Comment on Not everything needs to be Art
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 5 weeks agoAs someone who is part of the problem (working on creating AI products, too scared to quit in protest) I can promise you that is not how it works. That is a frighteningly naive and short sighted view of the repercussions.
Coal mining was bad, and using coal was bad.
We found a replacement for it, which is good. some people were affected, which is bad. But replacing coal had a minimal impact on the overall job market and was a huge benefit to society.
AI is taking away safe skilled jobs from people who love them. It’s affecting many industries, and will affect many many more if you can actually believe the promises of the LLM providers.
First it’s affecting the fine arts. Beginner illustrators, authors, etc, can’t compete, so they leave the industry. After all the old hands die out, there is nobody left to replace them.
Then it’s affecting technical industries; software development, hardware design. Same thing, eventually nobody will be left.
Finances and accounting, of course
Then medicine. And there is a knock-on effect here where areas that AI cant do are also affected because the industry as a whole is on the decline so nobody bothers to even apply - you usually start school as a generalist and specialize later.\
And the new “prompt artist” jobs being offered are orders of magnitude fewer and less gratifying.
If what you said was true, then there wouldn’t be any benefit to corporations, and they wouldn’t be investing billions into it.
All this would be ok if the fruits of this new advancement went back into society, to help people, especially those who were displaced. But it doesn’t. It goes straight into the pockets of business owners and shareholders in the form of increased margins and stock buybacks.
You’re literally arguing that we should just let big business interests walk all over the job market because that’s “just how it is”.
Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
I’m saying more that nobody is going to go out of their way to artificially save those some corpo art people and such jobs. It’s just new tech making some jobs obsolete while moving some workforce in to other things. There will be luddites but it’s not going to stop the change.
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
Calling people against the current incarnation of AI “luddites” is a gross mischaracterization.
I’m glad that you seem to have at least completely given up the pretense that this will somehow benefit society.
Im telling you that again that the jobs that AI makes are orders of magnitude fewer, and far less fulfilling.
I’m telling you again that the impact goes way beyond corpo art jobs.
But youre refusing to listen, or even put up a reasonable defense, you’re just reiterating your previous completely unsupported assertion in really suspicious ways.
Nobody is trying to argue the feasibility of stopping the change, we’re saying the change is bad. The argument that the change is inevitable therefore it is good (or that at least we shouldn’t be upset by it) is crazy
Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
I don’t know if it’s that different from the real life luddites. Maybe the word has a different connotation in where you live, I don’t know, but I did mean it in a slight negative but mostly meaning “workers against the change”.
I think it might benefit society, but I don’t think I’ve ever been optimistic about that. I think things in general will keep getting worse.
I don’t know how I was saying the change is good or what was suspicious about what I said, I guess that’s more meta conversation but if you don’t mind I’d like to know
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
Luddites were against automated looms because they thought it’d destroy the careers in the industry.
They were right, it’s just that working a loom was a small enough part of the economy that it didn’t really matter.
AI is like that, except for every creative or technical career in every industry. It promises to replace all jobs where people are provided creative or intellectual challenge. Nearly every middle class job. Assuming that LLM providers can actually deliver on their promises. But why do we even want to allow them to try?
The owner class gets the lions share of the benefits and none of the drawbacks. The middle class gets almost no benefits, meanwhile their wages get suppressed and the job market gets wrecked.
Even if you’re right and this will create new industries, which I’m skeptical of, displaced workers need to retrain at their own expense. How many people, in the middle of their careers and with families, can afford to just start again in a new industry with entry level salaries? And do you know how tough it is for an older person to advance in a new career?
And even then, even if people could afford to switch careers mid-life; where are those careers? Those hypothetical new industries are going to take decades to mature let alone to even be created in the first place. How much unemployment do you think the economy can stand up to for decades?
It’s suspicious because you seems like you have a vested interest in AI or in making AI appear positive.
You seem to be framing AI as good for us normal folks, and that the only people at risk are those who do shitty work. That there is some kind of benefit for people to have and that the risk is so negligible that it’s fine.
But it’s frustrating because you can’t seem to describe these benefits, or why the risks are negligible, or even worth it. You just keep steadfastly asserting that it’s ok. So where is this conviction coming from and what is the motivation to continue to assert it?