Artist Jingna Zhang predicts that “60-80% of the artist workforce will lose their jobs in the next 2-5 years. Not to prompters—just to company bottom lines.” As with businesses and workplaces, the visual arts are going through a major shake-up from generative AI. It seems like a safe bet that artists will lose work to AI – a recurring consequence of new technologies – but job security is not all that is at stake. The introduction of AI into the visual arts cheapens the unique human capacity for imagination.
