"Two people do the work that ten people used to do.": how AI is affecting illustrators in China

Everything was going well for Amber Yu, a freelance illustrator who was paid between 400 and 950 euros for each video game poster she drew. she counted in Rest of the World how each of them took him a whole week, but things have changed radically.

from days to seconds. Now Yu is in trouble: the video game companies she worked for can make similar artwork in seconds thanks to DALL-E 2, Midjourney, or Stable Diffusion. Now his job is to make small adjustments and corrections to the AI-created images, something for which he charges “one-tenth” of his original fee.

China already had it sworn to video games. The video game industry was already in trouble in China after the latest measures by a government that did not like its citizens to play games. The country introduced a staggering ban in 2021: that under-18s could only play for one hour a day on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The fight against “addiction to videogames” caused the closure of thousands of small developers.

AI is the straw that broke the camel’s back. According to Leo Li, a “recruiter” of talent from the video game industry, the number of jobs destined for illustrators like Yu has been reduced by 70% in 2022. Not only because of regulatory pressure or the economic situation, but because of the rise of generative AIs. The capacity of these platforms has meant that, according to Li, “the bosses can think if perhaps they don’t need so many employees.”

illustrators in danger. An artist in this field who works in Guangdong and preferred to speak anonymously commented on how “our way of making a living has suddenly been destroyed.” Before, he and his classmates could create a scene or character in one day. Now they can create 40 with the help of the AI. “It makes us more productive, but it also makes us more exhausted.” Meanwhile, Yu complained that it was “despicable” that algorithms—which have been trained on human-created images—were about to replace them.

“Digital Casings”. For some, these illustrations are an iteration of human art, and they scrutinize the illustrations for clues that an AI is behind it. In February, the makers of the popular mobile game Alchemy Stars, from Tencent’s Tourdog Studio, published an illustration in which the artist used AI. The critics of the players were so important that from Tourdog Studio they highlighted that this poster would not appear in the game, and they made comments against AI-created art in video games. “Our art team’s attitude towards AI illustration is very clear: we will not use AI to illustrate our products.”

The old debate of AI and the future of work. The impact that artificial intelligence will have on the world of work has long been talked about, with various studies revealing how GPT-4 has the potential to affect thousands of jobs. The way to affect them will undoubtedly be varied, and from MIT they pointed out years ago how, more than destroying jobs, they will transform them. Those Chinese illustrators probably don’t quite agree.

Image: Javier Pastor with Bing Image Creator

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