[firen777]

>"Having to do manual labour to make ends meet while the robots paint and write poetry was not the future I had in mind"

Thank you for this quote! This speaks out the reason for my innate disgust toward the current "creative" AI which I couldn't quite articulate before.

[hnfong]

And this kind of highlights the kind of hypocrisy implied by the original comment.

"Having to do manual labour to make ends meet while the _______ paint and write poetry was not the future I had in mind"

For the less fortunate people struggling to make ends meet, it may not matter that much whether it's robots or the aristocracy, or the upper middle class doing the poetry writing.

Until the last couple decades, 99% of humanity was always doing doing manual labor to make ends meet. It's just that the literate class throughout history always identified with the 1% rather than the 99%. We're conditioned to think that creative endeavors are always more "noble" than manual labor because that's what nobles did.

Ironically the fact that we pay "knowledge workers" more than manual laborers might have contributed to this outcome. If toilet janitors commanded a $500k salary maybe more R&D budget would go to inventing robots that are good at cleaning toilets, instead of AI systems that are good at solving leetcode.

[nemo44x]

I think it’s because of supply and demand in addition to value. A manual laborer, even a very skilled one, is limited by their own output on how much value they can create. A software engineer creates outputs that can generate many multiples of their compensation for doing so.