During the AI boom, I became the first to lose my job

Stable Diffusion draws Cyberpunk scenes in 20 seconds

Technological advances may be faster than you think.

Half a year ago, Li Na, the original painter of the game factory, firmly believed that AI could never replace her job. The patchy elements of AI painting, the strong AI style, the persistent scrap rate and the indirect use of finished products all convince Li that her 10-year accumulation in the field of art will not be easily defeated by AI.

But now she dares not think so.

The turning point occurred in February this year. The team from Stanford released a generic plug-in called ControlNet in the programmer community, GitHub. On the basis of this plug-in, AI drawing software Stable Diffusion can more accurately represent human posture, image hierarchy, and complex three-dimensional structure, and support users to adjust picture details. One of the most notable advances is that the details of the hands that were once considered "AI killers" are no longer a problem.

CITIC Construction and Investment Research reported that ControlNet, as a general plug-in form, transforms picture editing applications from entertainment tools and production assistant tools to a truly new professional creation platform, effectively produces directly commercially available content, and eliminates the problem of "non-professional" professional tools.

A group of game companies quickly embraced technological changes and introduced AI painting into their workflows to get rid of the enormous talent pressure and financial anxiety in the gaming industry. At the same time, the first group of people who lost their jobs because of AI also appeared.

Outsourcing teams are often the first to be affected. On March 2, Huang Yimeng, the founder of cardiac network, burst the news on social platforms. All his game teams know that the original painting outsourcing team was chopped down. "AI has actually started to affect many people's jobs."

Inspired by a technology director at a game art outsourcing company, Times Finance revealed that his company has cut half of its original artists in the past month. "The original painter uses Alto complete the project, and the work efficiency can be improved by at least 50%. The reduced demand of Party A has been quickly digested. The company will certainly not idle people, those original painters who have no need can only be optimized. Before our company needed 38 original painters, now 20 people have been cut off."

By contrast, Li Na is lucky to be in the factory. Based on the factory's cautious style, Li Na and her colleagues have yet to confront the risk of unemployment. But since March, AI painting has joined their daily workflow at the request of the company. From this point of view, security is only temporary.

"It's hard to say if you can keep this job after half a year. It's time to think about where to put up a stall to sell stir-fried powder after you leave your job." Li Na said with a bitter smile to the finance and economics of the time.

AI Intervention Game Art, Half of the original painters are unemployed

Discussions about AI painting replacing painters have started since September last year.

At that time, the Space Opera Theater, a work produced by AI painting software Midjourney, won a gold medal in the Colorado Expo Art Contest. However, after Li Na's experience, she found that AI painting produces a poor picture logic, which is quite contrary to the stiffness and compactness. At most, it can provide inspiration and material for work, but the effect and texture are far from mature artists.

"At that time, everyone felt that AI was not scared enough to do this, and it took more than half a month before it could continue."

However, when Li Na used AI mapping software again in March this year, her previous confidence quickly collapsed. Artificial intelligence is growing much faster than Li Na imagines. Once those uncoordinated places no longer exist, after careful adjustment and optimization, now the AI drawing software can even exceed Li Na's own level of drawing. In her view, the AI works fed by the best works are already better than 70% of the painters.

Even worse, AI mapping is still evolving rapidly. On March 17, Midjourney released the fifth edition of its commercial AI Image Composition Service, which allows you to create photo-grade images directly while tackling the challenge of hand detail depiction, almost matching the work of a photographer at first glance.

Photographic artwork produced by Midjourney with the theme "Hello Kid". Source: Kobi, a little red book Blogger

However, unlike the narrative of "AI replaces human", Li Na emphasized to the financial times that although AI painting software is now powerful, it can not completely replace human. After drawing, the original artist needs to make more detailed adjustments before it can be finally adopted. Even so, Li Na has to admit that AI mapping software is already a very powerful production tool.

"It used to take a week or two to complete, but now it only takes two days."

Qiqiang also pointed out to Times Finance that AI is strong because it can help the original painter to complete the first 50% of the work, and the latter 50% of the work needs to be modified according to the needs of Party A. "The most frightening thing is that it can give you dozens to hundreds of image embryos in a short time, so that the original artist can create on the basis of the image embryo."

