Any Place for Humans?

not AI generated

Even Isaac Asimov, Henry Kuttner-Lewis Padgett, Richard Matheson and all of the other Science Fiction greats, in their classic writings about a weird and twisred future, never really believed the turn this nightmare-to-be would take. They frolicked in fantasy. It was just after WWll. Everyone was exhiliarated and "over the moon" with optimism. Money was flowing in to the States like manna from heaven. The genie of prosperity billowed forth perpetually from a post war Aladdin's Lamp. Nearly everything in business, industry and culture boomed and burgeoned. Art and artists, both in the fine and advertising sphere, were celebrated and acclaimed. They were showered with accolades. The best of them could rise like meteors to a sort of stardom. Even the less competent or aggressive or well placed made a decent living, for decades, from hordes of enthusiastic clients.

Fast forward, from 9/11, through The Great Recession, Covid, Putin's War on Ukraine, October7th, to a federal gowernment riddled with cracks and crackpots. The world is, for the sixth time in 24 years, teetering on the brink of recession. What has that meant for me and my colleagues? Advertising agencies, and animation and gaming studios, as well as design firms are desperately scrambling to save money. They're practically clamboring over each other to acquire AI image generating apps, and train kids fresh out of art school, as interns, to use them. Human created comp/illustration/storyboard vs artificial intelligence image generation - say, $150 an hour vs $200 a month for the high end AI Image Generating version; mammon triumphs! We have now come to live in a Petrified Forest, among the blackened twigs of petrified creativity; 30,000 years of blindingly btilliant artistic innovation where uniqueness and originality drove us down ever changing and evolving roads to - this - rigid cookie cutter mediocrity within a tight framework of existing styles. Now any "chinless wonder" with a grasp of the workings of these apps can create an engineered illustration or animation, and do it in the relative blink of an eye - and yes, so much more cheaply. I believe these have become the Dark Ages of my genre. I pray it doesn't take a thousand years to re-acknowlege the worth of a flesh and blood artist who, after years of honing, uses their god-given talents and experience - not this perniciously mutated clip art - to create the genuine thing.