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Comment by slimebot80 | Hacker News Reader

There's a whole world of paying jobs out there where near enough is good enough. Where the client just wants to come up with something, and is happy to go in a direction that balances speed and cheapness.

There are millions of these jobs, taken by juniors and people trying to build a portfolio, and they will be diminished greatly.

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In my experience, there is no such thing as a design job where the client (or boss) doesn't make some kind of specific requests or feedback. Of course, with human artists, the marginal cost of such requests is relatively low - perhaps when the choice is between getting your stupid request honored for a human wage or taking what you get from an AI for ~free, executives will realize that none of their opinions are actually that important.

This is the same hollowing-out that came for all other industries. The high end people trusted with non-obvious problems continue to be worth a ton (worth even more if they are good users of the new tool), while juniors who do rote practice become nearly worthless. It came for lawyers, doctors, engineers, and even writers. Now commercial artists and designers are in trouble.

How did it come for doctors? AI is only useful in narrow applications like radiology and spotting things that are off, maybe radiology techs get displaced?

The hollowing out of primary care via midlevels e.g NPs and PAs is interesting however. They are fighting for the ability to diagnose and prescribe meds and see patients without physician oversight, largely driven by pressures to reduce costs by politicians and big insurance companies.

Radiologists, pathologists, etc. are now competing with AIs. Other doctors are now competing with RNs supervised by a single doctor and a huge electronic medical records system. The digitization and standardization of medical records is the transformative technology here.

And if the juniors can’t pay their bills doing the thing, who’s gonna step into the high-end shoes as the people who mastered the thing start to retire?

If you look at lawyers, you can see a narrow pipeline where there once was a wide funnel. People from top law schools and people who distinguish themselves early basically get groomed for partnership, and other lawyers have a hard time cracking 6 figures. I assume this will be the same for artists and software engineers too.

Aren’t paralegals going to get displaced by automated case law cross referencing systems doing the leg work for lawyers? I guess they would want to keep billing the most hours and use slow paralegals, while also using the automated systems to ensure their legal arguments are the best researched.

And that's the base higher ambitions build on, as a fallback layer. The "fine arts" certainly won't be the same without the lower levels of the pyramid. With the abundance of stable diffusion offerings, I'd expect that wave of "style transfer" ML that was all the rage a few years ago to become more important. Perhaps the act of shepherding recognisable ML identity providers won't be quite as bad a substitute of those low level graphics jobs as we think.

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