Comment by atomicnumber3
17 hours ago
It sure seems like, while LLMs and diffusion models won't completely eradicate the middle class, the bar has now risen significantly to actually contribute in a lot of areas.
For programmers, sure SV startups and actual software-first shops are probably only augments with LLMs and not replacing. But what % of software engineers are employed in such shops? Well, from my graduating class in CS, approximately 30% of grads all went to the same contracting shop whose business model seems to be, take the bottom 30% of each CS class, underpay the fuck out of them, bootcamp them into something vaguely usable + teach the house style of CRUD/LOB app framework, then throw them at clients. And this seems to still be a step above "offshore to barely baseline capable (or worse) body shop for extremely dubious results."
That entire bottom 50% is probably about to be eviscerated. The "offshore + pray" approach is probably going to be completely zapped, much easier to just vibe code for probably better (or at least not worse) results. And the onshore-but-cheaper contracting shops are probably going to need a lot fewer people whose main contribution is translating low-ambiguity tickets into syntactically valid java spring code.
Similarly, for artists, disney is probably not going to use AI in a way that substantially speeds them up because they won't tolerate the quality loss at all. But how many artists work for disney? And how many make anime waifus for the gacha apps? The latter of which I can only assume has already switched substantially to AI assets.
I'm not sure about coders but for artists I don't think a massive number were making anime waifus, but instead were making graphic designs for advertisements, publications & websites.
Currently AI is actually replacing some of these jobs. But there's kinda a hitch there - when you target me with ads or show me your company's website and it has obvious AI art I tend to think that you're either selling me something very low quality or are a scammer. If you show me the novel you've written and it has an AI art cover I assume the contents are also AI generated garbage writing. So I wonder if those jobs will really be replaced? It all depends on society's acceptance of AI art and if AI art doesn't get any better. I thought it would get to the point that I couldn't tell it was AI by now, but so far it hasn't.
I think AI waifus and porn and memes and browser based zynga type games will be a place AI is going to be accepted because nobody cared too much about the authenticity and quality of those things before either. But an advertisement selling me a car? The cover of a book on philosophy? A website that I'm going to give my credit card number to? I'm not sure about those things.
> I'm not sure about coders but for artists I don't think a massive number were making anime waifus, but instead were making graphic designs for advertisements, publications & websites.
There was an old joke among designers that their biggest competitor was the boss' nephew playing with photoshop.
Now they need to compete with the boss' nephew playing with AI.
Cars feels like a bit of an odd one out because there's basically no low end. If you have the money to produce even a single car from a Camry to a hummer, you are probably going to not try to pinch pennies on marketing because a single car sale pays the salary of a designer for a year.
That's true. And car commercials that get people to buy fancy new cars are really well figured out and seem to seriously work. Why fix something that isn't broken?
Real estate is interesting because they seem to be really getting into using AI to stage individual houses. So I guess on the same vein maybe someone will try making an add with AI that shows some car driving down your local mainstreet or at some scenic location nearby your ip address that you might have positive associations with. Or maybe even your own home-street and parking in your driveway and you (or facebook you from 10 years ago when you had that hipster-moustashe because you haven't updated your photo) opens the door with a big smile on your face).
Seems crazy, but who knows.
We really should start being more precise when we say "replace". Are we talking about replacing 90-100% of that particular job? Or 50-80%?
Because it feels like people argue as if they were talking about the former, but if probed it turns out they admit it's the latter.
There will be still people making car advertisements, but they will be using ai tools and will get asked to produce X times faster. Effectively, some of them will get replaced, or rather have been replaced.
If 1 person of AI will be able to replace 5-10, we can expect a replacement of 80-90%.
But I don't see why it couldn't replace thousands, with design/content factories.
So it could be 99-99.9% (leaving all the money for the top 0.1%).
>But how many artists work for disney?
Given their empire these days: a lot. Mostly because outside of Disney there's really not much such thing as "modern salaried artist". You work for any of Disney's 50 subsidiaries, you work at a games studio (because Disney gave up its expansion early in that medium), or you're likley freelancing/commissioning and grabbing whatever gig comes along.
I'm exaggerating, but less than I care to adnit. Disney makes up that much of "normal" full time artistry these days. And it's no secret how little respect artists have had in the US, even before AI.
>And how many make anime waifus for the gacha apps? The latter of which I can only assume has already switched substantially to AI assets.
In America? Less than you think. Asia has plenty of cheaper and more talented artists to exploit. AI adoption is interesting there because it's already such a sweatshop that you need to consider if AI really saves that much time for its cost. Larger studios are dabbling, smaller ones use sparingly.
No, North/South American slop is fully focused on the hyper-casual market. It's fueling thousands of asset flips for quick mobile games or copying indie games into Roblox/Fortnite. That's where the effort (or lack thereof) is going.