AI’s next victim: headshot photographers.
Discussion
ai sucks. its awful.
Sure.
OH~ getting used to a new client, and followed up on the web. new client doesn't have avatars, but this doesn't change my conduct.
okay, so i put it one way on fedi, and i'll copy paste because i think its relevant to the discussion:
the human impact of ai pitted against inflation / sheer human oversight and lack of consideration = a very bad equation for a whole lot of people. Removal of jobs, mostly.
Customer Service Reps of all types
Programmers (not all)
Compliance People
UI/UX People
Web Developers (most)
Artists
Govt Employees (okay squee)
Almost the entire DMV
other things overlooked here.
all gone. yet they all eat...
And this will result in significant displacement and pain. But the genie cannot be put back in the bottle. Everyone must adapt.
why was it taken out, though ? we could trace back to kurzweil and other trans humanists, and similar stuff, but - what gets me, is it's hard to consider that after 60 years or so of warnings, it's not that nobody saw it coming, it's that hundreds of thousands of people working at huge tech companies, actually thought this was a good idea somehow.
There are downsides, clearly. But there is a lot of potential for great use. Khan Academy has a high reputation in my book for having a positive impact. I'm excited to see how AI assisted tutoring will help students https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEgHrxvLsz0
imagine for a minute you were 60 years old.
imagine that you studied photography in highschool, and college, and got your degrees in fine art, and even went on to get a phd in fine art.
you became a teacher of photography
you worked professionally in the field,
starting in a photo lab, and moving your way up.
you never worked for national geographic, or shot any spreads for rolling stone,
but you were or arguably are VERY good at what you do, and know it inside and out,
and helped a large number of people.
how is replacing these skills with a computer, good for anyone other than the software developers of that company?
do you feel it's possible for these people being displaced, to still exist in a field when it's perhaps literally all they know how to do, and have spent their entire lives working at a thing, to the point of mastery?
is that fair? or is it "the price of doing business" and "collateral damage" ?
just to be clear - i am not upset, but genuinely curious to see how people feel about these manner of things.
Kahn has always been a decent operation.
On the topic of AI assisted tutoring- how does this help the teacher, if say the AI teaches mathematical theory a different way than the teacher learned themselves? :) Stuff like that.
But more interested in how you feel ai would benefit multiple industries and those benefits.
thanks :)
And it has always been this way. The same can be said for the printing press, the steam engine, industrial manufacturing, the internet.
No one’s saying that there won’t be suffering. But it’s here, nonetheless. The question is how to enable the greatest number of people to successfully cross the chasm.
Yup, great innovation. In a sense it's like Bitcoin - learn how to effectively integrate this tool in yours family life, don't try to fight or compete with it.
Don't fight the windmills. Use them for your good.
Forgive the long response, but I study this stuff and am particularly passionate about it.
------------
These are absolutely valid questions, especially in a world where work+money is the driving force for self-worth. And I am absolutely an advocate for helping those individuals during this transition.
I'll counter with a similar example. What about the neurosurgeon, spent x-amount of years to become highly trained to perform life-critical operations on patients? Suppose we get to a scenario where robotic surgery is 10x more precise and accurate and 100x cheaper than than a surgery done by a human. What happens to the neurosurgeon? They essentially dedicated their lives to become highly skilled at a task and now what, are they out of a job? If they think of themselves as just a pair of finely tuned hands then sure, but a neurosurgeon is trained on much more than that. There is the human connection, and the ability to analyze and *understand* medical literature. Yes an AI can analyze millions of articles, but it takes someone with specialized knowledge to comb through it and verify that the information is true.
To rephrase, if you believe you are the hands/tools of an operation, doing monotonous repetitive tasks and not giving any cognitive contribution, then sure that job is gone. If you are the brains/architect of an operation, then you will utilize AI to go farther and do more than you could do individually. This can give a great opportunity for the solo/small teamed operations which can move and iterate fast. Large corporations may have a lot of hands, but they can get stuck in the bureaucracy.
AI art has been tuned on what is popular and can be used to earn money. Artists can (a) leverage AI to speed up the monotonous work, or (b) if they are particularly gifted create mind blowing paradigm shifts that AI would never be trained on in that is usually not appropriate for money earning because they are too *out there*.
Sal Khan has stated that teachers can use this AI to help them refine a curriculum, teaching a different way is perfectly fine so long as the learning happens. Hell, when things are told to me in a multitude of ways I start to understand it more fully.
Let AI do the boing stuff. Its great at that. What a computational system will never have, however is the *meaning* generating process that biology and therefore humans have.
Let us be free to innovate without restriction.
interesting. I appreciate your well articulated and interesting response, so thank you .
That's not to say that things won't be difficult in the near term. We've essentially always existed to learn a skill and capitalize on it. Only the privileged are currently allowed to explore new ideas without financial risk.
Most derive their sense of self worth and meaning in life from their occupation and the income that comes with it. AI is fundamentally changing that. Society needs to accommodate and move away from that perspective (UBI is a promising route).
Without the tethers of "need to have a job -> earn money to live" we all will have the opportunity to explore our curiosities. We ultimately need to get there fast, otherwise there will be a lot of suffering, across all walks of life.
The worst part of AI I worry will be the big ISP/clouds finally get control over content/paying for data access.
Expand on that?
Many companies have wanted to monetize data they host. Aws, azure, Google, Verizon, etc.
Currently, most data (not intranet) is basically open and free to consume. Which is what AI is able to train on.
Eventually, This could/will incentivise large cloud host to charge for access to their data.
Because once scrubbed and archieved, it will become less valuable to the larger picture.
AI will replace modern search engines. Most people don't even fact check now. It will become even worse as they blindly trust AI assistants as they do with "just Google it"
Ai is changing everything
I've always said AI will replace the mediocre in almost every profession. They will replace in this case your average portrait photographer, but they're not replacing Peter Hurley.
This is a painful truth.
the big problem with most of this isn't that it raises the "bar of quality"
it's that it eliminates a means of earning a living, for a great many people.
if you can't see why that's evil without arguing against it, I have nothing further to add :)
A bit of a broken window fallacy, nah?
ill have to spend some time parsing this over.. https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/broken-window-fallacy.asp new nomeclature here.
This article is so poorly written that it makes it look like the fallacy is the conclusion against it.
This is the original from Bastiat
My point is that similarly as just breaking windows to give people work has somewhat obvious negative consequences, telling other people to not use 10x tools because it steals people jobs will have the same consequences.
I agree that in the short term, if there's a rapid change, people will have hard time adjusting. And some might not... But ultimately it creates more capital in the world, and makes all other remaining scarce skills relatively more valuable.
I feel like I've recently heard a great podcast elaborating on AI's impact on humanity along these lines with some "Austrians" - either Human Action Podcast, or Stephan Livera. Can't find it now. But found that Dominic Frisby has just made some episodes on it, and looking forward to listen to his perspectives, he's usually a well balanced and practical libertarian. (https://fountain.fm/episode/14275230998)
PS. There should totally be more discussions about this, it's life-changing topic.