This ongoing discussion feels classist. I've never seen such strong emotions about AI (and automation) taking blue-collar jobs, some shrugs at most. It's considered an unavoidable given, even though it has been happening for decades. The only difference now is that AI is threatening middle-upper class jobs, which nobody saw coming.
I do not see the difference between both. Can somebody that does explain to me why now is "critical" and not so much before?
Also I'm not sure most artist jobs are middle-upper class.
Personally, I'm new in my career, and I'd like to not have the rug pulled out from under me. If I were a student again, I would have to consider whether the university debt was going to be worth it in the long term or if I should look at a more traditional field to be in.
However, these are individual reactions, not behaviours as a community/society. If you read comments around HN or some other liberal circles, you have the feeling that is our human-ness is being threatened, one of our core defining traits. It seems like "artistic creativity" is being enshrined as a circular argument (also I'm wary of calling startup-landing-page illustrators "artists" – more like craftpeople, although this distinction might hurt the conversation).
My broader point is that ChatGPT is not "the beginning of the end", but another chapter in a history of automation and replacement that will pose serious challenges for humankind. That treating it as more critical than factory automation is demeaning to blue-collar workers and also untrue. Everything we do is what defines us as people: cherry-picking some skills is a relic from Enlightenment we should get rid of.
> Also I'm not sure most artist jobs are middle-upper class.
I do not have any data at hand, only my circle of friends and former colleagues (I was formerly a graphic designer). Few people endure being a "starving artist" without a little financial safety coming from above. Also, it is a profession that only provides status to a certain socio-economic milieu.
My first job was to write C code for industrial machines that replaced humans doing manual work. Sometimes I even had to go watch them work so I could fully understand what they were doing.
In my second job as a developer, I wrote a Django application that automated away a whole department in the company. I saw 100 people getting fired due to a script that I wrote.
That was all happening in the third world country were I came from. These were real people getting fired, with families that depend on them. Most of them were already in poverty even before being fired.
These artists complaining sound like a very 1st world problem to me. I doubt that anyone actually "lost a job" because of this technology so far.