AI erodes Adepts' Influence
Many people far smarter than me have written about AI. And many people seeking relevance have written about AI. I haven't written much, because I didn't think I had much to add. Today, I had a thought.
I won't talk about the theft of intellectual property, since it has been discussed (to disturbingly little effect) that it is theft to take something without permission, and even worse to then sell it (or access to it) for a profit - AI model subscriptions do this all day long. Eventually, there will be enough content creators and subject matter experts that willingly give away their knowledge (hopefully for a fee) that this argument will lose a lot of weight.
It is a decent analogy to talk about the industrialization of society as a parallel of what AI will do, but I think there is a sharp difference - desire. The person whose job it was to place caps on bottles in a factory did not do it as an expression of self, they did it as a way to make a living. When this living was lost, they were of course unhappy, but they were lamenting the loss of income and stability. But this is still very different from what AI can take from people.
In the modern hyper-capitalist society, it's all about more money at the cost of everything else: humanity and quality included. Let's talk about an advertisement banner; the amount of work it took to do that has shrunk rapidly in the last hundred years, mostly thanks to computer technology. AI shrinks that even further - not just in time, but in expertise. In the past, the person asking for the banner was at the mercy of the person creating it - to a degree. Of course tight deadlines could be imposed, but the person producing the banner could still exercise some level of control over the output to try to get it to meet their standard. If they were confident and persuasive enough, they might even win a few extra days to work on it and produce something they would be happy to put their name on.
AI has collapsed that. Now, a person with zero talent for design can produce a banner (which looks like the hundreds of others the model was trained on) and it looks just fine to them. The non-expert whose desire it is to ship the product as soon as possible to maximize profits can now produce something that is "good enough". AI doesn't necessarily eliminate the need for expertise; it eliminates the need to purchase expertise whenever the buyer is satisfied with an approximation of its output.
Why does this matter? Because unlike the person in the factory putting caps on bottles, the output being produced by these people is part of their identity. They want to make a perfect product, they live to make beautiful things. Before, they had more control over what they produced; now, they need to produce quickly or they will be thrown aside. It's a race to the bottom. As society continually accepts lower and lower quality, AI is the knife that can cut out an entire type of person who lives to produce good works - while the users of AI can profit more than ever without needing to pay their wages to produce the bare minimum. If we focus so much of our money and time on "good enough", how can we hope to produce something better? How can we hope to discover something new?