You know these sites where you can enter your job and check if its save beeing replaced by a machine ?
Especially for creative jobs these numbers are mostly very low meaning the chances of beeing replaced are very unlikely.

Wich I honestly concour. Because these site starts with the wrong premise from the start.

They think that the automation will be the scenario that one day you go into office, and a blinking machine at your desk wil do all the work.

not going to happen

Thats a bit of a naive POV how automation works. Automation rarely replace a workforce completely. Especially not at the beginning: In the first stage the original worker usually do operate the machine, and intervenes if something goes wrong.
So it acts as a tool and its function is to boost the output in amount and quality.

If the worker did 500 pieces a day with 10 Percent failure, the machine and the worker together might do 3000 pieces of work with 0.1 percent failure. (Renember where the word sabotage comes from ? Nobody talks about the fact, that there were still weavers working at the machines throwing their shoes into)

In later stages, if automation was sucessfull and human intervention becomes less, there are two ways how  things work out: Either the original operator uses his extra time to operate more machines, or a  lesser educated (and cheaper) workforce will replace him. Or both.

So now to the graphic related person which thinks that his creativity won't be replaced by a machine in the near future:
You already part of the movement. Lets start with something simple, like pbr workflow, wich makes photoreal texturing way easier. Allowing you to texture an object in in a lot less time...or even better with a week of introduction allows a less trained operator to do the job wich needed at least a year to get to the same level.
Or what they guys of SideFX did with Houdini: Adding presets for complex node setups, reducing the amount of time needed to setup complex simulations. You don't have to learn the whole node structure, you simply learn the needed nodes alongside creating your work,

And these are only simple tools. One reason I write this article is a new website called artbreeder.com.
This is where you get a glimpse of what to come.  You need to register to play with the settings / understand the full potential of the site.

Concepting out nice unusual visuals ? Mix some buildings with organic shapes. To get inspiration for some unusual shapes



Creating Character references and variations ? A question of minutes.


Or find interesting greebles for your next scifi projects ?


Creating a comic character ? Just dial in the values what kind of style, type and reference you want and generate new references in no time

it creates this in seconds. concepts wich would need a few hours if done from scratch

But as said its not about getting inspiration, its about automation.  Generating data quickly, to be processed by less operators in time and manpower. This site is just a preview of what to come.


Especially for the character part, I tried to generate a face in artbreeder, wich I feeded into Character Creators headshot plugin,
imported it into my 3d program, and added some pbr shading to it.

notice I don't put a copyright on this

Sure the results using minimal intervention sucks, And you see mapping errors / texture problems all over the place.
But I got a result in less than an hour, and most of the time was spend getting the pbr textures to work correctly from one program to the other, wich isn't a process wich can't be automated.

Things wich, when I would do this from scratch, would need much more time.  And the best thing, I had most of the energy left wich I would need to refine it...and this is from a person who usually suck in  character generation. Your creative input is still needed, but the workload needed to come to the point making such decissions will be greatly reduced. And in the end I've got a unique piece of artwork.

UPDATE 1: Now realusion offers a coupon for using a AI face generator by themself....so the idea isn't that uncommon.


And thats my predicition / conclusion: We will see more tools wich simplify the creation process, Intelligent Agents will more and more reduced the need for special trained people, and those who are will boost their creative output extremly and therefore reducing the need for additional people.

Those websites I talked at the beginning might be right that you might keep your job, but finding new one in a shrinking job market will be a lot harder.

And, unlike some cheap jobs, where automatisation is actually unprofitable, there is a high incentive to make high payed jobs less needed.

UPDATE 2: And now some companies offering AI rotoscoping....not sure about their current techniques...but if they provide also spline export, instead of only an alpha mask, ths would be a real game changer.


BTW: The banner image is generated by Artbreeder and scaled up by Topaz Gigapixel. No additional editing has taken place