“‘Drink… More…. Ovaltine’, It’s just a crummy ad!?!?” crumples up cypher and tosses away
Holiday movie references aside, I guess we can chalk up a few more jobs on the ‘AI Took Our Jerb’ board: secret decoder rings, secret decoder ring-factory workers, and Enigma machine operators… and I guess cryptography-based puzzle enthusiasts, but that’s not a paid position.
Another tangent, I’ve only recently realized the OTHER AI took our ______ problem: all the various hobbies that people can spend a lifetime enjoying, perhaps incrementally improving (but most likely never mastering) over the years…. which have now been made much less exciting and rewarding, now that AI can do them instantly. Art and music are two very obviously implicated hobbies, but more niche hobbies like amateur cryptography are impacted too. I’m sure there are many many other examples…
Yes, unfortunately. I have met people that love AI videos (my in-laws being the closest to my bubble) and defend them as enjoying creativity.
Many people with niche and nostalgic tastes loved that music AI that got sued to oblivion recently.
For the record, I revile both as well. But for every person eating salad, there’s someone subsisting on McDonalds.
Okay, AI videos, whatever, people are stupid. But that's not art, and it's not music. People in my circles (art-adjacent) immediately bounce off AI images and music.
Outside of our bubble, yeah, especially if it's not called out specifically as AI. YouTube and Facebook are awash in stuff that's pretty clearly AI, and it's getting engagement or they wouldn't keep making it.
All of the "engagement" I see on those videos is calling out that it is slop and boomers being confused by whatever the topic is.
That view has been accompanying me for a while as well. Difficult to really put a finger on it, because what I'm thinking of are fields where "enthusiast dilettantes" did not have their joy in honing their skills in the slightest way affected by the existence of trained professionals so much better than them. But when anyone can just throw a few ktoken at it, that joy has to be, uhm, "renegotiated".
I guess sub-fields with little tool use won't be affected a lot, tool-heavy sub-fields.. might pretty much be over. (think playing the guitar at a campfire vs going wild on a set of TB-303 + TR-909 vs going wild on emulations thereof)
The other "ai took our..."
I like that term, I have been looking for a while now and haven't yet been been able to come up with a better one.
> all the various hobbies that people can spend a lifetime enjoying
I disagree. AI took chess literally decades ago now, and more humans enjoy playing it now than ever before.