I was just reading comments the other day where people who dragging a company because they apparently used AI for some low level copywriting stuff. No art assets, no code (so far as anyone knows), not actually writing copy but more like "is everything spelled right, does the copy structure flow, have all these points been addressed, etc." Not only that but the only reason anyone even knew is because the company was completely up front and transparent about what they used AI for and what they didn't.
There is a visceral hate in the artistic community toward AI that doesn't really make sense to me tbh.
I would imagine it is like transcribing, an industry I was in for a little bit when I was younger. I saw the same transition there and imagine it will be elsewhere. First it's a bunch of people saying "AI can't take our jobs, our jobs are thinking jobs." Then it's "Sure, you could use AI, but there's no real advantage to it because it makes so many mistakes."
But pretty soon after that it's "Why am I paying a transcriptionist $3/minute when I can just have the machine auto-transcribe it and then my admin assistant can just scan it for mistakes."
Even if there still IS a quality difference between great writers and AI product, "good enough" is good enough for most customers, especially if you have to pay professional rates to get better.
I go back and forth on it a lot myself; and it's not just in the office context.
Grandkid's sports club had an AI-made song about the group at Christmas. It was "good enough" for that. Did they steal the job of a local band? Well, in the sense that the club would have had to commission a song. But in reality, the club wouldn't have paid money for that.
They won't pay money to commission Anthropic (or in that case I assume something like Suno) to make the song in the future either. They just won't pay the money at all. A lot of "valuable" human work will be replaced, but it won't be profitable for the companies. I bet more stuff is being transcribed now than ever before -- but not much money is being made on it.
> There is a visceral hate in the artistic community toward AI that doesn't really make sense to me tbh.
Really? Have you seen how the CEOs marketed it and talked about people in that community? Artists hate it, because they listened to what AI community and leadership were openly saying.
The weirdest thing on this all is how people find the hate puzzling considering initial rhetoric coming from the industry itself. And current rhetoric for that matter.
Right? AI evangelists never seem to miss an opportunity to be clueless about this
"Why do you guys hate AI so much? All I did was tell you it's so great that it makes your skills worthless and how glad I am that I won't need people like you around in the future to make art and designs. What's wrong with that?"
What I noticed was that it was not just about money. It is not like people could live out of art last decades anyway. Artists actually know it better then anyone. But the disdain toward things artistic people value and like was noticeable. Even when one has bad economic news, surely it should be possible to say then without being gleeful arrogant jerk. Which is exactly what the message was.
It is just ... we insulted those people, told them they are worthless, when they want to talk about things they like doing we tell them they should use AI and then we act all puzzled they hate us. How could that happen.
There's a large amount of voices, both online and off, that are sneering. Between crabs in a bucket happy that software devs are being clawed down, and people happy thinking they no longer need us
I'm worn down by a cacophony of voices telling me I'm no longer wanted or needed. I'm very tired.
Have you seen the arrogance of artists? They acted as though they were above replacement, above automation. They acted as though they were superior.
We're all facing very hard times ahead of us, but I would be lying if I said it wasn't at least a little cathartic to watch this unfold. Programmers, too, were just as arrogant until only a few years ago. As were doctors, lawyers... The list goes on. How the mighty have fallen.
Now we just gotta allow AIs to replace all these lavishly compensated CEOs too. Now that'd be epic.
I certainly do. The only point I'm making is those people are sending plenty of messages of their own. You say that AI proponents sound like cartoon villains. To me the AI detractors sound a lot like elite lords being forcibly deposed from their titles. People who thought they were superior, but were proven wrong.
The only crime here would be stopping the AI onslaught just short of replacing the really powerful people. Let it happen.
I don't think I've seen anything that smacks of elite lordship. Artists don't generally believe that other people should have their livelihoods taken away for the crime of not being artists.
You could replace every software engineer on the planet with a perfect LLM tomorrow and it would not lead to mass unemployment-triggered riots. If you're talking about software engineering specifically, you're not correct. If you're talking about all labor, you're talking about something unrelated to the article.
