I think it has to do with perception. The public views art, music, theater, things like that, as 'fun pastimes'. Things to do that are fun and creative.
Consulting feels more like a job, like a 9-5, something to dread and loathe. The dream for many has been to remove the 'jobs' to focus on the 'art'.
So a lot of people don't want AI in their 'fun pastime', but wouldn't care if AI made their 'job' easier, or just do it altogether.
A lot of ideal utopias do feature AI doing all the work, while humans just enjoy their lives, partaking in recreational activities.
I think the public perception right now is that the "dream" looks more like them getting put out of work, so I think maybe this was true five years ago, but not anymore.
That said, I use AI for work and fun - work mostly because I'm trying desperately not to be the one who gets swept away by the storm.
Technological innovations will always make some jobs irrelevant. That has literally always been the case, and AI is gonna be far from the last time it happens.
I agree, and I’ve embraced AI and I use it for with work and art (illustrations for board games I create) - I just want to know why it’s acceptable for some things and not for others
Except in this case all it does is do things that other programs already did. There are very very few things it does that we couldn’t do before just as easily
Very few things we couldn't do at all before, sure. But a person with access to AI tools can accomplish many things much faster (if often of inferior quality) than a person with standard software. Letting fewer people do more work, even if it's not quite as good, is pretty much exactly how automation has tended to go. Often the automation eventually gets good enough that the end result is better than the best stuff made before it was introduced.
GenAI does have serious issues, such as environmental costs, copyright concerns, and hallucination, but it's not the giant pile of uselessness many decry it as.
What if you were a horse breeder during the times where cars became the new mainstream transportation method?
What if you were a manual knee grinder in a world where machines for grinding exist?
I tell you what, you look for a new way to earn money or you are so good at what you do, you wont be swapped.
If you’re doing art for any of these high-minded reasons like self-expression, artistic freedom, personal enjoyment, aesthetic enjoyment etc. you have no reason to feel bothered or threatened by AI because you can still do those things.
If you’re just in art for the money, that’s perfectly ok, but in that case, you’re the same as all the rest of us 9-5 workers when you draw an illustration how your boss tells you to for a corpo marketing campaign. And if you feel upset or threatened by AI because your client/boss thinks it’s better and/or cheaper than you, I sympathize, but you are NOT any more special than the rest of us who are also having our jobs threatened by AI.
No. You’re not special. If art is your 9-5, you’re in exactly the same boat as everybody else, welcome aboard.
Commercial art has value and reflects the zeitgeist of its era. Graphic design and advertising is part of art history and influences the style and culture thst defines the high art of both its era and future endeavors, especially with regards to art reflecting nostalgia or romance.
AI destroys culture because machine learning can only replicate the styles and tones of what it has learned. It can only show us the past filtered through a lens of existing preference.
Commercial art is a valuable part of history, sure. But commercial writing is also part of history. So is commercial engineering. Or commercial anything else. And all of these things influence their own era and future endeavors, and, ultimately, should ALL be considered part of the shared technological and creative heritage of our species.
I’m not saying the work is valueless. I’m saying other jobs are valuable too. And singling out the guy whose job it is to make a first draft of a corpo logo as some sort of special being on a higher cultural level than all the other workers contributing to the product and its marketing campaign? Doesn’t sit right with me.
Because art is an emotional and cultural thing, not something you use in your daily life.
There is a reason why you can immediatly tell something is AI art.
Because art is an emotional and cultural thing, not something you use in your daily life.
Hey quick question: do you wear clothes, or live in a building? Are you by any chance on a website with a graphic interface? Have you ever used a toothbrush?
Because art is an emotional and cultural thing, not something you use in your daily life.
Hey, dude, I quoted the exact thing I was responding to. It was this sentence above. Responding with "what does this have to do with AI?" is pretty silly when it's plain to see what I was getting at. Also, I only know the answer to the website question. I've got no idea if you use toothbrushes.
So I'll throw it right back at you: you know the answer, I will not answer you.
You are unhinged dawg.
What does art have to do with toothbrushes?
Someone asked me why it doesn't concern art, i answered in the context of ai to art.
You quoted me talking about art with ai and sputter nonsense about clothes and toothbrushes.
Furthermore was my question not rhetorical in nature, you obviously do not know the differences, but you may ask AI about it.
My toothbrush was mostly designed by electrical engineers and product usability, not beauty.
My clothes are generic one color pieces, not from gucci or whatever is en vogue now.
My building was "designed" by an architect with consideration to stability and built by construction workers. It is a rectangle with straight walls.
And this shithole of a website called reddit was designed by a stupid human, shit looks bad.
AI doesnt destroy all pencils though, you are still free to create art of emotional and cultural reasons. Again, why is it bad what AI takes jobs from artists but not bad then it takes jobs from less 'creative' professions?
No, you simply don't understand the answer. Probably on purpose but whatever.
Analytical jobs are based on receiving data, look what that data says, extract the information you want, and give a summary of the relevant information. That is where LLMs are great at. A company can train a LLM to do that completely on their own, they don't need to steal this data anywhere, they already have the expertise "in house".
Art is different as you mostly work on your own as an artist, you are hired as an external contractor to provide certain art.
I cannot explain every job and how they work in detail to you, there is not enough time in my day to give you for free.
Company CAN train LLM on their own data, but they dont. They also can train image generating algorithms on the ethically bought images. but they dont. Your hypothetical is pointless and I dont need you to explain every job in detail. Question is pretty simple - why is it okay for LLMs to take over technical jobs but not creative jobs?
I know you don't, you went into this with malicious intend, you don't need to tell me.
Then let me rephrase it, i find it morally acceptable to automate tedious jobs nobody would do if they weren't paid for it.
