Over the past few weeks and months I’ve been getting increasingly concerned and admittedly very depressed about the onset of A.I art and its impact on professional artists like myself. In 2021 I escaped wage slavery, quit my 9-5, and became a professional freelance editorial illustrator. But only after literally years of hard work and practice. I’ve put thousands of hours into this. Endless nights of grind to get where I’m at now. Only to now recognise that in the not too distant future my work could easily be replaced by an A.I art generator. Some of you might think, ‘surely A.I isn’t that good yet?’. I’m telling you it is. It is truly exceptional. And that’s coming from myself as an artist with a critical eye who knows what is good and isn’t. And it’s only going to improve. It’s definitely stronger in some areas vs others, but on the whole it’s exceptionally good already. In 2,3 or 5 years how good will it be? And that’s my issue. Sure, maybe it’s not taking my jobs right now, but in a few years time it very likely will be.  And that’s the depressing part. Whats the point in continuing on in my line of work (which is already very competitive) if the majority of it will be taken up by a.i generators. Very depressing. I’m struggling to get myself out of this state. Feeling very down and have no motivation to work. My wonderful vision for my life has basically crumbled in front of my eyes. I genuinely feel purposeless which is a dangerous state for a man to be in. The only thing I’ve ever been skilled/talented at (art and drawing) is now slowly becoming useless.  And look, I’m exposed to this stuff every day. I know what’s out there. I know what kind of art is being made by A.I. And if there’s anyone who would deny the competency of A.I art generators it would be me! It’s in my agenda to deny their capabilities and talk badly about them. But from what I’m seeing, they will be taking a significant large amount of art jobs in the coming years. So there are obviously areas of art which A.I artists will easily take over and there are domains which it won’t.  Stock images and photography - this will be the first to go. A.I artists are already creating stock images that literally look like photographs you see on shutter stock, but far more specific to the prompt. Concept art - this will be heavily affected. It includes things like landscape and environment art, character design, a lot of game-related concept art (in-game objects, user interfaces, textures, characters, etc.). Even concept art for films will be affected. I've seen so many landscape artworks, buildings, machines, and cityscapes that could easily be used for film or game concept work. Editorial illustration - This is my field of work. The Atlantic has already published articles with A.I generated artwork. Admittedly, those particular articles may have just used stock imagery rather than an editorial illustrator's work, but it shows that art directors are aware of A.I generators and are more than willing to use them. Cosmopolitan used an A.I artist to create their cover image (although in fairness this was probably just a one-off thing). And just generally I see a lot of A.I art that could easily be used in replacement of actual editorial illustrators. I know what art directors are looking for, I know this space, I know what images work in editorial contexts and what don’t. The reality is that it will become increasingly easy for art directors to input the core idea of an article into an art generator and find a suitable image within minutes and most importantly for FREE. They don’t have to pay illustrators like me to create images. I’ve already seen people inputting music lyrics into the generators to create images. This is similar in a lot of ways to editorial work, except that editorial is just text about some political or social issue for example. It’s all the same.  I definitely see graphic designers eventually being affected. There’s no reason why an A.I. artist can’t generate incredible website designs, logos, poster designs. It can’t do it now, but in the next 5 years I predict we will see this. You’ll be able to input a bunch of specifications, all the text and imagery you want included, and then bam! the A.I generator gives you 10 different options in less than 30 seconds. A few tweaks here and there and you’re done. Obviously there are going to be some forms of art that won’t be affected by A.I. For example, there will always be a need and market for fine artists e.g. real paintings. Any kind of art that involves creating 'physical' stuff rather than digital work is not going to be significantly affected.  One of the best free A.I. art generators now is called Midjourney. You can use it for free here: https://midjourney.gitbook.io/docs/ Click on the discord link, sign up, and enter /imagine [your prompt] in one of the bot groups in the left-hand side menu.  Just seeing what Midjourney can do already is very disheartening and depressing for myself and for many other artists.  I feel like I’m back to square one again after so many years of hard work and effort. And like I said, I’m not saying my jobs are just going to be taken away next week. This will obviously be a slow gradual process. But the point here is that in 2, 3, or 5 years will I be needed as an artist? Or at least how many jobs will there be left? I guess the silver lining here is that no matter what I’ll always love creating art and I always can create art. No matter what I'll always have that available.