I got into this industry because I enjoy programming, and I wanted to get paid for what I enjoy.
It sucks that the fun part of the job is gone.
I used to love taking the time to whiteboard my project, write the code in peace (with maybe a background show). Go through the steps of structuring, debugging, testing.
Now I can write a prompt to basically do what I do instantly, and now I'm the manager and tester of something I didn't truly even make.
So sure the upside is I can do more, and I basically have to use it because I can't even keep up with what people want me to do without it. And it also seems so silly to go back.
Everything fun is just gone.
That's the economy. It's not like all our problems are solved or everything that needs building is finished, even in very AI-forward tech companies. We are busier and working harder and longer hours than ever, and we've been hiring thousands of people in India.
It sucks on that end too.
A few years ago the owner of a local bar and friend of mine, comes up and asks about building a loyalty program and bar operating software. It sounded well thought out and really good for his business, but I told him, at that scale you would need 20 or 30 other bars to split the cost of development, it just was not economically feasible. But with what I have seen out of codex, I started talking to him about it again a few days ago.
Even with art, I have a lot of ideas and concepts but can't draw or paint. Now I can create images that I personally enjoy. I don't post this slop anywhere, but I really enjoy it. One of my favorites recently is a humanoid robot 3d printing a baby robot to give birth, I am sure no one else would like it, but it makes me happy.
It's a great future.
With open source you can also have it improved, and have less trash software in your life.
Codex created a custom build of firefox with a feature I wanted (essentially the ability to override ssl dns like you get with curl --resolve option). Also, it was able to take apple-music-for-linux that I like for streaming apple music and update it so it would work again. There are incredible possibilities here.
It turns out after enough time nihilistic techbros insisting that they were making a better world while they visibly damaged it, you start to build a dislike for the whole enterprise.
Maybe when they focused impact, someone should have told them that humanity wasn't looking for Chicxulub style impact.
But who cares, at least a few of them are getting richer at the moment.
99.8% of artists all start out at a similar place. They have good "taste", but they suck at making art. Only through practice and feedback from other artists were they able to improve their skills and creative sight, and these things in turn further developed their "taste" in art.
The art pieces that people enjoy are the culmination of an artist spending countless hours practicing, failing, retrying, and experimenting with different ideas. You don't get a Zdzislaw Beksinski without endlessly iterating and honing your craft.
This is one of by biggest gripes with AI: it creates an incentive for people to skip all the hard work that results in great art. Why spend thousands of hours developing your art skills and your unique artistic fingerprint when you can press the instant gratification button right now? I know its not something you can blame a single individual for, but when society as a whole starts taking shortcuts that's when we'll really see a degradation in art.
Yes, we'll have lots more art for people to enjoy, but fewer artists.
Deep understanding, taste, aesthetic, sensitivity to nuance, and so on...none of that can be developed without intimate involvement with the process, with the thing itself.
Your example of poisonous paint vs buying it in tubes is a fallacy, because that isn't what we're talking about. We're talking about _actually painting_ vs just...telling someone else to paint.
For humans, taste is learned through friction against the details of your problem, and finding what ends up sliding smoothly through the details of the medium you're working in. For AI, it's the same, but it comes from the details of the training data.
We've automated taste well enough for most production needs, and its only going to get better over time. If you don't think it'll be good enough for artistic needs too, you're placing a pretty hard bet against AI.
"Taste is all that's left" is pure cope. Taste is one of the first things where humans become useless.
But then you could argue that it has nothing but trained taste, and isn't creative. Then somebody could ask what you mean by that, and you could throw up your hands and say "I don't know", which is the decent thing to do, because none of us know, but it means something.
It isn't about the merits of the output, except that there are some creative outputs that it won't produce. But we can't formally describe those, because they're creative. They're all different, they have different qualities, there's no formula, and you don't get there by training. Once you "get there" you have to get there again, which is to say, keep being creative. This process can be mediated by actually daubing actual paint around.
It's not about placing bets on the ability of AI.
"Taste" can also include the human behind the piece. For example, I love listening to black metal. My "taste" as a consumer of black metal includes sombre atmospheres, oppressive walls of noise, dissonant, angular rhythmic guitar sections, etc.
But my "taste" in black metal extends to the artists behind the music. Black metal has a huge issue with racism and white supremacy. There is a lot of sonically interesting music made by hateful individuals in the black metal scene that I don't listen to because the artists values are antithetical to my own.
In a similar manner, art made primarily through generative AI may technically resemble art that normally matches my "taste", but I find myself wholly uninterested in it because the artists behind it have values that are antithetical to my own.
PS: I'm not trying to say "AI artists = nazis". I'm trying to say that your own motivations and world view behind the art you create influence whether I'll engage with it or not.
So, if we're going to preserve human art, we either need AI to fail naturally, or we need to explicitly reject it. The same goes for the rest of human creativity.
I keep putting quotes around "taste" because its hard to properly describe. Whatever it is, it seems like a mixture of observing what has worked for others, personal preference, worldview, etc. "Getting good at" taste is therefor hard to quantify.
Furthermore, having good "taste" in the art you consume doesn't translate to having good "taste" in the art you create. There exists a gap between the appreciation and application of said "taste", and you need to practice creating a lot of stuff to shorten that gap. And again, these two sides of "taste" are deeply intertwined. The kind of art you consume tends to change as you hone your creative skills and begin to see the technique behind it all, and that in turn influences the kind of art you may wish to create.
At the end of those twenty hours, quiz them. Get them to solve a problem. Who do you think will do better?
Learning happens when the brain struggles with problems. Trying to shortcut that only prevents learning.
Again, it's hard to quantify or validate. One thing I will say is that people can often misinterpret the things that make a certain piece of art work. It's often the little details, or even the absence of detail that make or break it. This is the sort of stuff that requires you to train your eye to notice.
For example, Da Vinci is often heralded as a master of the human form and proportions (the Vitruvian man). But many of his later works often eschewed realistic proportions, with his figures often being 10-11 heads tall. This is a subtle detail that influences how a piece feels, and yet most people would completely miss it!
They're buying it from the AI. They haven't produced anything new.
The big issue here is that through all of human history, effort was a necessary prerequisite to making art. Whether that effort came from mixing paint together before sitting down in front of an easel, hiking through the back country to find the perfect spot for a photograph, or fixing n-gons in Blender all evening. If you created a piece of art, there was a shared understanding amongst other artists that you cared enough to put in the work to make something. For most artists, it's the work/journey/process they cherish, not just the end goal. Putting in the work to make your art is usually the only "gatekeeping" that happens in the art community.
But AI is allowing people to short circuit the path from idea -> creation, which begs the question: is that actually creating? Is prompting for a picture substantially any different than tweaking your search on Google images until you find a photo that resembles what you had in mind? Is creating just having a shiny new picture, or is it the hours/weeks/months of effort, failure, and successes that happened leading up to the picture?
Point is: you can call it "gatekeeping" if you want, but all we're really saying is that creation != ideation.
Where this becomes even more of an issue is imagine somebody spends substantial time with these tools to create something - editing the output of vid models for example. Some would say that's not art but at the end of the day it is just using a tool.
So the central challenge has always been the same: discoverability is the difficulty. It’s just even harder now, and we need to find ways to promote the good stuff.
AI will make things cheaper and more abundant - at the cost of a few people not enjoying their jobs. So what.
You could've made the same argument at any time in history because all technologies do the same thing. Things will go on, mastery will remain.
Investors I know are investing on the prediction that people will be less able to participate in the profitable parts of the economy in the future, and most transactions will be between businesses.
We're building a future for humanity where people are both unhappier and poorer.