AI can outwork everyone, but it won't outworth anyone. How?
AI art doesn't have a copying problem. Ask for the same picture twice and you'll usually get two different images. Every one is technically one of a kind.
It has a volume problem.
AI can make a new image in seconds, all day, for anyone who asks. When there's always another one-of-a-kind image behind the last one, none of them are rare.
Unique isn't the same as rare.
We've watched this happen to digital art before.
NFTs were sold as scarce digital art. Then everyone made them. A 2023 study of 73,257 NFT collections found that 79% had never sold out, and 95% had a market cap of zero.
Trading had already collapsed by then. Between January and September 2022, NFT trading volume fell 97%, from $17 billion to $466 million.
Flood the market, and the price of each piece heads for zero.
NFTs had a second problem: copies. The token was scarce. The image never was.
In March 2021, an entrepreneur paid $2.9 million for an NFT of Jack Dorsey's first tweet. A year later he put it up for auction, and the top bid was $280. The best offer after that was a few thousand dollars, about 0.2% of what he paid. Meanwhile, anyone could screenshot the tweet for free.
That's the gift shop problem. Museums don't hire guards for the gift shop. The prints downstairs are copies, so they're cheap. The original upstairs gets a rope, a room at the right humidity, and someone standing next to it all day.
People don't pay for the image. They pay for the one a person made.
When photography arrived, painting didn't die. I'd argue it got more valuable for being the thing a camera couldn't do. People still store real money in paintings, far more than they do in photographs.
So AI looks like bad news for artists and the visual arts business. I don't think it is.
AI-generated art has the volume problem. NFTs had volume and copies. Art made by a person has neither. It's slow to make, and there's only one original.
The people who can afford valuable human-made art aren't the people printing AI images for their walls. The more AI art there is, the less each piece is worth, and I think that pushes everything made by a person up.
The gift shop is about to get much bigger. I don't think the guards are going anywhere.
This is an opinion, not a forecast. I could be wrong.