AI comes for YouTube’s thumbnail industry - Rest of World
▻https://restofworld.org/2023/youtube-thumbnail-ai
Designers and artists who spoke with Rest of World said they’re treating the rise of text-to-image generation AI tools such as Midjourney and AlphaCTR with a mix of anxiety and curiosity. Rest of World spoke to four YouTube thumbnail artists in India, Qatar, and France who said they have either already incorporated, or will soon incorporate, AI tools such as Midjourney or Photoshop’s Generative Fill into their workflows.
“I’ve heard from so many junior artists who are absolutely petrified because they’ve gone to university; they’ve put years of work and resources and experience into this skill that, quite frankly, may not ever get used,” U.K.-based senior digital designer Edd Coates told Rest of World. “From a technical standpoint, what we’re talking about is a piece of software that you have fed other people’s work into, and then that software is generating work that will replace the people who you’ve taken the work from.” Coates said it’s his responsibility as a senior digital designer in the gaming industry to push back against the use of such tools.
Until 2020, full-time thumbnail artists were far and few. The pandemic sparked a boom in the creator economy, which led to the emergence of numerous graphic design professionals catering to YouTubers full time, said Muazz Shaail, a Qatar-based thumbnail designer. The rise of the YouTube economy, which also included strategists, video editors, and scriptwriters, even led to the creation of YT Jobs, a job board to find talented YouTube professionals in 2021.
Of the over 2,000 job postings on YT Jobs this past May, thumbnail designer was the second most in-demand role, accounting for 19.3% of the listings. Creators who once made their own thumbnails, or paid graphic designers a meager $20 for thumbnails five years ago, are now paying hundreds of dollars for a single image, Paddy Galloway, creator of YT Jobs noted in his analysis.
#YouTube #Thumnail #Intelligence_artificielle #Métiers_numériques
