AI took my job, and the designer of a big factory changed his career to open a tavern

Tencent News Deep Web

2024-06-07 09:56Published on the official account of Hebei Tencent News "Deep Web" column

Image courtesy of Visual China

Author丨Xue Fang 

Editor丨Yu Chen

Produced by丨Deep Web Tencent News Xiaoman Studio

More than 200 years ago, when photography was first born, painters also watched the camera conquer the city, and the famous French designer Paul Delaro also left the classic statement: "From this day on, painting is dead." "But after the wheels of history have whizzed by, painting and photography are still in their separate corners.

When AI technology enters the field of image generation, history seems to enter a cycle, and a large number of designers face unemployment. For most designers, it is a matter of survival to leave or stay. A grain of sand of the times, falling on the body of every individual designer, is a mountain. This is one side of the coin – cruelty and violence.

And the other side of the coin is – subversion, equality and embrace.

"AI has given many ordinary people the ability to design, and through accurate descriptions, they can produce a good work of art, and it provides an equal ability; If designers make good use of AI, they will have the opportunity to be efficient, and their design ceiling will be higher, and they can rely on AI to transform into super individuals. Liang Yaoming, founder of the visual creative platform Zhanku, said.

In the new wave of technology, no one is immune. A report by Goldman Sachs shows that artificial intelligence can replace 300 million jobs, and OpenAI researchers have released a paper showing that about 80% of Americans' jobs will be replaced by AI.

 "I've studied art for many years, and my painting skills are not as good as the paintings that come out in tens of seconds after AI inputs entries." An art student lamented that he was very anxious and confused about the future, and the news that the designer was unemployed and delivered food made him feel heartbroken. Not only that, but in the midst of the soaring progress of AI, there are many questions about the ethics of technology, and AI can indeed improve efficiency, but it can also be abused for spoofing and plagiarism.

"My job was killed by AI"

Brother Liang, a native of Dalian, became the design director of an e-commerce platform, and he left two years ago. Now, he has opened a fermentation tavern in Huilongguan. This shop on the second floor facing the street is about 50 square meters, and the rent is 250,000 yuan.   

From the panic brought by AI to designers at the beginning of 2022 to now, many designers have basically accepted the existence of AI.

Brother Liang said, "If you (AI) want to replace me, replace me!" I have no regrets. He came to Beijing in 2006 and has done a variety of design projects in the past 16 years. Now he has opened a tavern, but Brother Liang feels that he has not said goodbye to design, this space is full of his designs.

Brother Liang took the initiative to leave the e-commerce platform at the beginning of 2022, in his cognition at the time, it was not difficult to find a job, but in April of that year, he felt that the signs of bad came out little by little, and a former colleague called Brother Liang and asked him if the company was still recruiting? Brother Liang said that he had left.

In June, Brother Liang found that there were fewer opportunities. His friend Xiao SI, the design director of a large factory, her entire design group, more than 10 people have collectively "graduated", this team is one of the oldest design teams in the domestic Internet industry, focusing on the design team of Internet visual design, interaction design, user research and front-end development.

Brother Liang couldn't stay at home, and in August, he spent a month visiting all the museums in Beijing. Brother Liang opened some social software and designer communities, and found that designers who didn't find a job for half a year or a year abounded. Brother Liang told himself that as a manager, it was even harder for him to find a job.

A pessimistic mood enveloped Brother Liang, and he began to worry that he would not find a job and would leave Beijing, and he would not be able to tell his family about it for the time being. "If my mother had known, she would have thought that I would only be able to wear a uniform and work as a security guard or deliver food after I was in Beijing." Brother Liang teased. He began to adjust his mentality, so that his heart was quiet, he was not anxious, and his mentality must not collapse.   

After a period of confusion and searching, Brother Liang's tavern opened. It starts at 6 p.m. and closes at 4 a.m. Brother Liang talked about the tavern guest Chubby. Xiaopang told Brother Liang, "Huilongguan finally has a craft brew; Don't be yellow, you have to hold on - I'm sorry, boss, I'm not very good at talking. ”

Brother Liang was deeply impressed by Xiaopang: "The tavern has become a place for people from big Internet factories to complain, and some people cry while drinking; Some people are worried that they will be laid off at the edge of their business; Some people are complaining about the company's bad money and the cultural ...... of expelling good money, "Dachang is still like a besieged city."

Brother Liang walked out of the siege of Dachang, the future of this newly opened tavern and tavern carries his future life and ideals, and about the future, Brother Liang is more ordinary now.

Guotai Junan analysts predict that in the next five years, 10%-30% of the image content will be generated by AI. Industry insiders prefer to see AIGC as the "industrial revolution of liberal arts students", and at present, AI replaces only the part of painting that can be industrialized. As the first application of AIGC to break the circle, AI painting was passively taken from the city to the outside of the city.

Zhang He, who is a UI designer in Dachang, was born in 1989, he was recruited into Dachang by school, and after "graduating" from Dachang, he originally wanted to find a small and beautiful design company to work.

