[pj_mukh]

Ehh, I've had the opposite experience, with lots of writers and artists in my circle.

The markets that have replaced writers and artists with slop never valued them in the first place, and the markets that do will never replace them with AI, and I say this as an AI engineer.

Writing movies, writing theater, creating clearly original illustrations for various purposes, these are all tasks AI will never threaten, because there is just no point. And also, the market sizes for this kind of thing are a rounding error compared to say coding or back office automation which is incidentally the bulk of the token spend right now, confirming all this.

[hgoel]

But this is missing the fact that the vast majority of starting jobs for artists/writers would be in the former category. Similar to how AI coding or automation hurts junior hiring more than it does senior.

I found myself thinking about this issue when I was experimenting with an MCP server to handle tuning some precision parameters for scientific simulations. Claude did a much better job than I used to do when I was a fresh PhD student, yet being given tasks like that was how I learned, so it almost felt like pulling the ladder up after myself.

In the sciences, I think this is less of a problem because the PhD to scientist pipeline is pretty normalized, labs are used to the idea of having to let younger people take longer on problems that experienced people could solve much faster. But this doesn't seem to be as normalized elsewhere.