This is partially a repost of my comment in the news megathread but not really.
OpenAI just announced Sora, a tool for creating video from text, and the results are really fucking good (especially compared to state-of-the-art AI video generation tools), and this has me thinking about job security again.
Generative AI is already displacing workers.
A study surveying 300 leaders across the entertainment industry reports that three-fourths of respondents indicated that AI tools supported the elimination, reduction or consolidation of jobs at their companies. Over the next three years, it estimates that nearly 204,000 positions will be adversely affected.
The Concept Art Assn. and the Animation Guild commissioned the report, which was conducted from Nov. 17 to Dec. 22 by consulting firm CVL Economics, amid concerns from members over the impact of AI on their work. Among the issues is that concept artists are increasingly being asked to “clean up” AI-generated works by studios, lowering their billed hours and the pool of available jobs, says Nicole Hendrix, founder of the advocacy group.
“We’re seeing a lot of role consolidation and reduction,” Hendrix says. “A lot of people are out of work right now.”
According to the report, nearly 77 percent of respondents use AI image generators enabling, for example, individuals to upload landscape photos to virtual productions screens or speed up rotoscoping in postproduction. They have applications in 3D modeling, storyboarding, animation and concept art, among other things.
Generative AI displacing workers isn't some future hypothetical, it's something that's already happening right now, and as someone working in a field which is vulnerable to automation by AI tools, I'm really worried that OpenAI (or some other company) is going to create a new tool that just completely puts me out of a job.
Is anyone else worried for their job? Is there anything that can be done?
Yeah, this is how this stuff tends to go down. New tech doesn't have to replace an industry wholesale, it just has to make it so that one person is more productive and capable of taking on more work that might've gone to another employee needing to be hired. Technology is a Force Multiplier. Many of the companies doing lay offs and hiring freezes right now will, in the future, find it more profitable to spend money on software and cheaper, less skilled labor than to hire back anywhere near the amount of people who have been let go. This happens pretty regularly, but at an extremely large scale during recessions. The future is gonna be pretty rough.
As leftists, we really should be trying to leverage AI's massive Force Multiplier potential to help us in our organizing and overcome the vast gulf in our numbers but it's become much more popular to shrug it off than to learn about it. A lot of people took the ExplainItLikeI'm5 version of this stuff and decided they're experts on it and that's that. I've been studying this shit in my spare time for almost 20 years. My intro book, currently sitting on my bookshelf, is so old that it talks about the potential of ATT's landline video phone which I got to demo as a kid.
Believe me when I tell you the current LLMs barely scratch the surface of what neural networks are capable of. And you can bet Capital is gonna use it to squeeze every last drop of productivity out of us until we're no longer necessary.
I agree. AI doesn't need to automate 100% of people's jobs, it just needs to automate 90% of people's jobs and allow one person to pick up the work of ten.