A lot of AI use I’m personally seeing is shit most wouldn’t spend money on or stuff where instead of paying for a stock photo they just generate shit and be done with it. Would they have ever paid someone to do the work and especially would anyone have agreed to do such small work that’d never pay anything reasonable, most likely no.
Before if you chose not to hire someone, you’d be competing against better products from people who did hire someone. Hiring someone gave them a competitive advantage.
I guess I don’t believe in quite as much in the invisible hand of capitalism. I rather think it’s a race to the bottom with companies buying some cheap slop to use on their webpage or whatever from a stock photo company and now people pay AI companies for it, if anyone. Can’t see the big impact of that sort of shit being replaced.
I also think capitalism is a race to the bottom, but I believe it is so because it subverts the value of labor. It’s shit like AI that makes it a race to the bottom.
shit most wouldn’t spend money on or stuff where instead of paying for a stock photo they just generate shit and be done with it.
Then pay for the stock photo. There, an artist is being paid for their work. But realistically the little stuff you’re talking about is the occupation of entire departments in megacorps.
Paying a stock photo “artist” or some AI slop “artist”, I’m not sure it makes any difference. The stuff AI generates is already so sloppy generic corporate bs that it’s hard to think of anyone deserving to paid anything for it anyway. It’s mimicking a horrid generic art style and a horrid generic art style like that isn’t owned by a particular artist anyway.
It’s not giving them elsewhere.
There is not and will not be an abundance of prompt “engineering” jobs, it’s not creating new industries, and it’s not significantly lowering the bar for people to start their own businesses is existing industries.
What it is doing is data-mining on a scale never seen before, and increasing profit margins for megacorp business owners.
AI is a huge growing industry with a lot of jobs. Now instead of some corporate slop “artist” it’s some corporate AI “prompt artist” doing work (albeit behind the scenes). That’s just how it goes. And I’m sure some jobs die off but that has always just been how it is, not as many jobs in coal mining either as there used to be.
As someone who is part of the problem (working on creating AI products, too scared to quit in protest) I can promise you that is not how it works. That is a frighteningly naive and short sighted view of the repercussions.
Coal mining was bad, and using coal was bad.
We found a replacement for it, which is good. some people were affected, which is bad. But replacing coal had a minimal impact on the overall job market and was a huge benefit to society.
AI is taking away safe skilled jobs from people who love them. It’s affecting many industries, and will affect many many more if you can actually believe the promises of the LLM providers.
First it’s affecting the fine arts. Beginner illustrators, authors, etc, can’t compete, so they leave the industry. After all the old hands die out, there is nobody left to replace them.
Then it’s affecting technical industries; software development, hardware design. Same thing, eventually nobody will be left.
Finances and accounting, of course
Then medicine. And there is a knock-on effect here where areas that AI cant do are also affected because the industry as a whole is on the decline so nobody bothers to even apply - you usually start school as a generalist and specialize later.\
And the new “prompt artist” jobs being offered are orders of magnitude fewer and less gratifying.
If what you said was true, then there wouldn’t be any benefit to corporations, and they wouldn’t be investing billions into it.
All this would be ok if the fruits of this new advancement went back into society, to help people, especially those who were displaced. But it doesn’t. It goes straight into the pockets of business owners and shareholders in the form of increased margins and stock buybacks.
You’re literally arguing that we should just let big business interests walk all over the job market because that’s “just how it is”.
I’m saying more that nobody is going to go out of their way to artificially save those some corpo art people and such jobs. It’s just new tech making some jobs obsolete while moving some workforce in to other things. There will be luddites but it’s not going to stop the change.
A lot of AI use I’m personally seeing is shit most wouldn’t spend money on or stuff where instead of paying for a stock photo they just generate shit and be done with it. Would they have ever paid someone to do the work and especially would anyone have agreed to do such small work that’d never pay anything reasonable, most likely no.
I guess I don’t believe in quite as much in the invisible hand of capitalism. I rather think it’s a race to the bottom with companies buying some cheap slop to use on their webpage or whatever from a stock photo company and now people pay AI companies for it, if anyone. Can’t see the big impact of that sort of shit being replaced.
I also think capitalism is a race to the bottom, but I believe it is so because it subverts the value of labor. It’s shit like AI that makes it a race to the bottom.
Then pay for the stock photo. There, an artist is being paid for their work. But realistically the little stuff you’re talking about is the occupation of entire departments in megacorps.
Paying a stock photo “artist” or some AI slop “artist”, I’m not sure it makes any difference. The stuff AI generates is already so sloppy generic corporate bs that it’s hard to think of anyone deserving to paid anything for it anyway. It’s mimicking a horrid generic art style and a horrid generic art style like that isn’t owned by a particular artist anyway.
Honestly that’s kinda worse, because it’s specifically replacing entry-level jobs
Replacing jobs in one place and giving them elsewhere. It is what it is.
It’s not giving them elsewhere.
There is not and will not be an abundance of prompt “engineering” jobs, it’s not creating new industries, and it’s not significantly lowering the bar for people to start their own businesses is existing industries.
What it is doing is data-mining on a scale never seen before, and increasing profit margins for megacorp business owners.
AI is a huge growing industry with a lot of jobs. Now instead of some corporate slop “artist” it’s some corporate AI “prompt artist” doing work (albeit behind the scenes). That’s just how it goes. And I’m sure some jobs die off but that has always just been how it is, not as many jobs in coal mining either as there used to be.
As someone who is part of the problem (working on creating AI products, too scared to quit in protest) I can promise you that is not how it works. That is a frighteningly naive and short sighted view of the repercussions.
Coal mining was bad, and using coal was bad.
We found a replacement for it, which is good. some people were affected, which is bad. But replacing coal had a minimal impact on the overall job market and was a huge benefit to society.
AI is taking away safe skilled jobs from people who love them. It’s affecting many industries, and will affect many many more if you can actually believe the promises of the LLM providers.
First it’s affecting the fine arts. Beginner illustrators, authors, etc, can’t compete, so they leave the industry. After all the old hands die out, there is nobody left to replace them.
Then it’s affecting technical industries; software development, hardware design. Same thing, eventually nobody will be left.
Finances and accounting, of course
Then medicine. And there is a knock-on effect here where areas that AI cant do are also affected because the industry as a whole is on the decline so nobody bothers to even apply - you usually start school as a generalist and specialize later.\
And the new “prompt artist” jobs being offered are orders of magnitude fewer and less gratifying.
If what you said was true, then there wouldn’t be any benefit to corporations, and they wouldn’t be investing billions into it.
All this would be ok if the fruits of this new advancement went back into society, to help people, especially those who were displaced. But it doesn’t. It goes straight into the pockets of business owners and shareholders in the form of increased margins and stock buybacks.
You’re literally arguing that we should just let big business interests walk all over the job market because that’s “just how it is”.
I’m saying more that nobody is going to go out of their way to artificially save those some corpo art people and such jobs. It’s just new tech making some jobs obsolete while moving some workforce in to other things. There will be luddites but it’s not going to stop the change.