I am not sure what's 'Big Tech' but yea, artists are getting replaced. It is now easy for small companies to use deepfake to create interesting marketing ads. A company I know used their own employee to create some ads and then used deepfake to replace her face with Mona Lisa's. They are considering it for replacing faces with those of different ethnicities for different countries. There are models that will create a realistic voice just given a script. And of course models like GPT-3 can create a reasonable script. Nothing Oscar winning or close but enough for a lot of companies to drastically reduce their marketing related budgets.
Seems like you're talking about designers, not artists. Designers make products whose endgoal is money, artists make artworks whose endgoal is meaning. The intrinsic value of an artwork comes from human > human communication. AI is a tool.
That is certainly one definition of art. There are others. The answer to "What is art?" changes depending on time and culture.
FWIW, I have a degree in Fine Arts, have had my work in galleries, and my goal is neither money nor meaning, but just for people to give me some validation and say, "Hey, that's cool."
> Designers make products whose endgoal is money, artists make artworks whose endgoal is meaning.
I don't think that's a useful classification or that those are even mutually exclusive. How would you group Michelangelo and his incredibly expensive commissioned works for instance?
What does it mean for meaning to be the endgoal of art?
I've spent the last two months making carvings and blockprinting them. Sometimes I try to come up with an idea or concept I want to convey. Other times I sit with a block and start carving without any sort of plan or idea for what will come out, just filling in the blank spaces until something emerges.
Upon completion I can often come up with various interpretation of the abstract results, but a lot of the fun comes from hearing how other people interpret my work. A veritable Rorschach test for the soul.