As a transition, Zhang He went to a bar opened by a friend, invested in technology, and helped to develop the brand and some peripheral products. After seven or eight months in the bar, he left. When he was in the bar, he met the current boss, which is a company that sells alcohol, and the owner and his wife admired him very much, and felt that in this era of live broadcast and short video, they needed to find someone in their team who knew how to design.   

For Zhang He now, his income is not as high as that of the original big factory, but he is much happier than before, and he is satisfied with the current situation. "In the past, he was a screw in a big factory, but now he often needs to find some original pictures on foreign websites, and he is also very happy in the process of finding pictures, because he can see a lot of good ideas, and he is also full of creativity in the process of drawing illustrations."

"I'm stronger after mastering AI"

"Little SI, AI is coming, what should we do?" "Definitely embrace AI!"

When the wheels of the times were whistling, whether active or passive, Brother Liang and Zhang He chose to leave. And Xiao SI's choice is to jump on this car, in her opinion, AI is both a challenge and an opportunity for a good designer. After leaving the big factory, Xiao SI made short videos and set up his own studio, which is definitely not a problem to support himself, but it is impossible to be rich and rich.

When Xiao SI was studying at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, his tutor often said, "You haven't caught up with the good times." In the 90s of the last century, there were often designers who would change the car for 70-800,000 yuan after a single design, but now why is graphic design in decline, because 50 yuan can design a business card, design a recipe, and the design has been templated, which can be regarded as the earliest prototype of AI. “

Now that the AI is so powerful, for the current little SI, what she has been thinking about is how to form a group of one person, and the repetitive physical work AI can help you get it.

"For a designer, she returns to the essence of design – creativity and inspiration." Little SI told AI Lightyear.

"In the whole market, competitive designers are divided into two categories, one type of designers themselves are very creative and expressive; The other type is very technical, including the ability of software applications, such as 3D, such as rendering, which is really spent on the work. LITTLE SI ELABORATED.

Xiao SI is a native of Shenyang, and when she was in college, she was shocked to see the exquisite sculptures and reliefs of the Chen Clan Ancestral Hall in Guangzhou, isn't this China's Rococo and Baroque? IN ADDITION TO BEING SHOCKED, XIAO SI SIGHED MORE, "IF I CARVE TO SUCH A LEVEL, SUCH A WORKLOAD, I HAVE TO BE EXHAUSTED, AND I CAN ONLY CARVE ONE DOOR IN A YEAR." ”

As we all know, Leonardo da Vinci took 4 years to paint the "Mona Lisa", Monet took 7 years to complete "Water Lilies", and Miyazaki spent 13 years working hard to complete the manuscript of "Valley of the Wind".

Xiao SI said, "At present, the integration ability of AI has exceeded 90% of practitioners in the industry, and a large part of artistic creativity belongs to the part of manual labor, and now this part of manual labor is undertaken by AI." ”

For creative designers, with the blessing of AI, they will become more powerful than ever before.

Ye Qing is a top designer in China, good at 3D, and also likes photography. Now he is trying to use AI to produce photos, he continues to challenge the limits of AI with his works, and in iterations again and again, his works are becoming more and more detailed, and later Ye Qing sent the photos to the Zhanku community, and everyone sighed that he used AI so well! Liang Yaoming told "AI Light Year".    

Image source: "Cyberpunk Mechanical Bumblebee" - Ye Qing (Station Cool ID: ATIMESKY)

Liang Yaoming, the founder of the visual creative platform Zhanku, was born in 1978 in Guangzhou. It is reported that there are 18 million designers in China, and there are currently 17 million registered users of Zhanku. Liang Yaoming, who worked as a graphic designer for ten years, then worked for Shanda Network and Maopu, and founded Zhanku in 2006.

"The entire design industry has come to a subversive and revolutionary moment, and the current era is different from the previous PC Internet era and mobile Internet era, and the future is still worth looking forward to - AI technology is worth embracing." Liang Yaoming said.

Liang Yaoming has participated in the ups and downs of China's Internet for so many years, and his philosophy of life is "to be a man who goes against the current and does things with the trend." "In February this year, Meitu spent 300 million yuan to acquire Zhanku. In this acquisition, Leung focuses on "enabling designers to make money using Meitu's AI technology." ”

"I hope that Zhanku can help designers master new technical tools and focus on creative or visual presentation." Wu Xinhong, founder of Meitu, believes that "people learn and grow through change, and they need to make good use of new tools. ”

Yu Yu is the founder and design director of Yixiang Huaran, tall and thin, with a ponytail, quite an artist's temperament. He holds a master's degree in architectural management from the National School of Art and Design in France, and a doctoral candidate at the University of Otago, New Zealand, specializing in winery, theme park design and cultural IP development.

Yu Yu has now started his third venture, he bought the script "Mars War" by his brother Yu Lei, who is a film screenwriter, and uses a script as the original to develop the whole industry chain of IP categories such as novels, movies, and theme parks. Yu Yu organized a global IP R&D team of 70 people based on the Tsinghua design team, including doctors of astronomy, science fiction writers, film screenwriters, AI designers, theme park design and operation and other talents.

