I was traveling this week, and saw a couple very obviously AI-generated billboards for the city's downtown. Something about downtown eats or something. They were, and I'm being extremely nice here, absolutely hideous. I have never, in all my life, seen such ugly billboards. And, while they were different, they were basically the same thing (does that make sense? Them being different, but the same? Not really sure how else to describe it). I was actually looking for a place to eat, and those things deterred me from going downtown. Ended up finding this cute little coffeeshop in some random side road. No food, but holy crap the coffee and crepes were good!
I think more likely answer is that most businesses are cheap and a mediocre image generated by AI is good enough vs paying a human to make a really good one.
Nah, I've just been in the industry long enough to not be scared of competition. Quality is something that a lot of well-paying businesses very much appreciate.
A crappy visual generator is on-par with an intern, at best.
The people who are startled the most, probably have never actually done design large-scale.
Classic "fuck you got mine" take from someone who has experienced no difficulty in decades with a field. If you're ignoring the mass layoffs happening across multiple fields right now, ESPECIALLY in well-performing companies, I guess it looks like AI is not having much of an effect. Like if you consciously decide to not look at any business news at all this take could make sense.
My dude, I'm literally replying to a person who said "rip graphics designers". Of course I'm talking about my on field.
BTW, I have no problem with "fuck around and find out". Fuck those companies layinf off people because of LLMs. I'll watch them go down with a grin on my face and balls in my hand.
This is something people always miss in these discussions. A graphic designer working for a medium marketing company is replaceable with a Stable Diffusion or Midjourney, because there, quality is not really that important. They work on quantity and "AI" is much more "efficient" in creating the quantity. That too even without paying for stock photos.
High end jobs will always be there in every profession. But the vast majority of the jobs in a sector do not belong to the "high end" category. That is where the job loss is going to happen. Not for Beeple Crap level artists.
I would question the efficiency claim. Uber and the like claimed incredible market dominance, driving local food delivery and taxi services out of business. They're only now really being forced to find profitability.
I wonder if AI is going to be similar. The powerful models right now, as I understand it, have ludicrous power requirements. I don't know their balance sheets, but in the current race to market share, I'm skeptical that most of these services are in the green.
What that ultimately says about the future I don't really know. Like it could be we reach some point where the models get better, or more specialized, or something and profit arrive. Or maybe theres a point of diminishing returns where the profit just can't be made, and once the hype falls off (and investors stop clamoring for AI) these companies will ask what they're getting for the money spent.
(And of course I could just be straight up wrong about profits today not being there.)
Replacing a human with any form of tech has been a long standing practice. Usually in this scenario the profitability or the efficiency takes a known pattern. Unfortunately what you said is the exact way the market always operated in the past, and will be operating in the future.
The general pattern is a new tech is invented or a new opportunity is identified, then a bunch of companies get into the market as competing entities. They offer competing prices to customers in an attempt to gain market dominance.
But the problem starts when low profit drives some companies to a situation where either they have to go bust or dissolve the wing, or sell the company to a competitor. Usually after this point a dominant company will emerge in a market segment. Then the monopolies are created. After this point companies either increase the price or exploit customers to get more money, and thereby start making profits. This has been the exact pattern in tech industries for several decades.
In the case of AI also, this is why companies are racing to capture market dominance. Early adopters always get a small advantage and help them get prominence in the segment.
They are absolutely eating the real costs in order to gain market share. I suspect that there's going to be a mad dash to rehire humans when the bill comes due and the VCs want profits.
You can only cut out so many people in so many industries before the economy collapses. I'd like to see what it would look like if like 30% of people lost their careers to AI. Maybe there would finally be a push for UBI and/or stronger tax laws for large corporations.
Most clients don't understand art or graphics to begin with, I guess.
That means shit prompts and shit visuals.
They just wanted someone good at Illustrator.
Well, that's where the "not very good at graphics design" comes in. If you're only hired because "you know illustrator", that says more about you than the client.
Kind of depressing that the answer to not being replaced by AI is "learn to use it and spend your day fixing its fuckups", like that's somehow a meaningful way to live for someone who previously had an actual creative job.
