Don’t get me wrong, there are problems with it, both in the process that modern AI uses as well as the sources that it draws from, however, as of right now ai is just a tool like auto-tune or photoshop.
Even though it will change the media formats that it is attached to, it will not supplant them within the next 5 to 10 years, it will simply transform them.
I find it very funny that people have such arbitrary lines for AI. They’ll happily use autocomplete (an AI model trained on all manner of copyrighted works) but get very upset about chatgpt (an AI model trained on all manner of copyrighted works).
I don’t think I’ve seen any artists complain about Photoshop’s AI tools when it came to erasing backgrounds or automatically filling in content, right up until the moment you could ask these models to autofill more than just part of an image.
The copyright theft machines that are popular now should die, but stock image libraries have already been hard at work training AI models based on images they own. Those AIs are here to stay, there’s no theft involved.
The biggest source of resistance is people fearing for their jobs. That said, a lot of them have never actually tried AI, so they don’t know the limitations and why I doubt serious businesses will replace any serious creative work for years to come. The only businesses that are replacing people by AI never really cared about the quality of their work in the first place, and that was going to happen with or without generative AI at some point.
I’ve seen discussions awfully similar years ago about writers and artists debating whether or not computer aided work is “real” work. Society has transformed and photoshop and text editors are now considered tools, and I suspect that’ll also happen to AI.
Right now, every serious AI company is funded by investors hoping their shares gain more and more value. That’s why chatgpt is free. I believe I remember reading that chatgpt 3 costs about 18 dollars per month per user, and that’s without the cost of training the next big model, or generating images, or producing music. At some point, the Gardner Hype Cycle will hit generative AI too, investments will dry up, and people will quickly lose interest once they need to pay for what they consume.
The internet will decry “enshittification” and rage on companies for not giving them free shit anymore (see Reddit, YouTube, Discord, or any other free service really), and soon after these tools will become stuff mostly used by people with the kind of disposable income to throw a a couple dozen bucks a month at shitposting.
The only disappointment I feel is how brazenly these AI companies can ignore copyright. For once I’m with the copyright maffia, and I hope a couple of lawsuits will force companies like openai to compensate the people whose content they use.
I agree with this take.
AI will definitely make some white collar jobs way more productive, and thus change the nature of that work and reduce the number of people employed in those jobs.
A good example is translation, where translators are now mostly reviewing translated texts instead of translating from scratch.
This means the ability to read fast and take on the role of editor is what remains important in the remaining jobs for translators.
I agree with you almost 100% (except the copyright stuff), but,
…the business owners are just as ignorant. They are trying to replace people with AI, which will disrupt our lives while the CEOs refuse to admit their error and force us all to deal with it anyway. It’s a lot like outsourcing. It’s not as cheap and effective as businesses hoped, customers largely hate it, and we’re still doing it anyway.
AI will be disruptive, but over the long term it will settle down to a small disruption. But the journey to get there might suck a bit.
But wev hit the part of the cycle where businesses who were stupid enough to believe it have already laid people off, and now we see them quietly starting to rehire. Seems like they still needed real people after all.