The job of software engineering is more or less literally to automate every other job. If there are no software engineers it's because everything is or has been automated. If AI isn't capable of that then there's still software engineering to do and your argument collapses.
> Take copywriting. It was a profession that took years to master and paid well. This changed slowly as more professionals joined the market, even after the demand spike driven by ecommerce and adtech. Now, LLMs have destroyed the job for the vast majority of professionals.
There’s not much articulation except some personal snippets about someone caught in the hype cycle of a product, that the hive mind is buzzing about deafeningly.
Tools/improvements have rarely been negative in such a massive way except rare instances, and even then society moved on and past those tools to bigger & better things.
How many people today seriously consider agriculture as a career prospect but almost all humans who lived in the last 2000 years worked as peasant labor on a farm. We are thriving in comparison to that period of time.
This is the technology that aims to replicate all of the human functionality. So, the aim is unprecedented. You might not be convinced that this aim is achievable (despite having the human brain that achieves it, unlike, say, superluminal travel), but, at least, you might be inclined to recognize that something potentially unprecedented is going on.
Just because a generation or two down the line is better off does’t mean a lot of lives aren’t effected negatively when industries are destroyed or moved.
I guess my point is it’s rarely the transformational technology people talk it up to be.
5 years ago absolutely everyone was talking about how blockchains & ledgers were going to solve all the problems of the world, and executives needed blockchain & ledgers in their products. Now, no one cares.
Not saying that happens in this case, but don’t believe the hype so easy. Even job losses in the context of a radically different policies by the current administration doesn’t get a second thought, nor does the fact we’re no longer in a low interest rate environment.
Sure don’t be gullible, of course. I was never sold on blockchain, and there was major skepticism across the industry.
I only know one person who works on crypto projects, and no one who uses crypto for purchases. Yet everyone I know in engineering and non-engineers use AI for work and personal tasks. This is a different ballgame.
It could be the innovation curve stops here and we only have to adapt to Claude 4 level AI. I’m sure there will be headwinds like with driverless cars. But it’s very reasonable to guess where this is going.
I don’t think it’s reasonable at all, but live your life as you see fit.
It’s easy in retrospect to be say “sure, we were sceptical of crypto”. It certainly was not easy then to voice that, nor is it easy now to be sceptical of AI - without being labelled a Luddite or just negative.
Money is a huge factor in all this, people love to discuss the current in thing and what’s more in than some tech that’s IPO’ing? Investors were making stupid money with crypto. Investors again are about to make stupid money with AI.
This isn’t about investors, that’s the difference. AI commerce will continue after IPOs or if there was no IPO, I have zero doubt in my mind about that.
> such a thing would almost certainly fail catastrophically in a contemporary American classroom.
It definitely would fail but isn't it an order of magnitude more likely that's due to the parents, teachers' unions, and other factors rather than American students are neurologically different than Chinese students and therefore learn differently?
If they do have much better outcomes (I have no idea if this is the case or not), if you made that change in kindergarten today and moved it up through the end of high school with that class, I bet you'd see remarkable improvement in them compared to older cohorts.
Yeah, here [1] are the PISA outcomes. PISA is an international test that's generally the gold standard for comparison of educational outcomes on an international level. [1] Over the last testing year China was #2, the test prior #1. Singapore was #1 in the most recent period, and is around 75% ethnic Chinese.
Whether the differences are genetic or cultural is interesting but doesn't really matter. The reality is that they exist and are relatively immutable. For a very basic example, in China failing students fail. In American schools, failing students tend to be passed along. And such things are difficult to change, even if you could prove beyond any doubt that doing so would yield better outcomes for everybody.
The real question is how you 'do at life'. Some tests are a proxy but not all. And even when it is, you can 'teach the test' and get worse results at life even though the test itself is good. Too often we are not sure what is a good proxy.
That is the grain of salt all education comparisons need to be made with.
