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A few bits of new information I took from these videos. 1) This website is designed to specifically highlight work that has literally stolen the style of human artists. Just highlighting the lack of true creativity in any of this technology. And the lack of any creativity in the prompt writers! They literally have to include 'stylised like X' because without it the work is bland and boring. https://weirdwonderfulai.art/resources/disco-diffusion-70-plus-artist-studies/#foogallery-2432/f:Simon Stalenhag+James Jean+Alex Grey 2) I suspect that making money this way will quickly become obsolete. The market will become very saturated with people trying to sell AI artwork which will reduce the artwork's value considerably. You might see a really great piece on one person's website, but then 20 other suitable works on 20 other websites that all look vaguely similar. But I'm sure some people will make money. People always come up with new ways to sell shit and make money. 3) In all fairness some of those images looked really great, around 3:48 onwards. I can see why people would buy that. 4) Despite my dislike for all of this, I feel I should probably make use it and start composing my own portfolio of A.I work. With my experience and critical eye I have a pretty good advantage over some random guy looking to make quick money.

I understand your points and mostly agree. But it's also very easy to say then when your capacity to pay your bills in 6 months time is not affected. Mine is. My sole income is from my freelance work.

Yes I agree, but definitely depends on the type of art director, as in which field they work in. An art director working in animation might be very frustrated with the technology, but an art director working in editorial might be glad of the speed and creative freedom.

I suspect that animation and manga studios will be one of the least affected by A.I. art generators. Creating complex animations, manga, anime are an extremely nuanced process. For example, the art director will often need a very specific facial expression, very specific body position and a very specific camera position, not to mention all of the other elements within the frame. There is a distinct communication problem with AI also. I think it will hit a ceiling where it just cannot produce the subtle changes and details required for something like a manga or anime. AI's don't listen or understand prompts like humans do. For example, the art director might give feedback to an illustrator saying, 'I want the character to have just a bit more frustration in his expression, and his head is titled upwards away from the camera slightly in x direction.' They could definitely be used for inspiration, idea generation, character design etc.

Thanks man, much appreciated!

Yes admittedly I do mistake those two things. I guess my purpose has always been a little vague in that it's just about sharing my artistic gifts and reaching my full potential as an artist. So yes, that needs clarifying and thinking about. But choosing illustration was a very intentional and strategic decision because: 1) Illustration was my best bet at escaping my 9-5 with an art-focused career, which has been a priority because my previous job was pure hell. With illustration, I knew exactly what kind of skills I needed to develop, exactly what kind of portfolio I needed to put together and I had a pretty clear and long list of potential clients I could work with. As opposed to something like fine art/painting where the path is more vague and clients are more difficult to attain. I also strongly dislike most forms of graphic design so I knew I didn't want that to be my medium. And things like concept design for games or film production, as you probably know, require a stupid amount of practise and skill development. I also wanted to work as a freelancer which played a big part in choosing illustration. 2) In order to become successfull as an artist you must narrow down and hyper-specialise your medium. No fine artist does graphic design, no VFX artist does editorial illustration. You even have specialised people doing background concept art, or character art, or some specific form of VFX, and they'll often focus specifically on those areas without venturing into others. So the bottom line is, to be as successfull as I want to be, you need to be exceptionally good, and to be exceptionally good you have to choose a particular medium and go balls to wall with it. I chose editorial illustration. 3) Editorial work is very well suited to my natural abilities and preferences because a) Editorial work primarily involves a lot of digital drawing/painting and this is the thing that I love doing no matter what. But editorial work is not just about creating nice pictures. It involves coming up with ingenious, highly creative, and interesting visual solutions to often abstract text prompts (hence my concerns with AI generators). There's a deep problem-solving, puzzle-solving aspect to this line of work which is very appealing to me. For example: 'Sky gazing can be one of nature's most awe-inspiring natural rememedies'. And, 'Passive aggression in the workplace': So, like I said, my hyper focus on editorial illustration was intentional, but admittedly there is no greater vision behind this effort beyond just being the best artist I can possibly be and honouring the touch of artistic talent i've always had. Very interesting share. I never thought about these technologies being used for nefarious reasons. Similar to deep fakes I suppose, but much much easier to produce something convincing.

Thanks for the blunt feedback man! Honestly really appreciate it. I've definitely been having some new (and more optimistic) ideas and thoughts since writing the original post. Yea that work is amazing. But funnily none of it would work in an editorial context. So that makes me feel a little better.

