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spaceman_2020today at 9:45 AM10 repliesview on HN

The worst part is that AI's first casualties are jobs that no one really asked to kill.

AI is killing writing, music, art, and coding. I've done all of these voluntarily because I simply enjoyed them

Meanwhile the parts of my existence that I actually hate - dealing with customer support, handling government forms, dealing with taxes - is far from being automated by AI

Look at Suno. Fantastic tool, but where was the capital need to make music generation so cheap that no musician could ever compete with it? Did the world really wake up one day and concluded that, "wait, we're spending too much on musicians"?

Seems like a complete misallocation of capital if I'm perfectly honest


Replies

ArchieScrivenertoday at 9:49 AM

Its not a misallocation of capital its an investment in media control. You don't how all this works yet do you? Your job is to be frustrated and desperate so you indulge in vice and convenience so others can profit while making your confines smaller and smaller.

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raincoletoday at 9:57 AM

> dealing with customer support

This is one of the first parts LLMs tried to automate. They were literally released in a form of chatbot. Whether it succeeded is another question.

> Did the world really wake up one day and concluded that, "wait, we're spending too much on musicians"?

I'm not sure about musicians specifically, but in the whole past decade studios have been complaining how costly it is to make AAA games. And the cost mostly came from art asset side.

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azan_today at 9:55 AM

I'm sure people working in customer support or tax advisors would have different take of what should be killed by AI and what should be spared.

izuckentoday at 10:04 AM

Because elites hate you moreso than downtrodden (they love miserable people in a sense). You are an independent agent with your own ideas, worst case you are completely orthogonal to the hierarchy, and this is something that breaks the intended world order.

aerhardttoday at 10:09 AM

AI cannot write for shit, it’s not even a fraction of a millimeter of the way there compared to the production of Thomas Mann or Dostoevski or Cervantes.

The fact that people are using it to flood the world with slop is a hyperscaled continuation of the overabundance and discovery problems we already had, but that doesn’t mean that writing is dead or dying.

The technology simply doesn’t have the capabilities right now, and even if it develops them, what will be put to the test is whether literature is about the artifact or the connection between the author and other humans.

armchairhackertoday at 10:24 AM

> AI is killing writing, music, art, and coding.

At least today, LLMs make bad creative writing, music, and art. They’re automating sweatshop work that, in an alternative timeline, goes to Fiverr-esque contractors who accept the lowest wages and sacrifice quality for efficiency in every way.

LLMs make developers more efficient but can’t fully replace them. This reduces jobs, but so did better IDEs, open-source libraries, and other developer improvements.

> Meanwhile the parts of my existence that I actually hate - dealing with customer support, handling government forms, dealing with taxes - is far from being automated by AI

LLMs can at least theoretically do these things. I’ve heard people use them to mass-apply to apartments and jobs, and send written customer complaints then handle responses.

> Look at Suno. Fantastic tool, but where was the capital need to make music generation so cheap that no musician could ever compete with it?

There’s no “capital need”, but a benefit of Suno is that it lets individuals, who otherwise don’t have the skill, to make catchy songs with silly lyrics or try out interesting genres. And the vast majority of top artists are still human, although most streaming revenue has already gone to a few celebrities who seem to rely on looks and connections more than music talent.

jollymonATXtoday at 10:08 AM

One of those 4 reliably makes enough to be a target just in how much is spent on it.

sleepingresettoday at 9:49 AM

imagine if producing music was as easy as using claude code or something

philwelchtoday at 10:18 AM

Coding is one thing that is genuinely more enjoyable with AI than without it. It’s a different (but overlapping) skill set, but my median AI sessions remind me of the most exhilarating design discussions I’ve had with colleagues, and I get a lot more done more quickly than I used to.

Customer support is kind of something you can use AI for; most companies will foist you off to some system of exchanging written messages, which is annoying, but then you can use an AI to write your side of the conversation. It’s ill-mannered to do this when you’re interacting with actual people, but customer support is another story.

> Look at Suno. Fantastic tool, but where was the capital need to make music generation so cheap that no musician could ever compete with it? Did the world really wake up one day and concluded that, "wait, we're spending too much on musicians"?

People didn’t know what LLMs would be capable of until after they were invented. Cheap music generation turned out to be easy once we had cheap text generation, and cheap text generation turned out to be a tractable problem.

vintermanntoday at 12:55 PM

If recorded music didn't kill music, then AI probably won't either.

But recorded music was a crisis. And it did tempt a lot of people into supporting fabulously abusable, rich-enriching "intellectual property" law as a means of financing art.

Rich people are lobbying to capitalize on this crisis as well.