Just realized AI art is wrecking my freelance commissions

I used to shrug off AI art as a tool but then I lost 3 illustration gigs this month to clients feeding my style into Midjourney prompts. The before and after is my paycheck dropping by $800 and I don't know how to compete with free.

4 comments

4 Comments

baker.christopher14d ago

Wait, hold on, $800? That's not just a couple of quick sketches, that's serious money. You're telling me someone just typed your whole art style into a box and took three entire paychecks away from you? That's absolutely wild to me, I can't believe clients are that bold about it. Even with Midjourney getting better at hands, it still messes up composition and lighting in ways that are super obvious if you have an actual eye for art. Like, do these people not care that they're getting a weird knockoff that can't even keep the characters consistent from one prompt to the next? It makes my blood boil that they think that's a fair trade for what you spent years learning to do. What are you thinking about doing next to protect your work from this?

david_reed2214d ago

Yeah maybe. Clients come back half the time anyway.

miasanchez15d ago

Hang on, are you sure those clients are actually gone or just shopping around? I've had people threaten to use AI on me before and then come crawling back when their generated stuff looks like uncanny valley garbage with six fingers. Losing $800 sucks for sure but I'd be curious to see what they even got out of those Midjourney prompts, half the time it looks fine at first glance then you notice the text is just scribbles and the eyes don't match.

fiona_carr2614d ago

Wait, isn't Midjourney actually pretty good with hands now though? Ive seen some wild stuff from v6 that doesnt have the creepy six finger thing anymore. Not saying its perfect but theyve fixed a lot of the obvious tells. The text thing is real though, I tried generating a logo with words in it and it came out as jibberish. Kinda funny they paid for that but honestly Id be more interested to see if the client even knows they got a bad product or if they think it looks great. Sometimes people just dont notice the weird parts.