I think that's a good way to put it, but there's still a problem.
The path of a digital artist is long and arduous. For a time on this path, the artist may be considered mediocre, or to put it better, they are an apprentice.
Just as in other physical trades, an apprentice who is mediocre at their craft can still practice aspects of that craft well enough to be useful and earn some money. It is also through practice that the apprentice improves their skills. In this way, the apprentice is financially supported and even incentivized to improve at their trade, until one day they become truly good at it.
So what things like DALL-E and Github Co-Pilot and your clip art package do is displace the apprentice. With no path of mediocrity for the apprentice to walk, to earn a stipend for training, how then can they receive the financial support necessary to train until they're a master? They would need to already be independently wealthy or receive financial assistance.
In order to train more master artists and programmers, we would need to provide them with financial support while they train without us receiving anything useful in return.
It's interesting that you basically just made Andrew Yang's argument for Universal Basic Income -- that we need to redistribute the wealth of automation to all of society.
This is the perfect example -- with a UBI the apprentice no longer needs to get paid to learn. They can live off of the UBI while learning, until they are good enough to charge for their services.
1) We need people to do low level jobs. So if UBI exists, wages will need to rise until people are willing to do them. This will happen along with price raises until an equilibrium is found where poor people need to work in order to survive. No need for narratives about landlords raising rent, though it is possible. The poor people aren't in an overall worse position here though, because although they're still earning just enough to live, a portion of that minimum is now guaranteed. However:
2) By raising your domestic (or local) wages/prices, you've just given yourself an absolute disadvantage against every other economic entity in the world. Anything that is outsourceable is now more appealing to outsource than before. This removes jobs and puts downwards pressure on wages.
If everyone just "lives off UBI while learning" society won't function because the jobs they do are important.
You're missing the point. At SOME point, even YOU won't be able to find a job, due to robotics and automation, compounded by extremely high unemployment making even basic jobs like plumbing impossible to get. If that happens, we either just let everyone starve until the population drops to equilibrium, or restructure society to support people when there's no jobs for 99% of us.
It tipped decades ago: in the United States, the labor force participation rate for men has been in secular decline since 1950 (and perhaps earlier—-the Fred data only goes back to 1948):
There is a large difference between the labor force participation rate and the unemployment rate because the LFPR can’t be gamed. A stark way to think about it is to consider that, if every person currently looking for work were to fail to such an extent that they just gave up, the unemployment rate would drop to zero.
Yes, if you ascribe to the Singularity theory of technological development. The closer we get to the asymptote, the larger each automation jump will be, and we'll have less time to adjust as a society before another even larger jump in automation hits. Granted, at this point we're talking about basically being at AGI, but still, yes, the idea is that it will tip eventually
If our enormous economic engines were devoted towards efficiency rather than profit motive, I think we would be there.
How many appliances do we build to last for a few years and then break? How many economic resources could we save by building fewer products to last longer? If the economic engine were tilted towards quality rather than churn, we could be much more efficient about our use of resources.
The profit motive promotes efficiency by driving all prices towards marginal cost, as long as competition exists. Highly durable goods are not per se an efficient use of resources, but we probably disagree on the meaning of that word anyway.
If you wait until a post-scarcity to implement a UBI you will have violent collapse of society long before you reach post-scarcity. We walk a razor's edge of oppression - too little and society doesn't have enough peasants to grind into the machine to make the gears work, too much and the peasants destroy the machine.
And if you implement UBI now, you'll just shoot yourself in the foot and become less economically competitive because you're in a globalized economy. You cannot do this while you're still dependent on trade with other countries, which we are. You can do UBI when it really wouldn't matter if we didn't employ people in low wage jobs.
For all intents and prepared we already live in a post-scarcity society. We're just too shitty to make an effort to distribute the wealth, the food, the products etc.
The idea that high unemployment is likely is just an artifact of bad monetary policy in 2010.
The entire time, automation people like Yang have been claiming unemployment was already happening, and yet it was constantly going down. Unemployment in the US is now lower than it’s been in decades.
