[mrandish]

> Assuming genAI won't deliver and make that world disappear entirely, ofc.

I get the concern and the reasoning behind it but having spent most my adult life and career in digital content creative tooling (2D, 3D and video), I believe AI will be short-term disruptive but also a long-term net positive. It should make skilled pros faster and more productive while helping non-pros achieve more of their creative vision on their own.

For over 30 years progress in tools has been about giving creative people the power to realize their visions. To create more and do it faster, cheaper and at higher quality. Of course, they don't always choose to use that power well but the concern that "these new tools are just enabling bottom feeders to create more bad content" has remained a pretty constant refrain since I started in 1989. Even back in the 90s I said "Sure, these new tools will enable 95% more crap but they'll also unleash 5% that's great which wouldn't have existed before." I think that's just as true today as it's always been.

[mschuster91]

> It should make skilled pros faster and more productive while helping non-pros achieve more of their creative vision on their own.

The problem is, AI is good enough to replace juniors. That means companies are already cutting positions at that level and some are just itching to ditch intermediates as well once quality improves.

But when juniors and intermediates are all gone... how are the beancounters expecting to get new seniors when the old ones go to retirement or hand in their 2 week notice because they are fed up cleaning up after crap AI?

[mrandish]

Disruption is disruptive and can suck. But it's also not new. Some companies and people will do short-sighted things in response and pay the price. Other job types and roles will simply be disintermediated and those individuals will need to learn new skills and find different kinds of jobs in the evolving landscape - same as always.

I just wrote a longer reply to a sibling comment addressing exactly this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44574895.

[SchemaLoad]

What happens is those companies will end up paying a lot of money for people with no experience when they end up being the only ones available to hire.

Same thing happens in tech in cycles where companies fire all the juniors, and every time theres a boom, they hire them all back at obscene prices.

[echelon]

> The problem is, AI is good enough to replace juniors. That means companies are already cutting positions at that level and some are just itching to ditch intermediates as well once quality improves.

Who needs companies? Those sounds like an unnecessary middleman to me.

[bee_rider]

I don’t see much risk to creatives and workers (hold the number of workers constant and have them all get more productive, and the world is a better place).

But, I do wonder about smaller teams accomplishing more, which the unit of work-doing-people can be much smaller. The org tree can shrink, probably knock out some levels. Maybe a team of 4 that does the work previously done by 10 finds it easier to just have someone directly interface with the customer, rather than needing a layer of project managers and customer service to receive customers messages and distribute them.

I’d be worried if I was… anywhere above an IC really.

[mrandish]

> Maybe a team of 4 that does the work previously done by 10

Interestingly, I heard similar ratios were being discussed (or feared/lamented) in the mid-90s as computer-based non-linear video editing swept the post-production industry and in live TV production as computer-based all-in-one production switcher, effects, titler systems like the Amiga-based Video Toaster disrupted everything. I still remember hearing about how the Toaster was giving unionized TV stations problems because union rules said the switcher guy wasn't allowed to touch the graphics/titling system or the editing system. So three guys would be standing around one chair depending which tab was up on the Video Toaster screen :-).

Having been around the content creation tooling business for so long has given me perspective. Since at least the late 80s it's been one never-ending disruption. And, despite the constant predictions of jobs lost, today there are far more jobs in content creation than there were then. Of course, the job descriptions, types, skills required, divisions of labor and which roles were more or less valuable have never stopped changing and probably won't. Yes, this ends up displacing some people in some roles. Back in the 90s highly-paid senior video engineers with deep expertise in how to wire up and synchronize analog video systems initially laughed at us "young kids" with our "toy" digital video systems. Then they resented needing to call us in to get computer-based gear installed, interfaced and working. Then they resented that us "new kids" were paid less due to being less senior but becoming increasingly essential. Some of them learned the 'newfangled' digital systems while others didn't and opted to retire or do something else.

Over thirty years later, I'm now the highly-compensated "old guy" with once-invaluable expertise that's depreciating by the minute and proven skills at doing increasingly irrelevant things. The particulars change but the theme remains the same, which is why I don't think the shift to integrating AI in content creation will be significantly different. There will be skills that become less valuable and job types that go away and entire industry sectors which get disintermediated but at the same time new kinds of work, industry sectors and business opportunities will emerge in different places and ways. As always, the new job types won't be 1:1 replacements for the old, and this will cause as much angst as it always has. They'll not only look different and have different kinds of trade-offs, they may even have different business and compensation models.

It's Schumpeter's process of "Creative Destruction" and renewal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction). The destruction part is fast, loud and shocking as what exists today combusts in flame. The creative renewal part tends to be more gradual, unfamiliar and at first may not even seem related. From time to time, even the definition of "the industry" ends up changing along with the jobs and roles. I'm pretty sure the old-school TV station engineers I learned from wouldn't consider a digital nomad working full-time editing 30 second clips on a mobile device for YouTube, Instagram and TikTok influencers as even being "in the TV business."