I think the bitter lesson here is that there's a bunch of jobs where quality has zero importance.
If you take for example, content marketing, SEO, and ad copy writing... It's a lot of bullshit, and it's been filling the web with gpt-grade slop for 20 years now. If you can do the same for cheap I don't see a reason not to.
Fair point. There are lot of morons who should be replaced. But we are talking about freelancers, not about SEO or content marketing, more like content filling. But it got worse since AI rise up.
But we are talking about freelancers, not about SEO or content marketing, more like content filling
Most SEO is done by freelancers (at least in my industry). When i talk about content marketing i mean anybody who writes blog posts and LinkedIn posts for companies. It was already shit long before AI arrived.
I used to write that kind of stuff for a living when I was really poor and scraping by, it paid by the word and so low that you could realistically only crack minimum wage if you kept typing continuously and didn't stop to think or do any research.
Yeah I'm not bashing anybody, my wife did that for a couple years I know how it is. There was a kind of golden period where it would even pay enough to let you do some quality stuff but when VC money stopped raining the market slumped almost immediately.
I think the quality definitely degraded, but that's exactly what capitalism wanted. It's going to darwin a big chunk of us through climate change that's accelerated by the electricity needs.
It’s a little worrisome, actually. Professionally written software still needs a human to verify things are correct, consistent, and safe, but the tasks we used to foist off on more junior developers are being increasingly done by AI.
Part of that is fine - offloading minor documentation updates and “trivial” tasks to AI is easy to do and review while remaining productive. But it comes at the expense of the next generation of junior developers being deprived of tasks that are valuable for them to gain experience to work towards a more senior level.
If companies lean too hard into that, we’re going to have serious problems when this generation of developers starts retiring and the next generation is understaffed, underpopulated, and probably underpaid.
AI is also going to run into a wall because it needs continual updates with more human-made data, but the supply of all that is going to dry up once the humans who create new content have been driven out of business.
It's almost like AIs have been developed and promoted by people who have no ability to think about anything but their profits for the next 12 months.
I just tend to think of it as the further enshittification of life. I'm not even that old and it's super obvious how poorly most companies are actually run these days, including my own. It's not that we're doing more with less, it's a global reduction in standards and expectations. Issues that used to be solved in a day now bounce between a dozen different departments staffed with either a handful of extremely overworked people, complete newbies, or clueless contractors. AI is just going to further cement the shitty new standard both inside and outside the company.
It looks like we are already at the point with some AI where we can correct the output instead of add new input. Microsoft is using LinkedIn to help get professional input for free.
But this is the point: the AIs will always need input from some source or another. Consider using AI to generate search results. Those will need to be updated with new information and knowledge, because an AI that can only answer questions related to things known before 2023 will very quickly become obsolete. So it must be updated. But AIs do not know what is going on in the world. They have no sensory capacity of their own, and so their inputs require data that is ultimately, at some point in the process, created by a human who does have the sensory capacity to observe what is happening in the world and write it down. And if the AI simply takes that writing without compensating the human, then the human will stop writing, because they will have had to get a different job to buy food, rent, etc.
No amount of "we can train AIs on AI-generated content" is going to fix the fundamental problem that the world is not static and AI's don't have the capacity to observe what is changing. They will always be reliant on humans. Taking human input without paying for it disincentivises humans from producing content, and this will eventually create problems for the AI.
The scales of the two are nowhere near comparable. A human can't steal and regurgitate so much content that they put millions of other humans out of work.
Yep. I used to be an accountant, and that's how trainees learn in that field too. The company I worked at had a fairly even split between clients with manual and computerised records, and trainees always spent the first year or so almost exclusively working on manual records because that was how you learned to recognise when something had gone wrong in the computerised records, which would always look "right" on a first glance.
I use it for software, but you really need to know what you are doing to understand what is wrong and ask it to redo it in a different way. I still think it saves time, but the ability to generate fully realized applications is a ways away.
The headline says "digital freelancers," so maybe it's talking primarily about small jobs that were being outsourced. A 21% decrease in regular job listings would be more concerning because of the amount of incorrect information and buggy software about to be created than job loss.
