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by zoogeny 626 days ago
Consider another angle.

I follow a lot of the new AI gen crowd on Twitter. This community is made up of a lot of creative industry people. One guy who worked in commercials shared a recent job he was on for a name brand. They had a soundstage, actors, sound people, makeup, lighting, etc. setup for 3 days for the shoot. Something like 25 people working for 3 days. But behind that was about 3 months of effort if one includes pre-production and post-production. Think about editing, color correction, sound editing, music, etc.

Your creative children may live in a world where they can achieve a similar result themselves. Perhaps as a small team, one person working on characters, one person doing audio, one person writing a script. Instead of needing tens of thousands of dollars of rented equipment and 25 experts, they will be able to take ideas from their own head and realize them with persistence and AI generation.

I honestly believe these new tools will unlock potential beyond what we can currently imagine.

3 comments

We have already been through this with music.

It doesn't really work that way. Over time, it really does just devalue the art form in a sense because now anyone can make a recording.

Electronic music is really the best example. In 1995 it took thousands of dollars to have a fully working studio to even produce any track. By 2005, anyone could do this in their bedroom for basically nothing. In 1995 the cost acted as a filter so only those with talent would bother. Once anyone could do it, all electronic music recordings were devalued by the infinite supply.

I thought there would be 1000 Richard James once this happened. Maybe there even are but I have never heard them because there is so much shit to sift through I really don't even listen to electronic music anymore. I don't think there are though. 900 them probably are doing something else because there is no money left in the art form, 90 are making some other style of music with better financial prospects and the 10 that are, I will never hear of or be able to find.

If the barrier to entry is low for high quality production and anyone is able to make good looking videos, I wonder how audience perception would evolve for judging and valuing what is considered 'good'.
Keep in mind: one of the top selling games for children is Roblox. Our perception of what is "good" is very open to reinterpretation by the coming generations.
That will be the end of creative work. Marketing and promotion is already the most difficult part of any creative endeavor. With literally unlimited trash being produced, it'll become impossible.
There's a term to describe this: creative destruction, literally.

We are at the cusp of a full scale commoditization stage of generative AI that will impact all aspects of the creative/software fields.

If you want to know what this creative destruction will look like, look no further than previous centers of innovation like Detroit, the emptying naval shipyards of Busan, the zombie game studios around Osaka as a sign of things to come.

TLDR: AI is going to destroy a lot of white collar, high creativity, high intellect jobs that isn't protected by a union or occupational collective associations which were all created to counter against creative destructions from taking people's livelihoods away.

Unfortunately, 10 years ago when I tried to create a union organization for software engineers/designers and creative workers, it was sabotaged by fellow software engineers who seem highly susceptible to psyops much more than any other group.

We might see a repeat of what happened in Japan after mid 90s, when much of the country's stable and ample jobs disappeared thanks to internet, globalized financiering backed by authoritarian labour market.

Instead this time its not a communist country working together with bankers rather its a small group of technology companies pushing out bankers and creating a sort of a dystopian AI dominated labour field where humans no longer dumpster dive for wages but any remaining labour industry that AI cannot infiltrate aka ppl literally switching careers to stay employed because their old jobs were outsourced to AI.

I didn't even talk about the impact on wages (spoiler: it will enrich the 0.1% while shunning the 99.9% to temporary gigs and unstable employment not unlike regions which have experienced similar creative destruction back in the 90s and early 2000s).

It's hard to see a future without some sort of universal basic income and increased taxation on billionaires who will no longer be able to hide their assets offshore without facing serious headwinds not unlike how Chinese billionaires fear the CCP.