It's not so much that it's a bad artifact of something in the past, it's more speculation about what will happen to employment of humans if/when companies can just create human-level AI that operates 1000x faster than fleshy humans for digital/white collar work, and just buy a Boston Dynamics style robot with a similar AI in it for blue collar work
Why would the wages need to increase? UBI is additive to wages. It is not like welfare where one loses the money when one starts working. For the welfare state, you absolutely have to raise the wages to be above whatever the government is giving to those without money. UBI is explicitly intended to do away with that problem. In other words, if someone is willing to work for 20k a year now and we roll out a UBI that gives everyone 12k a year, then the 20k job is still an attractive option and would net them 32k. Now, it may be the case that the wage goes down to 8k which effectively leads to a UBI subsidizing the employers. That would be unfortunate and is a risk, but it certainly does not lead to a disadvantage compared to other countries in terms of employers though it may lead to disadvantages for attracting high earners.
A UBI also opens up the possibility of removing the minimum wage which not only allows for more people to obtain jobs, but also raises the competitiveness with other countries, potentially (it depends on whether the minimum wage is actually effective in raising wages above the market rate).
Doing a grueling low wage job because you need those wages to survive makes sense. Doing low wage jobs for the extra cash is not, because it's not a lot of cash. Money, like everything, has a diminishing marginal value. The first bunch of money is keeping you alive. If the government provides you that first bunch, your employer is providing much less value to you. Everyone preaches about how UBI will allow people to start businesses and learn skills. Well yeah, but that means they're dropping out of the labor force because they don't need to do those jobs.
How do you incentivize people to work? Pay them more.
In other words: We have to keep the slaves in poor conditions or else they'll quit working. The only thing we are able to provide to make them work, is a threat of death if they don't. No carrots, only sticks.
If you're in a globalized economy that has scarcity, yes. That is the unfortunate truth of it. And you're mostly deluding yourself if you manage to outsource your need for slaves to other countries and think you've done anything particularly good. It's a prisoner's dilemma over and over.
You already figured out the problem. If you agree to work a job for 20k, why would you not agree to work a job for 12 plus 8k? Earnings are the same, except now every net tax payer pays a subsidy for employers to pay pityful wages.
If mass unemployment was a substantial problem, this may well be an acceptable tradeoff, but in the current economy it is not.
This is backwards and incorrect. If you make $1M per year working very hard and now get $999k for free, are you going to work very hard for the extra $1k? No, because the marginal value of the $1k is trivial, but the labor effort is the same.
If you get just enough to survive from the government, and employers try to reduce wages because you'll net out the same, you probably won't accept the job. It's not worth your time. Even as a dirt poor person, your time is valuable. An employer needs to pay you more so that it's worth your effort again. You have much higher freedom to shop around too.
If the government does not pay you enough to survive (non basic income), you're still in a precarious position, but you are still in a BETTER position than you were without the funds. This will RAISE wages, which will in turn RAISE prices, until the equilibrium is found where the UBI is distinctly not sufficient and you need to work to survive. You will still be poor. You will make more wages, but have about the same level of real wealth. You will be a bit safer due the guaranteed portion of income.
Until globalization kicks in and makes your specific local circumstances much worse.
The assumption of UBI is that it is a wealth redistribution from automation, so
> We need people to do low level jobs
Is solved through automation and immigration (only citizens get UBI). Of course this is a major downside, because you end up with a slave class unless you make sure those immigrant workers are well protected.
Your point 2 has already happened. But the wealth still remains here in the US. So if that wealth were redistributed to the poor it would actually make things better.
> and immigration (only citizens get UBI). Of course this is a major downside, because you end up with a slave class unless you make sure those immigrant workers are well protected.
... Uh... yeah I would prefer not to have a slave class
> ... Uh... yeah I would prefer not to have a slave class
What do you think we have now, where lower class people need to work to survive? If slavery is having the option between work or death, then I don't see how our current economic setup is not producing slaves. Sure, we don't treat the lower class as property (at least not normally), but they are definitely forced to work under any reasonable definition.
The distinction with slavery is being property. Moreover, it is certainly not the case that people who do not work will die in our society. Being forced to do something to survive is not slavery in any meaningful sense of the word. It is the natural state of affairs.
Whatever wrongs you may think of the current capitalist / slavery-like conditions exist for the lower class now, they are not nearly as bad as the hypothetical society that relies on large amounts of labor of low wage immigrants who don't have UBI while everyone else does.
It's arguably the most regressive fiscal system one can imagine. A class of people who must earn an entire cost of living paycheck to net zero with their non-working, unskilled citizen equivalents.
