Nowadays, all kinds of AI are exploding, and it is inevitable that they will conflict with certain functional crash occupations. Every change in productivity, while bringing technological progress and higher efficiency, will inevitably bring a wave of The wave of unemployment, the current wave of artificial intelligence is no exception.
Now, the first batch of people who lose their jobs because of AI have appeared.
According to media sources, a number of game companies have quickly embraced technological changes and introduced AI painting into the workflow to get rid of the huge talent pressure and financial anxiety in the game industry.
According to the news disclosed by Huang Yimeng, the founder of XD Network earlier this year, as far as he knows, some game teams have cut off the original painting outsourcing team.
Another technical director of a game art outsourcing company also revealed that in the past month, his company has laid off half of the original artists.
The original artist used Al to complete the plan, and the work efficiency could be increased by at least 50%, and the reduced demand of Party A was quickly digested. The company will definitely not support idlers, and those original artists who have no demand can only be optimized away. Our company needed 38 original artists before, but now we have laid off 20 people. "
The impact of AI on game original artists this time comes from a general-purpose plug-in called ControlNet released in February this year.
On the basis of this plug-in, the AI drawing software Stable Diffusion can more accurately present human body posture, picture layering, and complex three-dimensional structures, and supports users to adjust the details of the picture, which will effectively solve the problem that was difficult to solve by AI drawing before. Body details.
For commercial companies, the increasingly perfect AI drawing technology is bound to greatly improve the efficiency of related work, and even replace the work of some original painters to a certain extent.
Outside of the field of art, with the advent of GPT-4, or even a more powerful generative artificial intelligence model that can be foreseen in the future, more and more jobs will face the threat of being replaced by AI.
On March 19th, Cheng Hui posted two pictures on his Weibo account: a picture of a plaster model wearing underwear, and a picture of a virtual model generated by using the relevant AI Wenshengtu software (hereinafter referred to as AI model).
Once these two pictures were released, they attracted huge attention from two aspects.
One is the general public's concern about the beauty of virtual models in pictures.
Although the details of the clothing in the generated AI model images are not accurate enough, the image, proportions, and posture of the model have become more natural.
Some people think that AI models have shown sexy beauty, and can even be fake.
However, some people think that the texture of the clothing in the AI model picture is not accurate and clear enough, and there is a certain color difference; the image of the AI model is too perfect and lacks aesthetics; The shape of the clothes will mislead consumers."
Boss Cheng Hui thinks these are not problems. He believes that as AI continues to carry out deep learning that takes into account both quantity and quality, the fineness and realism of AI models' clothing, faces, and movements will be greatly improved.
The second is the concern that AI models may replace real models.
"This year we don't need to spend 40,000 to 50,000 a day to hire photographers and models for clothes shooting, which is completely enough for us." Cheng Hui pointed out in the accompanying post on Weibo.
On Xiaohongshu, the topic "Is this the first profession to be subverted by AI" also rushed to the top of the hot list, with nearly 5 million views.
Cheng Hui told "True Story Lab" that the AI model map was generated by his friend's artificial intelligence team, using open source technologies of several companies and optimizing them, including the open source image generation model released by British artificial intelligence company Stability AI Stable Diffusion.
Cheng Hui majored in computer science as an undergraduate, and has always paid close attention to the iteration and development of AI technology. In 2021, Cheng Hui will invest in the e-commerce industry, operating many categories, clothing is one of them.
Cheng Hui believes that compared with real models, the biggest advantage of AI models is that they can greatly reduce costs.
He calculated such an account. In 2022, Cheng Hui contacted a model photography studio to display and shoot clothing.
According to the price list, shooting 8 hours a day requires an expenditure of 36,000 yuan. Among them, the photography fee (including 400 retouched pictures) is 10,000 yuan, the male and female models cost more than 20,000 yuan, the makeup fee is 2,000 yuan, and the matching fee is 4,000 yuan.
Cheng Huifa's real-life model shooting cost in one day
"If you hire multiple models, you have to take care of the schedules of several models at the same time, and a large number of clothing also needs to be ironed and sorted in advance. Moreover, the photo data is large and the number is large. The process of downloading, making, and selecting at least 5 days. We have a clothing The special session needs to be launched in at least 10 days, and it is often necessary to recruit 20 part-time staff to be enough."
In addition, the state and style of live models and the quality of subsequent P pictures are often uncontrollable factors and an invisible cost. But through AI technology, the model's image, movement, clothing texture, etc. can be adjusted through data training, which saves the cost of hiring real models and photographers, and is easy to use.
I have taken a fancy to the development that this technology can bring to the company. At present, Cheng Hui has merged with my friend's artificial intelligence team. The initial investment is about 2 million, including the annual rental fee of 400,000 yuan, and the equipment investment is 800,000 yuan. 10 people The team's monthly salary of 400,000 yuan, social insurance, insurance costs and other related expenses.
Although he has to bear a lot of start-up costs, Cheng Hui believes that after mastering the AI model map generation technology independently, he can not only reduce the cost of the clothing business continuously, but also develop and implement applications to obtain benefits.
Cheng Hui revealed that at present, his team can generate standard graphic models in 10-30 seconds, and those that meet commercial standards need to be manually debugged. However, compared with the past shooting of real models, the time and labor costs have been greatly reduced.