I’m usually pessimistic about socio-cultural effects of technologies pushed into the world by corporations driven by capitalistic motives without much consideration for (unintended) consequences. In this case though, I’m cautiously optimistic that thanks to AI we are headed towards a renaissance of the humanities.
Today’s LLMs and other AI technology will likely cost many jobs. A few years ago many professional language translators had to look for other ways to earn money, not because translation technology finally became great. It was (and still is) just good enough, but it’s cheap, so that you can have stuff translated for (almost) free. If you don’t need or want a proper high-quality translation, you can use AI for that. The result will likely be average at best, but there are a lot of tasks where mediocre and cheap is superior to excellent and expensive.
I think the same will be happening to most written and graphical content, quickly followed by all kinds of media assets. For instance, game studios will for sure soon replace most designers with prompt engineers, perhaps first just for prototype assets, but it won’t be long until that’s good enough for a mediocre game to be published with such generated assets. On the plus side you could also see it that way: Soon you might be able to create your own game and don’t need to pay for any artists and still get some decent assets for it.
Of course, what happens to all those people out of their jobs? I don’t know. Some will perhaps switch from programming or writing or graphic design to prompt engineering and kind of do what they did before, but this time directing AIs instead of doing it themselves. Some will go into other industries, those that seem further away from being automated for now. And some will try to figure out what we as humans can still do better than AIs. And I think that is an extremely valuable idea to think about.
There is a chance for another renaissance. Good art has a deeply humanistic quality that I believe AI hasn’t cracked yet, and won’t until we get to AGI, which I’m certain is still relatively far away (I can go into detail why, but that’s probably for another thread). And I’m not just thinking about the kind of art that ends up in galleries and museums. Something you created yourself for a loved one can be a piece of art. A really well-designed product can also be a piece of art. Heck, even a really well-produced TikTok or YouTube video can be a piece of art. We know it, when we experience it. And the really good stuff won’t be just randomly falling out of an AI model, because to make the stuff that makes our hearts sing you need more than just a bunch of algorithms and a lot of processing power. What you need for that, we all have deep within us.
I have to say from my own experience, going through a programming education and working in the tech industry usually doesn’t help in revealing it, and often causes it to be buried instead (because profit, speed, efficiency, metrics, etc.). But if more of us who are technically capable also find their way back to what makes us human, we stand a good chance of figuring out how to coexist with the mediocre domain-specific wannabe-humans that AIs are today. And wouldn’t it be great to have all the mediocre stuff be dealt with, so we can focus on the great?
I’ve also keep a ChatGPT browser window open and experiment with it. I enjoy using it for use cases where I basically let it prompt me with clever questions to push my own creativity. Relying more on the muse than on the oracle. There’ll be a lot of people that will happily jump on the automation use cases and have their dull work taken care of, I think Microsoft is setting that up quite effectively for the business world. But with the right mindset, a healthy amount of skepticism and distrust in the generated “facts”, and creativity in how to let LLMs play to their and our own strengths, there sure is lots of opportunity. The future is going to be wild.