter by itself. What matters is that you make the client understand it. If you can’t convey these things to the client, then the soul and all the longing and ideas in your picture are worth zero next to an AI picture.

I know this reeks of bloodthirsty capitalism, and I don’t like it myself. But unless we go up a mountain to till the soil, grow vegetables and live in a cave, it’s very hard to stay outside this rule.

Also, AI platforms are being upgraded and extended at a dizzying pace, with the big tech players joining in. There’s no telling whether AI will become able to do the things I listed above at a better price-to-output ratio.

The big players will be probing how users feel about AI image generation services, and about AI images themselves:

Maybe AI will bring them significant profit and strongly affect the demand for artists.
Maybe AI isn’t as extraordinary as they thought, and they still need artists to handle almost every stage.
Maybe the flood of AI images will bore everyone and lose value after a while, and people will return to handmade pictures for their own particular value.

Many scenarios could play out, but I’m certain that the relationship between the value of your product and the needs of the market doesn’t change. You have to understand it to maintain your value.

3. Find a way to survive first

At this point I know someone will say: how is a newbie who’s just starting out supposed to make $300 art and also know all the things above? So, in short, what should a newbie do first?

Learn art. One way or another, you have to know art. If you choose this as your profession, you have to understand the thing you work with. Between a project that uses AI art and a project that uses AI art plus a hired artist to control quality, the latter clearly has the potential to come out ahead on quality, and no investor wants their project falling behind.
Learn more tools. Getting to know more tools is unavoidable. The digital artist profession exists in the first place because of understanding both art and computer tools. In particular, learn the tools that the people hiring tend to ask for. It raises your chances of getting work.
Should you learn AI art? Given the situation in front of us, I think yes. Even if you don’t use it, you should tinker with it a few times and keep your information and knowledge a little up to date so you don’t fall behind. I think in the near future many companies and studios will require artists to know how to use AI. Whether using AI is right or wrong isn’t settled yet, but there will be people who need a job to live.

A small edit: the AI I’m referring to here is text-to-image, the kind that’s causing so much controversy right now. AI that’s applied well and doesn’t take away other people’s livelihoods is easy to accept, and you may well have been using it already without knowing.

Learn COMMUNICATION and ATTITUDE. This matters even more than professional skill, yet I’ve met a great many people who fail at it. Even if you’re an introvert, you still have to learn to communicate with people in order to work effectively. Social communication is a human survival skill. If communicating with you is extremely difficult, or you regularly ignore a client’s messages for days on end, then surely they’d rather find a machine to type prompts into. At least that hurts the project schedule less, right?

Besides, focusing entirely on art while ignoring tools or AI (which is extremely hot right now) is like putting all your eggs in one basket. You become easy prey to the times and the market. I’m not confident myself that the human values listed in section 2 won’t be shifted by AI.

4. And grow later

After surviving your first year or two in the industry, hopefully you’ll have gathered more knowledge, or a little money to study and improve further. Here are some things I think you should learn, and that I wish I had learned 7 or 8 years ago:

More art. It’s your profession, so there’s never enough in-depth knowledge to learn. If you understand art and how to apply it, you can climb to higher positions. If AI develops strongly, you can still work as an advisor who sets direction.
Better communication and ways of working. As I mentioned above, it’s extremely important.
Foreign languages. A foreign language widens your pool of learning material. For those who want to go freelance, it also widens your client base and improves your communication.
Tools or skills related to your branch of work. If you make games, learn about game engines. If you do film storyboards, learn about cinema. If you do illustration, it might be knowledge of literature and reading skills.
Financial management. It sounds grandiose, but if you spend sensibly and keep your money under control, you’ll have more resources to study and grow.
Basic marketing or sales skills. These are useful for freelancers too, who have to find their own work.

I often joke that if machines are learning, humans have to learn too. Knowledge is never wasted.

5. Once you’re strong enough, go back to “drawing for yourself” if you still love drawing

Some say a work of art reflects the life experience and the views of the person who made it. I believe this turbulent period of the AI boom is also giving artists experiences that even the craziest masters of earlier times could never have imagined. I hope the struggle to survive and learn doesn’t burn out the passion in you, and that it still helps you create works of value.