Any given executive may or may not be devoid of creativity, but that’s not the problem.
Creative work is one of an increasingly small number of fields that can’t be outsourced for pennies on the dollar.
Manufacturers outsourced American factory jobs to Mexico and China and Indonesia (and are expanding to even poorer countries as those countries modernize and their labor becomes more expensive), and broke the power of American factory workers’ unions in the process.
But screenwriters’ unions are still enormously powerful, famous actors can write their own contracts, popular authors can ignore their editors, and the suits fucking hate it.
And let’s not forget coding, which is very much creative work, and which does still have strong protections and employee benefits, despite the best efforts of American tech magnates to replace American workers with Indian indentured servants on H-1Bs who can be kept in line by exploiting the caste system and threatening their families back home.
When they first rolled out LLMs, they didn’t market them as replacements for boring, mundane, menial work. They marketed them as replacements for creative work. Digital artists drawing for commission were some of the first to feel the effects. Then they started hammering scriptwriters, short video content creators, cartoon voice actors and dubbers, with more or less success depending on how shitty the AI tool is - and coders, coders have definitely gotten hammered…
But the reason is all the same. Unlike factory work, creative work isn’t globally fungible. You can’t replace an American actor with a dollar-a-day gig worker from the slums of Mumbai. But you can sure as hell try to replace an American actor with an AI generated pixel blob, because even the possibility of being replaced gives you leverage against them, and the benefits of breaking the actors’ union will pay incredible dividends in the long run.
So circling back to the content of the OP, AI corpocrats really, really want you to believe that creativity can be duplicated with an AI tool. They want you to think you don’t need to read books from a real writer, or try recipes invented by a real chef, or watch movies written and directed and acted by real union workers. They want to drive down your expectations for creative work until their shitty AI tools can meet those expectations. Because they want to break the power of creative workers, and the less the public values creativity, the more leverage the suits have against the creators.
Anyway, capitalism delenda est and thank you for coming to my TED talk.
I think the best saying I’ve heard against AI is “I want AI to do my work so that I can do fun things like paint and draw. Instead we have AI that can paint and draw so I have to work.”
The idea of using LLMs for ideas is so sad to me. Isn’t basically all of the fun of coming up with a new drink, the coming up with part?
It makes sense when you consider the numb, talentless, devoid of creativity executives pushing AI.
Any given executive may or may not be devoid of creativity, but that’s not the problem.
Creative work is one of an increasingly small number of fields that can’t be outsourced for pennies on the dollar.
Manufacturers outsourced American factory jobs to Mexico and China and Indonesia (and are expanding to even poorer countries as those countries modernize and their labor becomes more expensive), and broke the power of American factory workers’ unions in the process.
But screenwriters’ unions are still enormously powerful, famous actors can write their own contracts, popular authors can ignore their editors, and the suits fucking hate it.
And let’s not forget coding, which is very much creative work, and which does still have strong protections and employee benefits, despite the best efforts of American tech magnates to replace American workers with Indian indentured servants on H-1Bs who can be kept in line by exploiting the caste system and threatening their families back home.
When they first rolled out LLMs, they didn’t market them as replacements for boring, mundane, menial work. They marketed them as replacements for creative work. Digital artists drawing for commission were some of the first to feel the effects. Then they started hammering scriptwriters, short video content creators, cartoon voice actors and dubbers, with more or less success depending on how shitty the AI tool is - and coders, coders have definitely gotten hammered…
But the reason is all the same. Unlike factory work, creative work isn’t globally fungible. You can’t replace an American actor with a dollar-a-day gig worker from the slums of Mumbai. But you can sure as hell try to replace an American actor with an AI generated pixel blob, because even the possibility of being replaced gives you leverage against them, and the benefits of breaking the actors’ union will pay incredible dividends in the long run.
So circling back to the content of the OP, AI corpocrats really, really want you to believe that creativity can be duplicated with an AI tool. They want you to think you don’t need to read books from a real writer, or try recipes invented by a real chef, or watch movies written and directed and acted by real union workers. They want to drive down your expectations for creative work until their shitty AI tools can meet those expectations. Because they want to break the power of creative workers, and the less the public values creativity, the more leverage the suits have against the creators.
Anyway, capitalism delenda est and thank you for coming to my TED talk.
I think the best saying I’ve heard against AI is “I want AI to do my work so that I can do fun things like paint and draw. Instead we have AI that can paint and draw so I have to work.”