[simondotau]

I don't mean to be rude, only to provide Vulcan-esque observation. It's my observation that many "real creative" people spend most of their time permutating across a defined landscape of prior creative discoveries, creating derivatives of their own prior work. There's nothing wrong with that (and it's good that they reap the benefits of that) but that's what I mean when I say it's rare.

Conversely, AI, in absolutely everything it does, because of how it works, is literally average. Middle-of-the-road. Mainstream. Safe. It is the antithesis of creativity. Anything it does that seems creative is really just novelty factor. Any "real creative" should not be intimidated by this. Any "real creative" would not be intimidated by this.

[overgard]

I don't think it's the technology they're threatened by, it's that it's weaponized against them. I know a lot of people in the game industry for example, and this is already an industry run by very greedy people with poor artistic taste. If you give those people the option of "pay a creative person a meager salary for a good result" or "pay openAI for trash but cheap", those people are probably going to choose to pay for trash.

The market will correct for good quality.. eventually, but not before it puts people out of work.

[simondotau]

[Meme of astronaut with a gun]

Always has been.

There's nothing new here. Capital and technology have repeatedly been used to replace skilled creative labour with something cheaper, faster, more scalable, or merely "good enough". Offshore animators replacing domestic teams, mass-produced clothing replacing dressmakers and home sewing, MIDI replacing session musicians, digital typesetting replacing sign-writing, and so on. Yes AI will be weaponised against (mostly pseudo-) creative workers, just as capitalism and automation has gutted and decimated hundreds of other (equally or greater) creative industries before it.

The game industry is an extreme example. Large productions now employ veritable armies of people, many doing highly procedural, tightly constrained work absent of any original creative decisions. It's sad for the worker if their jobs are at risk, but it's silly to argue that creativity is being lost.

Quite apart from AI, the AAA game industry has long been in a bubble of over-investment and unsustainable head-counts. That bubble was going to burst one way or another. AI just happens to be the catalyst. But the underlying dynamic of replacing expensive skilled labour with cheaper systems (and accepting a decline in quality when the savings are large enough) is nothing new.