89% of Japanese artists consider generative AI “a serious threat” to their livelihood, large-scale survey shows

I think artists prefer to be paid for the work they do.

@Lucifrost they can go indie anime works and even add patreon since there is no stopping ai now

@deg
89% are worried they won't be able to do that.

If AI is taking their jobs, why can't they use AI to keep their jobs????????????????????????????????????????????

@RushingSugar Real answer to a bait reply:

The artists have developed skills for a specific workflow. This is essentially the same as blacksmiths moving to CNC machining. One is a manual labor skill, the other is computer work. The result is the same(ish), the work is completely different skillsets. This is why people fear losing jobs to automation, because manning automation systems is nothing like manual labor, and laborers often struggle to make that transition.

@valico

OH GEEZ YOU'RE SUCH A GENIUS! I CAN'T BELIEVE I FORGOT THAT USING AI ART GENERATORS WERE A HIGH LEVEL SKILL THAT TAKES YEARS OF LEARNING!!!!

If AI is taking their jobs, why can't they use AI to keep their jobs????????????????????????????????????????????

If AI is taking their jobs, why can't they use AI to keep their jobs????????????????????????????????????????????

If AI is taking their jobs, why can't they use AI to keep their jobs????????????????????????????????????????????

@RushingSugar
That doesn't make any sense. The fear of AI is that its purpose/end result will be saving money for companies by replacing people. They don't need to pay artists any more, because they can just have AI generate what they need. How would an artist switching to AI solve that? The problem is that they aren't paying artists in the first place, whether that artist uses AI now or not is irrelevant.

Like, if you work at a software company, and they lay off half their staff because they think they don't need as many people now that their employees will be more efficient using AI, then AI is going to have taken half those people's jobs even though they were using AI.

Mangaka should better learn how to train AI so that they can make it draw with their individual art styles.

They still need to draw themselves to feed the AI with training data, just less overall so they can focus more on other aspects.

@Zarutaku Artists would need to fix up the parts where AI messes up, that might take longer than just doing in by hand.

@JaniSIr A well-trained competent AI wouldn't mess up that much.

@Zarutaku At this point that's not a thing outside of marketing, where the CEO begs for more investor money.
There are rumors that OpenAI will run out of money in 2027 without new investors, because they can't monetize their AI hard enough to be self sufficient.

Maybe, but it's a foreseeable development.

@Saku_k AI *might* make people a bit more efficient, I don't know about art but as far as programming goes, debugging AI code is harder than typing in your own code.
AI speeds up the one part that takes physical effort, but then good luck maintaining a vibe coded code base.
Companies that laid of programmers citing AI ended up rehiring a bunch of people, mostly cheap labour from India...
And there is a very problematic trend of corporate cost cutting at the cost of their product quality, that will come back to bite them in the long run.

@Zarutaku Another possibility is that AI generated slop gets mixed into the training data, and the models start to deteriorate...

@Saku_k AI *might* make people a bit more efficient, I don't know about art but as far as programming goes, debugging AI code is harder than typing in your own code.
AI speeds up the one part that takes physical effort, but then good luck maintaining a vibe coded code base.
Companies that laid of programmers citing AI ended up rehiring a bunch of people, mostly cheap labour from India...
And there is a very problematic trend of corporate cost cutting at the cost of their product quality, that will come back to bite them in the long run.

89% of people who became what they are because they can't do anything in their life other than vomiting their badly drawn, badly written shit on paper consider AI a threat to their non-career



My thought is if you're really good at your work no AI will ever sobstitute you, like no other person will sobstitute you and you will keep being untouched and beloved the same. If you feel threatened the problem is on you alone, not on AI or any other scapegoat.

@ProudElitist So true. I see so many of them on reddit complaining about being at risk, when their portfolio only consists of badly drawn furry porn. If anything, they are making ai worse when it comes to training data, which im all for lol.

@ProudElitist So true. I see so many of them on reddit complaining about being at risk, when their portfolio only consists of badly drawn furry porn. If anything, they are making ai worse when it comes to training data, which im all for lol.