They went from literally starving to death in the 60s to becoming one of the greatest, if not the greatest, power on Earth with a thriving and growing middle class - which is really the backbone of a nation. So I think it's safe to say that their life outcomes are on parity with their measurable educational outcomes.
It's hard to say because the US was, by far, the most dominant economic power in the world in decades past, and now we're losing that role, or already have depending on how you measure things. But the nature of going from #1 to #1 (or #2 as it may be) means you have no real basis for comparison how things might have been.
But what I'd observe is that by many metrics the US hasn't really made major progress since our glory days. For instance real median wages from 1979 to present have increased by less than 13%. [1] It'd be disingenuous to compare that to China because they started from much less so obviously you expect dramatically higher growth, but I think it's reasonable to claim that we could have, and should have, done dramatically better than 13% growth in almost 50 years.
Another point is that the US was able to 'artificially' strengthen its economy owing to the dominance of the dollar and being the center of the tech boom. I say artificially because those things were obviously going to be liminal. We needed to leverage those advantages into something long-term. Instead it looks like we've been mostly treading water and largely wasted it all.
And now pair all of this with contemporary times with a sharply divided population, unsustainably low fertility rates, terrible education outcomes, and more. And no, I don't think it's reasonable to claim that the US is doing well, let alone to the point of being able to rest on our laurels as you're implying.
While China's improvements are amazing, don't be fooled, overall China is still behind. They have more people and so totals can look good, but the common person has much improvement left before they beat the US. Ultimately, I think your argument comes down to, when you're on top, it is very hard to improve much more, while, when you're starting at the bottom, you can improve a lot very quickly and easily. Indeed, China's growth numbers have been slowing a bit recently, which supports my thesis. Only time will tell of course
Also there is plenty of reason to think that China isn't giving honest numbers, but what's the true numbers are is impossible to know
Behind by what metric? PPP their economy is already much larger, their educational outcomes are much better, they're doing wild stuff in bleeding edge domains like robotics, built/launched their own space station super rapidly, and so on. Pretty much the only domain they're clearly behind in is rocket technology owing to SpaceX, and back here stateside you have plenty of people that hope the company somehow fails because they don't agree with the political opinions of its founder.
And the numbers we're citing aren't just from China, but from third party organizations. In any case, the arguments don't come to debating numbers - the change is obvious and visible. It's not like they're claiming new record low unemployment while seemingly large numbers of people somehow people struggle to find jobs.
This is a really interesting framing to me. You say "forced," would you have preferred to give them a better grade even though they didn't do the work because they were smart?
I said "forced" because there's a grading framework that I had to follow and there was no amount of flexibility within that framework that made it so I could pass them... Especially since they didn't leave the class really understanding the subject.
I knew they were capable of understanding what I was teaching, and I even made it very clear to students that if they are having trouble with the homework they can bother me and I will help them through it, and I will spend whatever amount of time it takes. A few students actually took me up on that, and they really did improve as a result, but some of the students simply seemed content on failing.
I take it as a personal failing; if a person is smart enough to pass my class and didn't, then I didn't do a good enough job making it interesting.
No - someone dropping a picture to your phone when you have the ability enabled is not violence by any definition used by people with functioning frontal cortexes. Maybe it's good to remove the "Everybody" option, maybe it's not. Maybe it's good to make it auto-disable after 10 minutes, maybe it's not. Irrelevant.
But absolutely nothing will make a photo popping onto your phone a violent act.
Someone walks up to you and stuffs an ad for local prostitutes into your shirt pocket before you react.
Don't like it? Should've worn a T-shirt.
Your wife founds another one in your back pocket later that day, and has questions.
What, you practically asked for it. Should've zippered that pocket. An open pocket is practically an invitation for everyone to put their stuff into it.
Violence, violations and other similar words have the same root, meaning to pursue, to suppress, to overpower. Quibbling over exactly where the boundary lines are drawn misses the larger point about unwanted incursions upon your person, whether physical or psychic.
Referring to someone airdropping an image over a protocol you specifically opened up as "psychic violence" is even worse than referring to it as simply "violence."
