[sandworm101]

Someone decided that marketing is now a tech problem. Artists have been replaced by software engineers. The net result is creepy AI emails.

I fell for oldschool marketing yesterday. Im moving into a new appartment in a couple months. The local ISP who runs fiber in my new building cold-called me. I agreed over the phone to setup the service. That was proper target marketing. The person who called me knew the situation and identified me as a very likely customer with a need for service (the building has a relationship with the ISP). I would never have responded to an email or any wiff of AI chatbot. They only made the sale because of expensive human effort.

[loa_in_]

It's the tech that put you on a queue to be called

[sandworm101]

There was no tech here. My new landlord contacted the local ISP, the one they liked to work with, to say they had a new tenant arriving soon. I'd bet that my connection will have been setup long before I arrive, at a time convenient to the landlord and local provider. A landlord recommending a favored local vendor to a tenant, or a tenant to a vendor, is the sort of human relationship that predates electricity.

[pseudalopex]

Sales people were never artists. Cold calling is not art.

[johnnyanmac]

cold calling isn't an art, but smooth talking/networking is. There's no exact science to making people feel good and wanting to form a relationship with you (despite centuries of literature claiming that there is).

[Jensson]

Programming and just about every other job is an art as well with that argument. If we aren't allowed to automate away that then we aren't allowed to automate anything.

[taneq]

If it's not an art then if we make the best example of something, what would that example be the state of?

[johnnyanmac]

It'll all vary based on what and who is automated. I'm sure there'd be less(but non-zero) fuss if we were trying to automate plumbing. I'm sure there'd be entire riots over trying to automate professional sports leagues.

I'd say the art industry is somewhere in-between because of

1. Being a traditionally disrespected but non-trivial skill to acquire 2. A skill valuable for advertisement (good art -> pretty ads -> more money 3. A valuable skill, but not one many industries need full time work from 4. Due to #1, a "vulnerable" industry. There won't be too many millionaire artists to fight back against the AI Overlords compared to, say, Politicians or businessesmen.

But it's not like I have any say on who or what gets affected.

[fennecbutt]

OP is wrong anyway. Everything is art. Art is about interpretation not determinism.

[pseudalopex]

Art and an art have different meanings.

[johnnyanmac]

Based on the response upstream, I assume they were talking about the latter. There's no art to door to door sales reading a boilerplate. There is an art to researching a customer and curating a proper response to make them feel good.

[pseudalopex]

They said artists. Artists means people who make art commonly. Not everyone with a non scientific skill. The word was incorrect no matter what they meant.

[johnnyanmac]

I don't always have perfect grammar on Hacker News either. Charitable interpretation.