@EvolKarma That's what I noticed as well. You mostly see that kind of folks being the most vocal, same with tracers. Actually skilled artists either do not give a damn, or just adjust their style by learning how to use the newest tools, just like @JaniSIr mentioned earlier. No one who makes a living out of art that I know, be it on the Internet, rages about AI destroying their career or even affecting it negatively. It's still just a totally subjective observation, however, if you look at what kind of people are the most aggressive about AI, then you might notice a pattern, lol.

On a side note, your post and @ProudElitist's post combined is a truth nuke that will surely enrage "AI bad" people, but it's good to see it said once in a while among all this fearmongering, technophobic echochamber, that minimizes the whole concept of AI and its influence to "lewd images of anime characters" fanarts. Oh, and "AI bros" coming outta bushes to ruin the world or whatever dark legend is popular about them these days on Twitter. xD

@JaniSIr
I don't disagree. A lot of the suits making those decisions don't really understand.
But I was more talking about where the fear stems from. AI isn't really at the point where it can replace artists (or many other jobs), unless you are fine with inferior results, but the fear people might have is that it could get to that point in the near future.

In the software industry we already have this situation. Microsoft boasted that in 2025, about 30% of their new code was AI generated. An AI can write code one magnitude faster than a classic software engineer. Yet, we aren't all fired because the AI can't do it by itself. It needs prompts, and writing good prompts is a skill that takes an engineer. Without guidance and feedback loops, the AI will run amok, miss focus, hallucinate, and eventually ruin the code base. There are early experiments with unsupervised AI based software production, but they are not very advanced yet. Also, unattended creation takes a lot of GPU time, so the cost is in the 5-digit figures just as well for enterprise grade quality. A human engineer cooperating with AI for the boring routine parts is cheaper and faster.

The real threat is that engineers from low wage countries in Asia and Africa (I am in Europe) can also write prompts. So the human won't go away, but in the long run he may be replaced with somebody else because there are more candidates. I'm not even saying that European engineers are "better qualified" than those from the global south, I have worked with some of them and there's the same mix of good and bad.

For AI supported animation, there are the same factors now. Writing a good image and movement prompt is still something you want an experienced animator for, somebody with taste and creativity. That would be storybook and key frame level, and a prompt may well be a hand drawn key frame here. In-between animation is already dead, it doesn't take a full AI for that and the respective software exists already. Those jobs are certainly lost.

Also productivity per animator will go up, in the software industry a typical factor is a 2-3x speedup. This could lead to firings, or simply to create more anime or bump up the quality. That is then something the market has to decide, the factory can produce 3 times more, is there demand?

As somebody who works with generative coding AI each day, I can say that the way forward is to master prompting and AI "thinking". There is a new tool in town, and it changes the workplace. We get from a purely human work to a teamed up AI-with-Human work, which is fine with me. A good engineer will still produce better results using the AI tool chain than a bad one. I am not afraid.

@inim ye low skill workers are the most affected by layoffs so either they go upskilling like learn prompt engineering like you said or we all go vote for universal basic income like negative income tax

yall are harsh for those getting unemployed but ye capitalism is link with social darwinism aka survival of the fittest anyway so thats why universal basic income is needed to reduce that harsh reality of capitalism

@inim thats an interesting fresh take i come across so ai tools is like another great equalizer then im not totally convince yet but thats a good one to think about and you do not even believe there will be mass unemployment too huh

@deg The first industrial revolution for sure created major social change, unemployment, and even violent revolutions. I think we can agree that the 2020s are a turbulent time of permanent and deep change - not only because of AI. Yet, the 1870s were a golden age, classic engineering advances were peaking. We see the completely new industries like electricity grid, electric light, railway and convenience belt factory production emerge. There are a few unfortunates who struggle during the transition. That includes old workers who just can't catch up, and young workers who have no experience and aren't hired because they are not "good" as the human part in a human-AI team. However, the average workforce probably will do the transition, change jobs to the newly created types, and move on. And lest we forget: AI is evolving at 10 times internet speed, expect the change we saw between 1990 and 2020 to happen with the internet to happen in 5 years for AI. And the robots for manual labour are reaching mass-availability just as well. 3rd industrial revolution will happen before 2030, if you ask me.

But: Predictions are still hard, especially about the future.

The stuff AI creates is low-quality anyways, I am surprised anyone tolerates it.

If AI is taking their jobs, why can't they use AI to keep their jobs????????????????????????????????????????????