Are those images definitely AI-generated? The shapes and edges seem very well defined and 'finished' which is unusual for AI art. I can't see any of the usual distortions or small errors that are common in most AI work either.

I don't disagree and I understand your point. Coming up with the ideas, the vision, the concept is artistry in itself. Just doing what you're told by the vision creator is not being an artist. But lets not forget that it takes a highly skilled and talented monkey to be able to draw good lines. Ultimately there is no art without the line drawer, no matter whos coming up with the ideas. Even though I am the monkey who draws the lines, I am also the art director because I come up with the ideas and concepts, even though I work with actual art directors at various publishers. But I think we're moving away from my original concerns though. On a practical day-to-day basis, the freelance jobs that I do are simply at risk of being taken because my assumption and prediction is that it will be easier and cheaper and more convenient for an art director to generate a bunch of images and choose one that looks eye-catching and vaguely suits the article. What happens when 30, 40, 50% of my potential jobs are replaced by an AI art generator because its just more convenient and free to use. And if I can't get any work, or i'm getting such a reduced amount of work each month, is there any point in continuing? Well firstly, i'm focusing primarily on editorial illustration in this thread because that's literally how I pay my bills, it's what I do for a job. And secondly, I think you're conflating editorial illustration with stock photos. They're two very different things, even though they're both used in similar contexts. I'm not really thinking about the future of stock imagery. Just searching for 'editorial illustration' on Pinterest will instantly highlight the difference between that and stock imagery, despite both being placed next to articles online or in magazines/newpapers etc.

I appreciate your feedback and encouragement, as always. Just to clarify my position, I'm not saying that all human artists are going to go extinct. Obviously there will always be a need for human creativity, vision, taste, as you said. My main point with my original post is that my particular line of work, editorial illustration, is at risk just because of the nature of the work. It will become very easy for an art director (the person who works at The Atlantic or Washington Post for example, who then works with the editorial illustrator a.k.a me) to use an art generator to find a suitable image for an article instead of contacting illustrators. I've already seen work that could easily be used in an editorial context. And thats with the current technology. It's not that i'm concerned about AI taking my jobs now, this week or even in the next 12 months. But soon I suspect it will start slowly infiltrating into the industry and more and more publishers (like The Atlantic, New Yorker, etc.) will start using it simple because they can get images that are good enough. I've spent thousands of hours working hard to become an editorial illustrator. It just feels like my entire vision for the next 5-10 years of my life is just not going to work or happen. Creating an entirely new vision, a whole new life plan is fucking hard and depressing. Particularly when it took me years to do in the first place. I don't understand your point about making a graphic novel using AI. That wouldn't be artistic. That would just be entering prompts and flicking through the results to find what you need. Even if someone then edited the images, well you're still just working off of the AI's work. You're not coming up with the core images. But I know it's just an example to help get my mind out of this rut, so I appreciate that. The only path forward I have in mind at the moment is to use AI generators to produce 'idea boards', to come up with initial ideas for an illustration, which will be the basis of my actual artwork. The advantages of this are a) it would speed up my process a lot and b) i'd likely be generating higher quality/more creative ideas vs just coming up with ideas myself which can be affected by my mood, energy levels etc. So in theory I could use Midjourney as a sort of creative assistant. But again, this still doesn't detract the fact that many art directors can simply generate images themselves without needing to outsource to freelancers like myself. As i've mentioned in previous posts, fine artists a.k.a painters, sculptures etc, obviously won't be replaced. It's predominantly digital artists that will be affected e.g. game character design, film concept art, landscape concept art, editorial illustration, textile designers, website designers, UI design, etc etc.

Yes this is an important point. AI artists are good at generating artwork but they lack the ability to add subtle and nuanced details which are often an important part of the composition. Maybe its just the eyes of a face looking just slightly in the wrong direction or like you said a small extra details in the background. However, in a lot of circumstances, I would say that these subtle nuances are not really that important for the client. Unless the detail make or breaks the image, a client will be happy with the result. Most professional clients are not looking for extremely specific images. Mostly what happens is a client will give the artist a fairly simple brief and its up to the artist to come up with the composition, details and make all the decisions. But in the not too distant future, if an editorial client has 50 artwork options to choose from based on the title of their new article, they're not going to care about some small detail in image number 18. They'll just choose a different piece.

