Anyone else draw similarities with this and the artists and authors who complained when gen ai first came out. I think a lot of people don't realise the disruption ai will cause to many industries, until its directly impacting them, basically personal fable at scale (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_fable).
I'm not sure the similarities hold. The best comparison I've found is the construction unions in San Francisco. They frequently block housing that is factory built somewhere else in the Bay area even though that would make it possible to build tonnes of new housing in the city at a fraction of the cost.
"But Jobs" they scream and hijack the council to block new housing. I'm sorry folks, the point of housing isn't the jobs it creates, the point of housing is housing! New jobs ARE actually created, they are just higher leverage ones in the house factory.
Mathematicians are now facing the same... calculation (pun intended). And I think they are empowered to create a lot more leverage, and they shouldn't be afraid of it. A lot of them are catching on to this [1]
[1]: https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2060451757818601808
I think the disruptions are temporary. Using AI still takes someone's time and the skill can be honed, which means there will be people specializing in using AI in different ways that are better than what someone just picking it up can do. It's just a reset on skill floors but the people with talent will rapidly regain ground and find their way to the ceiling again. The ones who learn the most, the fastest, will probably end up being worth more than they were previously.
I don't think any of these AI layoffs are actually because AI replaced a human. I think a lot of the layoffs are actually just due to a faltering economy or greedy companies trying desperately to get a piece of the pie, so they're sacrificing their long game for short term gambles. I don't think that's going to pay off for them.
I see a ton of people praising AI tools replacing software engineers. There is like a weird schadenfreude and an ignorance that this will only affect the tech industry.
They don't seem to realize that 100X the resources have been dumped into building coding/design tools as other industries. As soon as that hose gets turned towards their industry they are going to be in a similar or worse boat.
Also worth noting these are reactions to what is essentially equity in access to skills and knowledge.
I personally do wonder (worry) about where all of this pans out and what society looks like post generative llms. But at the same time there is a particular flavor of amusement that I can't help feeling watching folks simultaneously balance, "llms produce nothing of value" and "llms are so harmful and dangerous to our culture that we need to start policing use within our community"
Where that harm essentially stems from devaluing hard earned skills within the community. And while I do not take joy in the displacement of labor, never in my wildest dreams could I have anticipated how harsh and irrational of a reaction to the equity of these skills could be. Which, I would like to point out, though hard earned were earned under the tremendous privilege to pursue these goals in the first place.
Llms are an amplifier of an individuals intuition and taste. That these supposed pillars of the community are not bravely exploring how to push and wrangle these bounds, and instead are retracting into conservative stances under the guise of human centric morality is (IMHO) demonstrative of lack of confidence and creativity within these fields more generally.
I believe that this lack of creativity and imagination is how we find ourselves in the personal fable you're noting: the experts are so myopic that they can't even imagine how they're field can be disrupted until it's disrupted outside of their control, and feel the need to control rather than explore.
I’m curious, do writers and authors still really care about AI? I think by now most people are completely put off by AI slop, the value of AI writing or image generation is basically zero
So I suspect that the cloud will pass on math too, initial demos get extrapolated and people get worried but in the end slop is slop and serious people aren’t getting replaced or even threatened.
This is quite a way to admit that you don't have any writers or artists in your social group. It has absolutely gutted jobs in these industries, and will continue to do so.
If you think 'most people are completely put off by AI slop', you're living in a blessed bubble because: most people cannot even tell that the slop is slop, and are happy to engorge themselves on it.
> If you think 'most people are completely put off by AI slop', you're living in a blessed bubble
I think most knowledge workers don’t like AI because most of them are aware that AI was created to replace them.
Just about every CEO that has given a speech about AI at universities have gotten booed by the students which isn’t surprising as those CEOs are effectively promoting technology that will take their future from them.
Ehh, I've had the opposite experience, with lots of writers and artists in my circle.
The markets that have replaced writers and artists with slop never valued them in the first place, and the markets that do will never replace them with AI, and I say this as an AI engineer.
Writing movies, writing theater, creating clearly original illustrations for various purposes, these are all tasks AI will never threaten, because there is just no point. And also, the market sizes for this kind of thing are a rounding error compared to say coding or back office automation which is incidentally the bulk of the token spend right now, confirming all this.
