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"Technology displaces workers" is not a new thing or a very controversial prediction that I am aware of anyone on the other side of. The contentious prediction is that AI would create structural persistent unemployment effects across the entire economy which every prior technological paradigm shift has yet failed to do. A few commission artists having to find jobs elsewhere in the service sector won't be evidence for that, nor would they really be the first to be impacted by AI in general (most translation work is now done by deep learning models, for example -- similar to AI art, a human in the loop is only necessary when the requirements are particularly complex or the quality demanded exceeds some nominal bar).
The part that you might not quite appreciate if you weren't monitoring every advance in this field is how quickly things have improved, which is to say how rapidly this disruption occurred.
We passed a point where computers became better at chess than any possible human a couple decades ago. Computers became better at Go about 6 years ago. This year they became better at producing art than 99.9% of humans, and they're certainly faster at it than any human could be. Most of the advances there occurred in the last 2 years.
And now there are models that can be applied to basically any game or task that can be effectively digitized, and can reliably train themselves to [better-than-human levels in a matter of days, maybe weeks.]
That's not to say that we're going to see unprecedented levels of 'hard' unemployment, but it is likely to sweep into unexpected places in very short order.
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Completely true. Current advances do not guarantee the "no more jobs" dystopia many predict. My excitement is likely primarily a result of how much I've involved myself in observing this specific little burst of technological displacement.
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