A computer can still play chess better than any human. Yet we still consider many of the best players creative and ingenious with their thoughts. What a computer can do doesn't detract from a human's creativity. And 'being creative' is entirely relative and subjective. I strongly disagree. In a few years time AI artists will be just as good as any concept artist. Of course there will be exceptions. The absolute best concept artists like Aaron Limonick will be challenging to compete with. But even looking at this work now, I could easily see an AI artist replicating some of that. As I said in my original post, I'm not concerned about the AI artists taking jobs now, this week, even this year. It's in the coming years that it will start to take jobs. So my point is why should I continue committing to this path if that's almost certainly going to happen. There will always be a need for some artists. At least for a long time. And as I mentioned in my original post, painters and fine artists, etc will always have jobs. And there will be artists needed to accompany AI art in certain ways. The brain machine interface thing is a long way off. I'm not interested in that. What i'm talking about is actual artists jobs being taken within the next 2-5 years. Including myself. I'm not speculating here. I just think you're underestimating the capabilities of AI. I'm not saying that all concept artists will be thrown out. But its likely that 70% of them will be. They'll just end up having a small team of artists who work with AI image generators. In all fairness who knows what will happen. I could definitely be wrong. I hope I am. I hope AI artists just hit a ceiling at some point. Maybe there's a limit to what AI artists will be able to do. I just know we're a long way off that limit.

A few images I recently generated:

Yea Midjourney is amazing I must admit. Yes its a good point. There will always be value in human made art precisely because it comes from a human. But I would not agree that there is a hollowness to AI art. I've seen work which conveys a deep emotional feeling and message. I've given Midjourney simple abstract prompts like 'gently looking into the past' and it somehow creates images that capture that perfectly. It really depends on the type of art. If some random person is buying a one off painting or drawing then yes obviously they would want a real artists work. But most artists are not being paid by individuals, except for fine art painters. For the most part, normal every-day consumers are not the people buying artwork or artistic services. It's companies, publishers, production houses that are paying artists. And they will always have an incentive to reduce costs and speed up production times, both of which AI art can provide. I appreciate your optimism!

@5-D - L O V E Yea there's definitely some value and truth in what he says. Stage orange is important and necessary, but of course there is much more beyond this way of thinking.

Fascinating discussion with the very highly regarded and experienced marketer Rory Sutherland. Not only a very fun and easy listen, but also loads of interesting and valuable insights into the importance of marketing your product or service - arguably an essential aspect of your life purpose. We often think that marketing is something on the side that is kind of optional. But this discussion highlights the integral role of marketing in basically all of our favourite products and services that we use on a day to day basis.

Yea I watched the video but must have missed that line. Great that he's making those distinctions. I'd be interested to know how far he's gone with the consciousness expansion stuff.

Great talk for beginners but still quite superficial. Not to diminish or invalidated his experiences at all, but of course there is much further to go. Working through personal ego stuff, trauma release, etc, is an extremely important part of the psychedelic experience. But eventually, the ego completely collapses and dissolves. After that it's completely impersonal and more about reality understanding itself as a whole at a deeper and deeper levels. And I don't hear that Tucker is going that far. I don't hear it from anyone except for the obvious.

@SQAAD I totally get what you're saying. Making stuff happen can be hard and you've gotta have a really strong and clear vision for where you're heading. You've also got to have a massive desire for that thing to be an actuality. You've really got to WANT to actualize your life purpose. And you've gotta have a significant amount of willpower. There's good reason why most of us live fairly average lives. Also, the reason people never 'make it' is because they lack vision and have never even sat down and answered the question 'what do I want in life?', and if they have they were not nearly specific and comprehensive enough and maybe they did it once and forgot about it. And then combine that with all of the endless incessant distractions and comforts we have, it results in most of the population never 'making it'. But then we also have to ask, well what does 'making it' even mean. Because it's clearly relative to the individual. If you mean realising YOUR unique life purpose then that's all good. But anything other than that can be discarded. If we think that 'making it' is becoming super successful, famous or super rich, then obviously most people aren't going to make it. But that's a silly metric to use. For me 'making it' means setting my own schedule, being able to wake whenever I want, working on fun and cool projects, being creative and making art on a daily basis, having spare time and energy outside of 'work' to work on other things, having the freedom to live wherever I want, having the freedom to travel and go on holiday whenever I want. And I just described my life right now as I'm sitting here typing this. So I've made it, but none of that required being famous, uber successful, rich or even being in the top 5-10% of my field. Society's idea of success is fucking dumb and stupid. So its not actually that difficult to make a cool life and work a fun job that you find meaningful. Literally thousands if not 100s of thousands of people are doing that right now. You think they're different to you? The only difference is that they got really clear on what they wanted to do, committed to it 100%. 100%! And then followed it through until completion without giving up, course correcting where necessary. But to go back to the first sentence in your post. Yes I felt like giving up many times along the way. I had many many nights of self doubt, confusion and uncertainty. But what kept me going was the recognition that I could not possibly live a life that was not on purpose or at least vaguely meaningful to me. It was not a possibility that could happen. So you keep going. The idea that you should not follow your dreams is fucking stupid. What else you gonna do? Follow something you hate? Something you're not interested in? You just need to dream intelligently, dream strategically, dream fast and dream big.