But this is missing the fact that the vast majority of starting jobs for artists/writers would be in the former category. Similar to how AI coding or automation hurts junior hiring more than it does senior.
I found myself thinking about this issue when I was experimenting with an MCP server to handle tuning some precision parameters for scientific simulations. Claude did a much better job than I used to do when I was a fresh PhD student, yet being given tasks like that was how I learned, so it almost felt like pulling the ladder up after myself.
In the sciences, I think this is less of a problem because the PhD to scientist pipeline is pretty normalized, labs are used to the idea of having to let younger people take longer on problems that experienced people could solve much faster. But this doesn't seem to be as normalized elsewhere.
There have been numerous studies by now showing that most people cannot reliably distinguish "slop" from the real thing, and that many genuinely prefer the slop even.
> do writers and authors still really care about AI
it is demographics.. there is no single answer, you are talking about millions of people with varying amounts of this JOB description
> most people are completely put off by AI slop
this is almost pathological.. most people consume media not produce it. Those in the business of media have been eliminating people for thirty years, and this AI tooling has multiplied that effect
> the value of XXXX writing or image generation generation is basically zero
yes - bingo.. the average capable person now can expect to be paid ZERO for their ability to personally produce writing or image generation.. and, if you don't start somewhere, you will never get to ascend the ladder of success in those fields, by definition
> I suspect that the cloud will pass on math too
consistent with the other statements here, this is 180 degrees false.. substantiation? the content of the letter signed by world class mathematicians, who are visibly quite concerned
The artists will be fine and AI will liberate them. It's the engineers and mathematicians who are walking into the blade. They built their entire sense of self on being the best optimizers in the room and optimization is the first thing the machines take. Their whole identity was a number going up. Now watch it go to zero.
Depends entirely on whether "the market" ends up valuing what humans add to various artistic processes. Same for human engineers, who are still very much needed at least for the time being.
Certainly the scenario where a human touch isn't valued by the market raises lots of very difficult philosophical and economic questions but that's a separate issue.
> Depends entirely on whether "the market" ends up valuing what humans add to various artistic processes.
No, it does not, at least for arts. There is a chance, that AI will free art from it's utility or the necessary to create value. Maybe graphic designers and illustrators will lose their jobs due automatization, but most paid art (concept work, corporate design) was instrumental compromise anyway. Take away the commercial floor and what's left is the part they cared about most. Engineers on the other hand identify mostly by being optimizators and creating value. They may keep their jobs, but at what cost?
That depends entirely on what's meant by "will be fine" and "AI will liberate them". I was assuming you meant something along the lines of gainful employment. If instead you meant performing a meaningful task then I'd counter that most engineers like to build finished products not wallow in minutia. You can still hand roll assembly but I don't think many developers lament the advent of the modern compiler. Instead people build far more complicated systems than would otherwise have been possible.
Sure, but the compiler didn't promote the assembly programmer, it basically ended assembly programming. So which side of that is the engineer on? You're assuming we're the dev who got the compiler. But if the premise is that AI does the actual problem-solving, then we're the assembly and AI is the compiler.
> Engineers like to build finished products, not wallow in minutia
This only works if what you loved was having built the thing. If what you loved was the building itself, the solving, then "here's a way bigger system, the AI figured it out" isn't a win. It's just a promotion from maker to manager. And a lot of engineers specifically tried to avoid this promotion in their career.
My impression is that most developers are motivated to create a finished product for a variety of reasons. If what someone enjoys is the craft purely for its own sake then isn't the resulting situation exactly the same as for artists assuming a hypothetical future where the core activities of both are largely automated? Such people can still engage in the craft purely for their own enjoyment just as anyone who wants to is free to write assembly by hand today.
I cant speak for engineers, but as a mathematician I wholeheartedly disagree with everything you claim in your comment. Almost none of the mathematicians that I know care about the optimization aspect of mathematics: the pursuit of optemizing constants in theorems and providing minor technical improvements is mostly seen as pointless unless there are significant new mathematical insights that fuel the improvement. I think most mathematicians rather build their identity around providing actual understanding of problems using mathematics and improving society's understanding of mathematical problems.
Of course AI threatens this too, but the threat is of a much lesser degree. One could even argue that AI is helpful here with getting mathematicians to the 'frontier of knowledge' as AI is usually good in combining ideas from different fields.