Will the AI Steal All of Our Jobs?

One of my friends told me recently she’s worried about her future. She works as a freelance writer and illustrator and has been watching the latest developments in AI tool with growing terror and unease. With AI illustrations flooding the internet for free, will anyone pay her to draw anything again? With large language models churning out whole articles in a second, will anyone pay her to spend a few days writing one?

There’s no doubt that AI tools are getting quite impressive. They can already generate realistic photos and completely surreal paintings, write articles on pretty much any topic as well as scientific papers or poetry, code fully-functional applications, and pass pretty much every exam from SAT to medical or legal licensing. In knowledgeable hands it can write a marketing campaign for a new product, create an entire website with all needed illustrations, draft all social media promos, or script and record a promo video - and do all of the above in just 30 minutes. And even if certain things are impossible to achieve with the current generation of AI, there’s high chance this will be solved in another few years or even months. All the AI tools I’ve tried so far are evolving crazy fast.

Studying computer science in college, I knew I was signing up for a lifetime of learning. The technologies we explored in our classes were already obsolete, or deeply unfashionable at least. We wrote most of our projects in C++ and sometimes even assembly while the world was going crazy about web and eventually mobile applications. At that time I often wondered how my job would look like in another 5, 10, or 30 years—and I still do. How could I possibly stay on the top of my game while new powerful technologies are released every few minutes? Will I ever be able to catch up, or compete with brilliant 20 year olds when I’m getting closer to the retirement age?

I don’t think my illustrator friend ever had to ask herself these questions. She had no reasons to suspect her job would look any different in 10 years than it was when she first started. But now the AI is coming for all of us: the writers, the marketers, the painters, the computer game designers, the bureaucrats, the researchers and the storytellers. Is there any hope for us? What can we possibly do?

This week alone I’ve seen some fascinating advertisements. First one: learn how to use AI and make money running a fully automated YouTube channel with all the videos created by the AI. Second one: Buy quality fine art prints to express your personality and decorate your house (there is no doubt the fine art came straight out of Midjourney). Third one: Buy my 700-page package of mystical and spiritual content for every occasion that you can use to promote your esoteric business on social media. I might have an idea where all this content is coming from.

This is just the beginning. Things will only get weirder from there. I know there are some very smart people convinced that the AI is going to kill us. I suspect the future will be much more banal, the AI will simply churn out an infinite stream of content every day and learn what people prefer to click at an incredible speed, so that in the end we’ll be flooded with so many fully-automated and irresistible tweets, articles, videos, computer games, and virtual girlfriends that we’ll stay forever fully glued to our smartphones or VR headsets, entertaining ourselves to death.

When it comes to jobs, I suspect it won’t be much different from photography. In the 19th century people made the exact same arguments about photography as they do about AI art tools right now. It’s not real art, it doesn’t have any soul in it, it’s too easy to make, you don’t need any skill to operate it, it will put real artists out of their jobs. And in a way photography did put some artists out of their jobs indeed, but at the same time it created even more jobs in their place.

Is photography art? Some of it certainly is, without any doubt. I know some incredibly talented photographers who pay great attention to the light, composition, and technique, and are willing to get up at 3:30am to climb a mountain carrying several heavy lenses in their backpack only so that they can capture the early morning sun rays painting the landscape orange. The rest of us is perfectly happy taking selfies and vacation photos without ever aspiring to make “real” art.

I have no doubts that people will us AI tools in a similar way. Some will elevate them to an art form, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible to achieve and always seeking new forms of expression. The rest of us will use them to create a short book about their own children, brainstorm ideas for their living room furniture, or illustrate a newsletter. I’ve already seen parents creating books about their kids going on some kind of heroic quest, all done with ChatGPT and Midjourney. If that makes a child happy, why shouldn’t they? It’s not like they were going to pay someone to write and illustrate such a book. They could either do it with the AI or not at all.

I don’t think the AI will steal artist’s jobs any more than iPhone cameras steal photographer’s jobs. If I didn’t have a phone camera always with me, I still wouldn’t hire a professional photographer to follow me on my RV trips. I simply would not have them documented at all. And even though pretty much everyone had a camera with them during our wedding, we still hired a photographer to capture these moments for us. Our wedding was important enough to get a professional photoshoot, but for most other occasions I’m doing fine without one.

So will the AI steal all of our jobs? So far it’s been quite unsuccessful with helping me write this newsletter, although I must admit I’ve put much less effort into learning the language tools than Midjourney so far. It seems like a common pattern, some of the visual artists I know will happily talk to ChatGPT but scoff at Midjourney messing up fingers and hands. I know writers who are eager to illustrate their writing with AI tools, but can’t imagine ever using large language models to write stuff for them. And even my husband who’s been geeking out about AI language and image applications for the last few months is highly skeptical of Copilot and other AI tools for coding.

It makes perfect sense. The more expertise you have in a certain domain, the higher your expectations of the end result will be. I’m perfectly happy with my newsletter illustrations as they’re just a nice addition to the actual stories, but I hold much higher standards for the stories themselves. The 30-minute website and email campaign might look sufficient to a layman, but an experienced marketer will understandably want to make more of it. Even if the AI creates an infinite stream of text, images, code, or videos, it will still take someone with taste and expertise to tell the good stuff apart, iterate on it, and refine it to meet certain standards. Otherwise you’ll end up with a fully automated product and marketing pipeline that gets only visited by robots.

Or maybe not. Perhaps at some point the AI will get great at asking good questions, making decisions and curating the most beautiful or impactful creations. At this point it’s really hard to tell how this is all going to evolve even in 5 years, let alone in my lifetime.

But if that’s the case, I will happily spend the rest of my days raising and unschooling children, teaching yoga, planting gardens, organizing my local community, farming goats, singing together with people, and all the other forms of cultivating everyday face-to-face human connection and fully embodied connection with nature. If the AI frees us from all the busywork so that we can focus on the important stuff, then by all means I am so here for this.