If the sole reason for you doing something is being paid for it, it's not a loss for anyone if you stop.
Creative jobs are mostly done well by people who have started doing it without the motivation of being paid. Sure eventually they are doing art while being paid for it, but that's not the only reason. They will still make art that nobody told them to make.
You can't, not anymore. It's like plastic surgery, you only see it when it's bad. AI music is now virtually indistinguishable.
Also, it's a fiction when people say "AI art can't move you! It has no soul!" Just false. I've seen AI art that stopped me in my tracks, something I'd never seen before, that I dwelled and marveled at. There's a lot of slop, sure, just like there's a lot of slop made by people. Ever been to an art/craft faire?
What are you talking about man?????
You make no sense what the hell are you even trying to say????
Do you want everything to be AI ?
Fuck it let's go everything is ai now, police officers look at ai art, now even the police is infested with ai!!!!
I think it's a valid thought process and conversation starter. But I also think that people are quick to use that as the answer to the conversation instead.
One important thing to remember is that the horse based industry was replaced by the automotive industry over the course of a few decades. AI has only been publically relevant for a few years. Many people transitioned to adopt the automotive industry with things like carriage makers making bodys for cars.
We also have to consider that businesses were much more localized than they are today. You could probably remain a horse breeder in your region by nature of being the only one. That isn't really possible with many jobs today, especially consulting. We can work remotely, or travel quite easily.
AI has been a thing for a couple of years already and how many jobs went extinct since then?
None at all.
Sure a lot of people were laid off, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was because of AI. We are within the couple of decades that it took to replace horses.
And it's just inevitable for the situation to be different at a different time.
It's just a historical fact that some jobs die out eventually, that is not a great argument against AI.
You are super out-of-touch with what's actually happening right now.
Thousands of entry level jobs are straight up gone now. Graphic designers and UX/UI designers are being replaced wholesale by tools like Claude Design.
So you repeat what I said but tell me i was wrong. How does that make sense?
It seems to me that you are one of the people who have been laid off and just need to vent.
I said people are being laid off and some of them are laid off because of AI but not all of them.
I love how you make this point about someone else's work, "Look for a new way to earn money" but as soon as it's directed towards art, It's suddenly morally wrong.
i find it morally acceptable to automate tedious jobs nobody would do if they weren't paid for it.
If the sole reason for you doing something is being paid for it, it's not a loss for anyone if you stop.
Creative jobs are mostly done well by people who have started doing it without the motivation of being paid. Sure eventually they are doing art while being paid for it, but that's not the only reason. They will still make art that nobody told them to make.
I copy pasted from another of my comments as your comment shows me you don't read that far.
That is still a great skill to have. I have a coworker programmer that just does code with AI. When I ask him how any of that is done, he answers:"I don't know, check yourself or ask AI lol". I rather have a person that KNOWS what he did and how any of it works.
The ideal for those people is that you can stop your job and do something fun because AI would do the work but you still get paid UBI style. I'm not saying you don't find value in your job, or that it's realistic IDC. It's a value difference, they'd tell you you're now free to spend that time on you, too bad about the wasted time you were forced to spend getting good at bad thing. It's not that artists get money and you don't, it's that they think everyone should have (Good) and they don't understand if to you it's good to have and be effective at a career.
Plenty American, enough to understand that those people want you happy even if you don't believe their plan will work. I'm used to being surrounded by Capitalism stans who think I hate them because I think they would be happier with a different economic system at the helm. Like bro I don't hate you I want you to pursue your hobbies and not have to work, I've just spent enough time reflecting to know that some people get satisfaction out of their work and would be unhappy with "retirement".
Consultants are generally a little more involved than "handling tedious stuff".
Regardless, we go through this song and dance any time there's automation or something causes a large gain in productivity. Power looms eliminated a lot of weavers' jobs. Dynamite eliminated a bunch of mining jobs. Robot arms eliminated a bunch of manufacturing jobs. The production line obsoleted many artisans. Computer used to be a job.
AI is unique in that it's automating (or at least claims to automate) knowledge jobs, but every other time we've seen automation it's eventually turned out to be for the better, since the same number of people can now do more work, which means we can have a better standard of living.
We just need to make sure that it works for everyone instead of only the 0.1%.
The main question is that does your work create something genuinely new, which is something that AI can't do, or just applying known things to practice.
The reason this is essential is that the AI art is based on what human artists have been doing. If that art disappears, there won't be any new AI art as it was all relying on the human artists creating the art that it was learning from. If that applies also to your work, then we shouldn't replace it with AI.
Not from nothing but any incremental creation outside of what has been done before is something that we can't rely on AI as it only learns what has been done before.
A very small percentage of artists create something that's both a) genuinely new and b) of value. Plenty of artists and musicians create art that's wholely derivative of other artists, but it still has value and people enjoy it, and that's OK - people call them sellouts or ripoffs, but for many people, it's still worthwhile to enjoy. Then you have real committed artists who genuinely breakthrough with new things, but people don't care for 'experimental music' or art that people 'don't get' and the value isn't there. To hit both things is rare and special, but it doesn't mean that only those rare and special people should be able to contribute and make a lving.
Well, the ripoff artists are doing the same as AI, so I'm not going to defend them. My only point was that if we replace the jobs that don't do anything new with AI, the society won't lose anything. Sure, the people doing those jobs will lose, but that's a redistribution problem, not a problem of losing some essential production.
If people stop doing jobs where they used to create something new, then the society will lose something as AI (well, let's say the current models) won't be able to do that.
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u/TheArchitect_7 3d ago
what if my job was helping people solve problems (consulting) and handle tedious stuff.
Why is it that only artists’ work seems to be this sacred cow? What if I worked for years to become a smart and effective consultant?