Words mean things. I know it's popular to pretend they don't and anything can be anything as long as we say it long enough and loud enough, but that's simply not true.
Yes. The captain has the authority, by law, to remove anyone (or everyone) for any reason. There is basically nothing the captain is legally barred from doing while the plane is en route.
> There is basically nothing the captain is legally barred from doing while the plane is en route.
This is pretty wide of the mark. They have a lot of authority, yes, as it's the flipside of the flight's safety being their responsibility. They still aren't allowed to assault a passenger, say, or commit tax fraud, or needlessly break the air laws.
Also, while the plane is en route? As in, the captain throwing someone out of the plane mid-flight?
Ah yes because I am definitely saying that the captain of an airliner is free to commit tax fraud. That's definitely something someone with a functioning brain could believe I meant, and not a complete straw-man bad faith interpretation.
And yes, the captain's authority is greater while the plane is en route compared to on the ground. En route the captain can divert pretty much anywhere if they think it's the right thing to do. They can dump fuel over the ocean or even over houses if they believe the alternative is worse. When the plane is on the ground realistically all they're going to do for anything is deplane everyone, either at the gate or via an evacuation.
> That is a very, very, very different statement than "I'm calling the FBI."
Yes, but on an aircraft the captain is the dictator. They can do basically whatever they want within the confines of law and company policy - and honestly with enough seniority, which the captain on a transatlantic flight has a lot of - they can probably ignore company policy once or twice and get away with it and keep their job.
As far as I'm aware there is no law preventing the captain from deciding to go back because they don't like one of the passengers blasting their opinions to the entire aircraft. What the opinion is, its levels of subjectivity or objectivity, and whether or not it's popular is completely irrelevant.
I'm well aware of the law. I was a full-time flight instructor for years, and the relevant regulation is the first one I taught when introducing students to the regs.
But I'm not talking about whether the captain has final responsibility and authority for the operation of the aircraft.
I'm talking about whether it's sane to escalate directly from something that is very much not an explicit threat of violence, to involving people whose primary tools are suspension of physical liberty and acts of violence.
(Also, please note: that rule says two things. The captain has final authority, yes, but they are also responsible for the choices they make. It's not a free pass to do anything they want for any reason.)
It is a fucking device name. That is so easy to ignore and not be affected by.
Anyone being pissed off and willing to start a fight over a device name should be committed. Put that person in jail, not the person with the tacky device name. Otherwise you are just creating a world where you police the behavior of reasonable people because they might upset unreasonable people. Police the behavior of the unreasonable people.
Do you see how what you said is irrelevant whether it's the right way to think about it or not? The captain saw it, or had it brought to his attention, and decided to get rid of it. End of story. It doesn't matter whether or not it's easy to ignore, or whether anyone was truly affected by it, or anything else.
No, I do not see that. The captain is not a dictator on the plane. They can act according to reasonable and credible threats but their power is not infinite. They do not have the power to kick everyone off of the plane that's, say, wearing a yellow shirt.
If a fight breaks out then arrest the person that started a fight. But if your argument is "we can't let X happen because it might start a fight" then maybe consider stop serving alcohol before you get all uppity on some tacky device name
> They do not have the power to kick everyone off of the plane that's, say, wearing a yellow shirt.
They would likely lose their job if they did it depending on if ALPA wanted to fight for them or not, but they absolutely, 100% have the legal authority to do this. Maybe it should change, and I'm sorry it hurts your feelings, but that's just objectively how it is.
I'm always confused as to why there's such a trend on the internet of romanticizing pilot's judgement and whatever they arbitrarily decide to do when flying a plane. Like videos of some pilot refusing to fly the plane because something feels off. And everyone in the comment praises the pilot and says that whatever maintenance said must be wrong and the pilot's instinct is some sort of all-seeing, all-encompassing entity that can see beyond the puny engineers and mechanics tasked with putting a plane in operating condition.
There is a visceral hate in the artistic community toward AI that doesn't really make sense to me tbh.
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