Such a change would be a fatal attraction for many game companies trying to cut costs and increase efficiency. An increase in productivity often means that capital can do the same or more work at a lower human cost.

The financial analysis of Qiqiang into the era indicates that in the traditional game development process, game art has always been a high investment and long cycle link. Even on a medium-sized game development team, artists need at least 10 people and outsourcers to help with artwork. If you make dozens of characters in a game, it takes about 1 to 2 years from development to landing.

However, after AI gets involved in the production process, the efficiency of game research and development will be greatly improved. Qiqiang said that if AI can be used in all aspects of the game, the artist allocation of the same size of hand game team can be directly reduced to 3-4 people, and the cost of art will be reduced by 20% to 30%, and the marketing cycle will be greatly shortened to 3-4 months because of the overall efficiency improvement.

This is certainly a good thing for the entire gaming industry. Savings in aesthetic costs will provide more room for gamers to try and error and enrich market supply.

But the situation is much more complex for the individual in it. There are always people who can't keep up with the fast-moving wheels of the times and are unable to cope with the risk of future unemployment.

Today, Li Na is trying to learn to use AI so that she can not be eliminated by the times. But even so, the fear of losing a job continues to persist. Every time they eat with friends, they talk about what they can do to make a career change in the future. By Qiqiang's side, many original artists directly choose to try to change their positions to 3D modeling or simply transform.

300 million jobs worldwide or replaced by Generated AI

AI's impact on the game art industry is just the beginning.

In addition to AI painting products such as Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, the AI language model represented by ChatGPT is also rapidly upgrading.

On March 15, Open AI released the latest version of GPT-4. Compared with previous generation GPT-3.5, this version has made a great breakthrough in image understanding and information processing. It can not only read pictures and program, but also write copies and plans, and even play Li Bai's poems. The next day, Microsoft released Microsoft 365 Copilot, an office software assistant tool that carries GPT-4. In addition to functions such as one-click analysis of data and sorting out document points, Copilot can automatically generate PPT from one sentence.

Rapidly advancing artificial intelligence has started to make many white-collar workers worry about whether they will be replaced by AI. On social platforms such as Little Red Book, the argument that planning, operation, copywriting and other types of work are about to lose their jobs is endless.

In fact, this change is happening gradually. After two or three weeks of intensive contact with ChatGPT, Lin Yang, the founder of a sports organization, made a bold decision to cut his own marketing director and designer, train ChatGPT to guide the company's marketing behavior, and let AI mapping tool Midjourney make posters.

"Everyone is saying that we need to go back to business nature, open source and throttle. How can we reduce costs and increase efficiency? I see this possibility in ChatGPT and other related software when we reduce costs and increase productivity significantly."

At present, from the results, such a decision has not brought any inconvenience to Lin Yang's company. Lin Yang told the times about finance and economics, and he quickly found that ChatGPT's programs were almost identical to those written by people.

"What you can say in two or three sentences is that you don't need a fancy PT. Let him give you a Presentation in half an hour. The form is not important."

Under business pressure, more and more entrepreneurs have made the same choices as Lin Yang. A survey of 1,000 companies by a platform providing employment services revealed that nearly 50% of them said they were already using ChatGPT, according to Fortune.com. In companies that already use ChatGPT, 48% have it instead.

Lin Yang also told Times Finance and Finance that there are already many companies around him using ChatGPT to train their sales and service teams. At the same time, he is asking his team to learn to use ChatGPT. And Lin Yang's own schedule for the next month is basically filled with AI-related courses.

A recent study by Goldman Sachs, one of the world's top investment banks, points out that the latest breakthroughs in Generative Artificial Intelligence Systems, such as ChatGPT, will revolutionize the global labor market, with 300 million jobs being replaced by Generative AI globally and lawyers and administrators being the most likely to be laid off.

"The technology has caused a major disruption to the labor market: it could create a new class of white-collar unemployed workers who could experience a fate similar to that of blue-collar workers in manufacturing in the 1980s."

Source: Times Finance