AI art isn't "about to shake things up". It's already here.

I don't think you have any object-level disagreement with most people who say AI is "about to" shake things up. You just view "the tech is already such that this could theoretically be happening today" as sufficient justification to say things are being shaken up in the present tense, while others are using that same justification for the words "about to", and are presumably waiting for real-world effects (significant shifts in commission art pricing, artists losing their jobs, any major project shifting their art budget to use this tech, etc.) before we say the shake up is actually happening.

I’m more familiar with DALL-E 2 than with Midjourney, so I’ll assume that they have the same shortcomings. If not, feel free to ignore this. It seems like there are still some crucial details that cause problems with AI art that will prevent it from being used for many types of art that will probably soon be fixed, and that’s why I would say “on the cusp” rather than “it’s already here”. I think the biggest issue for your example with Magic cards, there’s a certain level of art style consistency between the cards in a set that is necessary. From my experience with DALL-E, that consistency isn’t possible yet. You’ll create one art piece with a prompt, but then edit the prompt slightly and it will have a rather different style. See, for example, Scott Alexander’s attempt at making stained glass: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-asking-robots-to-design I’m curious if you tried making a set of Magic cards (even, say, ten cards) and then asked other people into Magic to decide which ten are better, how many would choose the existing set. I would bet that they would choose the existing set because of the style consistency.

Beyond that, like you said there are some places where the AIs are just not there yet. Images with text is one, like you mentioned. Another one that seems like it would be a big problem for a Magic set is human faces, which DALL-E is notoriously bad at. Worse, it’s bad at it in ways that are rather obvious to viewers.

Both of these issues seem likely to be solved soon, but they’re not here quite yet. My use of DALL-E so far would still incline me towards paying a real artist.

For one of these games, a typical budget for an individual card illustration of sufficient quality is, as I understand it, in the realm of $200-1000 USD. A single "set" of cards might require 100+ such illustrations. That means that you're looking at paying $20k in art costs on the low end, and that this is a recurring cost every time you want to make a new set that isn't just reprinting old cards -- and even then, sometimes new art is used for reprints!

Except, well, that was then and this is now. Now, if I were in the business of making a card game set, my art budget wouldn't be $20k-100k. It would be... a $30/month Midjourney subscription with $20/month private visibility enabled, and quite frankly high quality Midjourney images look better than many of the images already being used for art in these games. [1]

This doesn't undermine your overall point, but this is getting the numbers pretty wrong IMO.

You're either hiring an artist to do your work, or your doing the art yourself (which also costs you time, which you presumably value at some rate)

Making Midjourney art isn't instant – I've sometimes actually spent hours chasing a particular look. A $200 - $1000 card art probably takes an artist 5-20 hours to make, charging somewhere between $20 - $200/hour. Midjourney is still an art tool that still requires someone with good aesthetic sense. It replaces one set of technical skills with a different set, and the overall process is much faster. I'm guessing the average midjourney art ends up taking ~30 minutes to make, when you factor in trying a bunch of prompts that didn't quite work, as well as context-switching costs.

The cost is higher if you want your art to not only be good, but to be unique among other games or products. i.e. I'd Oliver and I have spent somewhere between 20-30 hours on a combination of figuring out the LessWrong art direction. The first phase of that project involved looking at possible aesthetics to pursue (this started before the rise of ML art), The second phase involved figuring out how to get Dall-E et al to output something that hit the right target. (i.e. having classy watercolor images that fade into a white paper background in a particular way)

So I think it's more accurate to say that the state-of-the-art is for Dall-E/Midjourney/etc to cut art costs by a factor of 10-20. This is enough to be industry-changing, but not quite as extremely as you imply here.

Stable diffusion comes out today. Given its quality, and the fact that it can be used to generate pornography, I suspect it will be quite newsworthy. There have already been huge Twitter threads about it, started by artists terrified of their obsolescence.

Am I the only person who thinks AI art still looks terrible? I see all these posts talking about how amazing AI art is and sharing pictures and they just look...bad? 

On the cost of hiring an artist for a book cover. A couple hundred pounds would be the cheapest end of the spectrum. And that is really very cheap given the number of work hours that appear to be invested.  Probably within a year books published directly through amazon can ask an amazon AI to read the book (or blurb) and wizard them up an acceptable cover.

I suspect some artists might loose business, but I imagine that many might benefit from these tools. For example some tool where the artist draws some stick men in different colours and says "the green one is an orc, the red one our hero who you drew in the last image etc." this allows the artist to transmit certain spatial details that might be hard to put in text to the ai. Basically all the tedious details can be done by an ai onto a human drawn skeleton image.

"Story of our species. Everyone knows it's coming, but not so soon."

-Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton.