Welcome to the club my friend… Expert after expert is having this experience as AI develops in the past couple years and we discover that the job can be automated way more than we thought.
First it was the customer service chat agents. Then it was the writers. Then it was the programmers. Then it was the graphic design artists. Now it’s the animators.
Another programmer here. The bottleneck in most jobs isn’t in getting boilerplate out, which is where AI excels, it’s in that first and/or last 10-20%, alongside dictating what patterns are suitable for your problem, what proprietary tooling you’ll need to use, what API’s you’re hitting and what has changed in recent weeks/months.
What AI is achieving is impressive, but as someone that works in AI, I think that we’re seeing a two-fold problem: we’re seeing a limit of what these models can accomplish with their training data, and we’re seeing employers hedge their bets on weaker output with AI over specialist workers.
The former is a great problem, because this tooling could be adjusted to make workers lives far easier/faster, in the same way that many tools have done so already. The latter is a huge problem, as in many skilled worker industries we’ve seen waves of layoffs, and years of enshitification resulting in poorer products.
The latter is also where I think we’ll see a huge change in culture. IMO, we’ll see existing companies bet it all and die from supporting AI over people, and a new wave of companies focus on putting output of a certain standard to take on larger companies.
Writer here, absolutely not having this experience. Generative AI tools are bad at writing, but people generally have a pretty low bar for what they think is good enough.
These things are great if you care about tech demos and not quality of output. If you actually need the end result to be good though, you’re gonna be waiting a while.
Still waiting on the programmer part. In a nutshell AI being say 90% perfect means you have 90% working code IE 10% broken code. Images and video (but not sound) is way easier cause human eyes kinda just suck. Couple of the videos they’ve released pass even at a pretty long glance. You only notice funny businesses once you look closer.
I can’t imagine that digital artists/animators have reason to worry. At the upper end, animated movies will simply get flashier, eating up all the productivity gains. In live action, more effects will be pure CGI. At the bottom end, we may see productions hiring VFX artists, just as naturally as they hire makeup artists now.
When something becomes cheaper, people buy more of it, until their demand is satisfied. With food, we are well past that point. I don’t think we are anywhere near that point with visual effects.
Yeah. And it’s not just how good the images look it’s also the creativity. Everyone tries to downplay this but I’ve read texts and those videos and just from the prompts there is a “creative spark” there. It’s not very bright spark lol but it’s there.
I should get into this stuff but I feel old lol. I imagine you could generate interesting levels with obstacles and riddles and “story beats” too.
Because sometimes the generator just replicates bits of its training data wholesale. The “creative spark” isn’t its own, it’s from a human artist left uncredited and uncompensated.
Artists are “inspired” by existing art or things they see in real life all the time. So that they can replicate art doesn’t mean they can’t generate art. It’s a non sequitur. But I’m sure people are going to keep insisting on this so lets not argue back and forth on this :D
It seems to me that AI won’t completely replace jobs (but will do in 10-20 years). But will reduce demand because oversaturation + ultraproductivity with AI. Moreover, AI will continue to improve. A work of a team of 30 people will be done with just 3 people.
Welcome to the club my friend… Expert after expert is having this experience as AI develops in the past couple years and we discover that the job can be automated way more than we thought.
First it was the customer service chat agents. Then it was the writers. Then it was the programmers. Then it was the graphic design artists. Now it’s the animators.
Another programmer here. The bottleneck in most jobs isn’t in getting boilerplate out, which is where AI excels, it’s in that first and/or last 10-20%, alongside dictating what patterns are suitable for your problem, what proprietary tooling you’ll need to use, what API’s you’re hitting and what has changed in recent weeks/months.
What AI is achieving is impressive, but as someone that works in AI, I think that we’re seeing a two-fold problem: we’re seeing a limit of what these models can accomplish with their training data, and we’re seeing employers hedge their bets on weaker output with AI over specialist workers.
The former is a great problem, because this tooling could be adjusted to make workers lives far easier/faster, in the same way that many tools have done so already. The latter is a huge problem, as in many skilled worker industries we’ve seen waves of layoffs, and years of enshitification resulting in poorer products.
The latter is also where I think we’ll see a huge change in culture. IMO, we’ll see existing companies bet it all and die from supporting AI over people, and a new wave of companies focus on putting output of a certain standard to take on larger companies.
This is a really balanced take, thank you
Writer here, absolutely not having this experience. Generative AI tools are bad at writing, but people generally have a pretty low bar for what they think is good enough.
These things are great if you care about tech demos and not quality of output. If you actually need the end result to be good though, you’re gonna be waiting a while.
Still waiting on the programmer part. In a nutshell AI being say 90% perfect means you have 90% working code IE 10% broken code. Images and video (but not sound) is way easier cause human eyes kinda just suck. Couple of the videos they’ve released pass even at a pretty long glance. You only notice funny businesses once you look closer.
I can’t imagine that digital artists/animators have reason to worry. At the upper end, animated movies will simply get flashier, eating up all the productivity gains. In live action, more effects will be pure CGI. At the bottom end, we may see productions hiring VFX artists, just as naturally as they hire makeup artists now.
When something becomes cheaper, people buy more of it, until their demand is satisfied. With food, we are well past that point. I don’t think we are anywhere near that point with visual effects.
Yeah. And it’s not just how good the images look it’s also the creativity. Everyone tries to downplay this but I’ve read texts and those videos and just from the prompts there is a “creative spark” there. It’s not very bright spark lol but it’s there.
I should get into this stuff but I feel old lol. I imagine you could generate interesting levels with obstacles and riddles and “story beats” too.
Because sometimes the generator just replicates bits of its training data wholesale. The “creative spark” isn’t its own, it’s from a human artist left uncredited and uncompensated.
Artists are “inspired” by existing art or things they see in real life all the time. So that they can replicate art doesn’t mean they can’t generate art. It’s a non sequitur. But I’m sure people are going to keep insisting on this so lets not argue back and forth on this :D
It seems to me that AI won’t completely replace jobs (but will do in 10-20 years). But will reduce demand because oversaturation + ultraproductivity with AI. Moreover, AI will continue to improve. A work of a team of 30 people will be done with just 3 people.