In a post-scarcity solarpunk future, I could imagine some reasonable uses, but that’s not the world we’re living in yet.
AI art has already poisoned the creative environment. I commissioned an artist for my latest solarpunk novel, and they used AI without telling me. I had to scrap that illustration. Then the next person I tried to hire claimed they could do the work without AI but in fact they could not.
All that is to say, fuck generative AI and fuck capitalism!
Someone said something that stuck with me the other day. “I don’t want AI to create all of our art and music so we can work more. I want AI to do our work so we have more time to create art and music”.
Funny - I distinctly remember not having any time to recreationally make, and most importantly, actually finish small art pieces. Because our society nowadays demands me to be working on things that aren’t quite art for 80% of the time I’m awake. AI assisted tools have caused me to be able to use that 20% to actually make something again in a satisfactory way. At least for me and most people I talk to in a similar situation, it has allowed me to enjoy being creative again.
That’s cool. It helps me at work too.
The reason for that is that you have to look at this as if you’re some greedy corporate bastard.
A robot butler costs money to build and if it doesn’t pan out, they’re on the hook for the cost. Firing people saves money right now, and if generative art doesn’t pan out, they can hire new employees that will work for less.
AI is just the latest craze to justify what these greedy bastards do all the time. The way they’re fucking us is new, but the act of fucking us is as old as dirt.
A tale as old as time
Currently reading Cloud Atlas and these comments accompany it pretty well
True as it could be
AI is on its way to automate most jobs. The economy is about radically change
Yeah, except we don’t have anything even close to ready for everyone who will lose their income. I foresee a lot of hardship coming, especially since those in power tend to horde all resources for themselves, and AI will allow them to horde resources at never before imaginable levels.
That should be at the forefront of our political discourse. We had Andrew Yang bring make some noise back in 2019/2020, but he was the only one to bring AI, automation, and UBI and he kind of faded into irrelevancy. Which is unfortunate because nobody else is talking about any of these things, especially the dinosaurs we have running for president right now.
AI in IT is about to obsolete new staff, but still require experienced staff. Of course experienced staff start out as new staff, the current experts retire or die
But that won’t stop management. Management will say “with this great tool we don’t need as many people” and will fire everyone but a few well experienced people who can polish the turds the AI produces
Then they’ll be left a few years later with no experts.
I have seen this in practice. The place I work for found that labour hire was able to replace long term staff, backed by a team of experts. Now they want to bring IT back in house and all the experts are retired, long term people like me have found other careers within the place, and they’re right now begging me to return to my old career to train a new lot of people. I’m not likely to co-operate