alt Hacker NewsYou're not wrong. But there is a common perception that we value things made by humans more. The problem is that grunt work actually serves as a pipeline for industrial training. Even with AI, the distribution of value doesn't get resolved automatically.
Of course, I think it would be great if grunt work disappeared, but I believe skilled workers ultimately need grunt work. It's like saying that since AI automates everything, programmers don't need to know how to write methods. The core issue here is that grunt work, which AI excels at, plays an educational role in our society.
Of course, I admit my thinking is quite old-fashioned. This educational model could change. But I'm not sure whether that would be good in the long run. It could be beneficial in the long term. Humans evolve, after all.
I'll reserve judgment on that part.
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It seems to me the problem is not having to do grunt work but that it's impossible to make a decent living at it even though it's widely agreed to be a necessity to develop higher level skills. By 'decent living' I mean being able to support yourself and have adequate rest and so forth.
> Of course, I think it would be great if grunt work disappeared, but I believe skilled workers ultimately need grunt work. It's like saying that since AI automates everything, programmers don't need to know how to write methods. The core issue here is that grunt work, which AI excels at, plays an educational role in our society.
It's not just educational. The more thinking you offload to AI, the more your own skills degrade [1] - and it makes sense, intuitively. If you repeat tasks, you gain experience and get good at it... but if you cease that repetition, eventually your skills break down.
We do not value things made by humans.
Hand-made anything tends to be a Veblen good, which means it's there to signal status, which means it's expensive.
But expensive doesn't work in mass-media. So a hand-drawn anime isn't going to be more profitable than an AI-animated one.
As for education - possibly, but this is the end of a process that started with digitalisation. I'm a huge fan of hand-drawn pre-Illustrator graphic design, especially 1960s-80s. I think it has a liveliness and freshness that post-Adobe design is missing.
But I'm not the usual audience, almost no trained designers can hand-draw lettering today, and neither the industry nor buyers/consumers seem to care.
Likely the same thing will happen with AI. It will just become the new normal, with skills to match.