Yu Yu can see the progress of his designer work every day in the Midway community, which is connected to Midjouney. Through this AI generation platform, Yu Yu not only improved work efficiency, but also saved a lot of personnel costs.

The future is here, and it's just begun

Xiao SI still remembers that one of his ideals when he was studying was "as long as I have creativity in my head, AI can help me realize it immediately, and designers only need to focus on creativity".   

In fact, AI painting is not new. Back in the 70s, an artist named Harold Cohen began to create the computer program "AARON" and create paintings. In 2008, Christie's auctioned a crude portrait of an AI for $432,500.

Caption: The first AI portrait at Christie's auction

In 2022, engineers from several open-source communities made an AI image generator called disco diffusion, and AI painting has made a qualitative leap; Midjouney started internal testing in March, and April Dalle2, which can generate more accurate composite logic images, appeared in July; Stable diffusion produces highly accurate images that rival those of Dalle2.

Stable Diffusion, arguably the most powerful AI painting model in the world today. Stable Diffusion has successfully solved the problem of detail and efficiency, and through algorithm iteration, the fineness of AI drawing has been improved to the level of artwork, and the production efficiency has been increased to the level of seconds, and the threshold of equipment required for creation has also been raised to the civilian level.

In fact, the Diffusion model has long been proposed by the academic community, which forms the underlying technology for all AI-generated images on the market. After the open source of Stable Diffusion, the industry has made breakthroughs in key technologies, and many applications based on the Stable Diffusion model have entered the market.

In a 2022 article titled "Generative AI: A Creative New World," two partners at Sequoia USA wrote: "Machines are beginning to try to create something meaningful and beautiful, and this new category is called "Generative AI," which means that machines are generating something new rather than analyzing something that already exists.

And so it is. At an art competition at the 2022 Colorado State Fair, the first prize was awarded to the AI-generated painting "Théâtre D'opéra Spatial"; COINCIDENTALLY, THE BEST SHORT FILM AT THE 2022 CANNES SHORT FILM FESTIVAL WAS ALSO AWARDED TO THE AI GENERATED WORK "THE CROW".

Of course, technology doesn't stop there. With the advent of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023, AI painting has also begun to explode. Not only that, but the communication gap between AI and the public is also bridging, whether it is from print to video, sending instructions to AI is even as easy as WeChat chat, and the level of AI detail has also been greatly improved.   

After Meitu's acquisition, Liang Yaoming and Wu Xinhong held many meetings, discussing how to export or make templates for some designers' abilities on Meitu's platform, so that more Meitu users can enjoy the beauty and convenience of art. Ordinary people quietly enjoy the convenience of technology, and the era of everyone is a designer has arrived.

On March 31, 2023, Lu Chuan said in an interview, "Now, the happiest thing every day is to lie in bed and chat with Chat GPT before going to bed, and let AI help him draw movie posters." Frankly speaking, the effect of AI in 15 seconds is much more powerful than the one I gave me a month after I found a professional poster company to make one. ”

Everything looks good, but the current AI is not perfect. In the process of communicating with AI, Yu Yu also found that due to the integration and recreation of AI based on the existing stock of human creations, there will be an obvious cognitive ceiling phenomenon in some subdivisions, which makes breakthrough innovation hindered to a certain extent.

In addition, these new things brought about by AI are also controversial. At present, in the early stage of AIGC development, there is still no clear definition of who belongs to the copyright of AI-generated content.

The White Paper on Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) released by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology this year pointed out that with the continuous expansion of AIGC applications, there are still many difficulties and challenges in AIGC in terms of technical algorithms, enterprise management, and policy supervision.

But something has changed. Zhou Qingfeng is a veteran publisher, and in 2016 he established a cross-border cultural company, Weiyan, to do publishing. Zhou Qingfeng attaches great importance to details, and he can't find a suitable cover for the book "Six Tales of Floating Life", so he can wait for the first half of the year. "Later, I finally saw a picture that I was satisfied with, this picture was made by AI, and I paid for this AI picture."    

Caption: The cover of AI-designed Six Tales of the Floating Life

This time, AI is making a big splash in the field of painting, and perhaps this is just the beginning.

"AI replaces human work, this cycle is extended to 5-10 years, it is still very meaningful, think about the Internet 20 years ago when the Internet era came, think about the first industrial revolution to the second industrial revolution, after the cycle is extended, it is found that everyone's life has undergone earth-shaking changes, the industrial revolution most people left their hometowns, to the city, and then to the company's lattice. In fact, the essence of every major change is the same. Jin Jianhua, founder and CEO of iAnalytics, told AI Lightyear.   

In this process of change, some people may be resisting, some people are refusing, they want to keep their lives in the state, and it can be seen from the historical proof of each change that everyone has to embrace in the end. Jin Jianhua believes that whether to embrace this process or accept it in anxiety and panic is essentially how to better face this matter, which is a subject that can be studied for 10 to 20 years.

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