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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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I do feel a little bad for artists. I mean, if you had a decent side hustle charging $50 to draw D&D characters, or a more lucrative side hustle drawing furry porn, AI is going to replace you.

Me too, but I don't really know what is to be done about it.

I agree with your assessment, it probably is all about money and fear of replacement at the end of the day. But it really is coming for all of us. What are all of us going to do? I merely hope that either we have time to learn new trades that won't get replaced again within our lifetimes, or I hope we will enter a post scarcity society where AI has made everything so cheap that money is meaningless.

I'm a pretty firm believer that the only thing that keeps life so good for so many people is that technological progress keeps making things cheaper and better. And really, I don't even know if I can say that I think that efforts to stop technology through the use of social stigma are bad. Instead I just feel like they're simply doomed to failure. People are going to follow the money. Maybe nuclear power is the one big exception I know of.

The number of people displaced in this manner is probably so trivial anyway. Illustrators tend to serve specific needs for clients, not something easily reproduced by ai. AI art is just the latest iteration of the stock photo.