Oh you mean Dr Schwartz's life purpose? I get ya. I thought you meant just in general. Make sure to use @user or quote as some people won't be notified of your response otherwise.

We've all been there. The first and second days are always the hardest. Good job on getting through it, sounds like it was a productive retreat

@assx95 India definitely has some different acceptable standards when it comes to approaching women and dating/relationships in general, so I suspect it's going to be quite a bit more challenging doing day game there vs somewhere in the West. But the very fact that you're out there doing approaches is amazing. Seriously - you've taken a step that millions of guys will NEVER do. Don't let this situation derail you. Re-frame it as a win simply because you've gained some experience in a difficult social situation. That's valuable in itself. Work to be more relaxed, chill, friendly and grounded in the body. You might have been coming off a little stiff and awkward which can make people feel uneasy and anxious.

@Ulax Quite a profound talk, thanks for sharing. Although I'm not sure it has anything to do with the non-linearity of life purpose. Is that in the following parts of the talk?

1) Give it everything you've got. Really really try you're hardest to make the most out of every single meditation session. Try not to slack off on sessions in the evening or nearer the end of the retreat. Every time you sit down for a new session, set a quick little intention to give it everything and try your best. 2) Don't quit halfway through unless you absolutely have to. It's really important that you stay for the full 10 days because on day 10 the noble silence is lifted and it's more relaxed. It's important to have this day to transition back to normality. 3) A few useful items to take: 1) ear plugs - an absolute must, unless you're in a private single room. Every retreat I've been on there's been someone snoring. 2) Shoes that you can slip on and off easily. You'll be going in and out of the meditation hall a lot, so it's useful to have shoes you can slip on and off easily. However, if you know the climate/weather will be bad, obviously take the appropriate boots/shoes, etc. 3) Wristwatch (turn off hourly bleeper) - they do ring bells for certain sessions, but it's just useful to have because you won't have your phone to check the time. 4) Optional item is a small pen and paper to write down the timetable. There will be notice boards around the site that show the schedule but I always find it useful to have a little timetable in my pocket that I can check without having to walk halfway across the site to find a notice board. 5) Optional: Your own pillow and other bedding items that you think will make your sleep as good as possible. 6) Good water bottle - highly recommended to take. 7) You're not supposed to take snacks but I usually take a few small bits with me, like some sweet snack bars, bag of nuts, dark chocolate. This is up to you. This might not apply to you but I always take caffeneited tea bags and coffee because the center I go to only provides decaf. And I don't want to go through caffeine withdrawals on a retreat haha! 8) Take some basic medication stuff like paracetamol, anti diarrhea and anti-constapation (yes I've had to use all of these on different retreats). Something about changing your schedule and meal times that fucks with my gut. 4) Optional advice: Don't do too much socialising on the day of arrival. I've been on retreats where there's just so much chatter and talking with new people and then all of a sudden it's noble silence. The other downside of socialising too much on arrival is that it can create distractions for the rest of the retreat. You end up thinking about what you said or what other people said or what others have done or not done etc. Any retreats I go on these days I minimise or totally remove all socialising with other people there (except for staff and managers) to the absolute minimum. I'll just go and sit in my room until the first meeting. 5) The last thing I'll say is really try to enjoy it as much as possible. Every moment remember that you're doing something that very few people are willing to do. You're also in a position of privilege to be able to do this. When things get challenging, remember that you're doing something extremely special and quite serious. You're deconstructing the fabric of reality and self. This is serious stuff. But it's also something that should be enjoyed as much as possible. I think that's everything. Goodluck!