LogInJames Busby has shared an insightful story explaining how the introduction of Epic's MetaHuman helped 3D Scan Store to thrive.
Back in April 2022, OpenAI, a relatively obscure company at the time, officially introduced one of the first text-to-image AI models DALL-E 2, paving the way for a multitude of other developers to unveil their own models, creating and popularizing such terms as "AI art" and "generative art", and, inadvertently, starting an online war between Digital Artists and the adopters of generative artificial intelligence.
For some time, artists and creators seemed pretty content with various generative AIs, experimenting with the then-novel technology, sharing their results, and even leveraging programs such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and the aforementioned DALL-E to produce concepts and texture maps for their 2D and 3D projects.
As time passed, however, more and more creators started getting concerned with the AIs, resulting in December's protests on ArtStation, one of the largest digital art platforms, against AI-generated images and their presence on the website.
James Busby, an Artist himself and the CEO and Founder of 3D Scan Store, a well-known library of 3D scans and models, has recently addressed said anxiety, sharing an insightful story that explains why AIs can never and will never replace the hard work of human creators.
In his story, James stated that he experienced a similar situation when Epic Games introduced its free-to-use MetaHuman toolset. Thinking that a novel program would make the store obsolete, the artist even thought that his career as he knew it was over.
As stated by James, they had only two options, to either "give up and do something else", or "knuckle down and keep doing the best [they] could and see what happens". Choosing the second option, the 3D Scan Store team continued to work hard, and as it turned out, it was not for naught.
According to James' story, not only wasn't MetaHuman the killer of 3D Scan Store but on the contrary, it helped the platform thrive by introducing more people to digital humans and increasing demand for similar products. With that in mind, the artist believes that AI will never be able to take the place of real human beings and the real artists, no matter the prompts one uses.
"If a company like Epic can release something that's better and free with a multi-million dollar marketing team behind it and our little company can still thrive, I don't see how prompt-based randomly generated 3D models trained on low-quality stock meshes will ever take the place of talented hard-working artists like you guys," James wrote in the conclusion of his story.
Additionally, the creator shared a graph showing 3D Scan Store's sales boost following the release of MetaHuman:
You can read James' full story here and learn more about 3D Scan Store over here. Also, don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Threads, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.