The mental contortions people go through to redefine slavery to not mean property when that’s literally the definition is mind boggling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery
People are not property and they are most certainly not forced to work. Wanting things and needing money to buy the things you want is not “being forced”.
I'm not necessarily a UBI proponent, but the interesting thing to point out here is that if a job is so essential that it is required for society to function, maybe it should be paying a whole lot more.
It is essential that the poor earn as little as possible so as to incentivize their labor, and it is essential that the rich earn as much as possible (by, for example, reducing their tax burden) so as to incentivize their labor.
> We need people to do low level jobs. So if UBI exists, wages will need to rise until people are willing to do them.
Andrew Yang's premise is that those low level jobs are increasingly being automated away anyway - meaning that no, we don't need people to do them.
Even without that premise, this argument presupposes that people receiving UBI will do so in exclusion to working. That doesn't really logically or practically follow; it's just as possible that people will work anyway because extra spending money is extra spending money. They'll work because they want to work, not because they're being actively coerced to work.
> This will happen along with price raises until an equilibrium is found where poor people need to work in order to survive.
With Yang's proposal, the "price raises" part is probably true, yes. However, that has nothing to do with UBI; instead, it has to do with VAT. VAT advocates oft insist that it's somehow "not a sales tax" and therefore "totally not regressive like a sales tax", but at the end of the day consumers are paying more than they otherwise would for goods - and since consumer spending is disproportionately higher (relative to income/wealth) for the working class than the ownership class (or low/middle v. high, if that's the terminology you prefer), that's going to have the same regressive tax effects.
However, a VAT ain't the only way...
> No need for narratives about landlords raising rent, though it is possible.
Not if the UBI is instead funded by taxing the unimproved value of land - a.k.a. a land value tax, or LVT. We Georgists tend to call that a "citizen's dividend", but it's just a special case of UBI: a basic income intended to compensate citizens for occupying less than their equal share of land value within a given jurisdiction. There are a lot of implications of this (I could go on and on about the economic efficiency and ethical justifications), but relevant to this conversation is that the lack of deadweight loss means replacing other taxes with LVT would if anything reduce the consumer-facing cost of goods by reducing the effective tax burden of those producing said goods.
> Anything that is outsourceable is now more appealing to outsource than before.
That has already happened, without UBI. UBI is if anything necessary because of outsourcing - again, because we don't need local people doing those particular low level jobs, because they're now being done overseas.
UBI also might even help correct outsourcing; it's a lot easier to start a business if you know that if it fails (like most businesses do) you won't be homeless and starving as a result, and that's exactly the sort of safety net that UBI enables.
> Andrew Yang's premise is that those low level jobs are increasingly being automated away anyway - meaning that no, we don't need people to do them.
Well Andrew Yang is wrong. That's not what automation does. Automation reduces the amount of skill required to do jobs, reducing both the amount, but also the value. You still need people, and often more people because it becomes economical to employ poor people at a higher scale.
> Not if the UBI is instead funded by taxing the unimproved value of land - a.k.a. a land value tax, or LVT.
A land value tax is a great idea, but irrelevant to what I was saying. We need people to do low wage jobs. If they get some wages for free, we need to pay them more to do the jobs. If we pay them more, then we need to raise prices on the goods in order to not go bankrupt. The natural level of wages/prices is the one where people need to work in order to survive. The tax system and funding of the UBI is a separate problem.
> That has already happened, without UBI. UBI is if anything necessary because of outsourcing - again, because we don't need local people doing those particular low level jobs, because they're now being done overseas.
Economic Comparative and Absolute Advantages are not binary events. Doing things that make domestic businesses less competitive across the board in a globalized international economy is suicidal.
> UBI also might even help correct outsourcing; it's a lot easier to start a business if you know that if it fails (like most businesses do) you won't be homeless and starving as a result, and that's exactly the sort of safety net that UBI enables.
It's just a naive thing to focus on this founder idea.
> Automation reduces the amount of skill required to do jobs, reducing both the amount, but also the value.
Which translates to one worker being able to produce the same output as what required multiple workers previously. And sure, you could hire three entry-level workers at $15/hour for the price of one specialist at $45/hour, but chances are high that the same automation that enables those workers to do the specialist's job at all also enables said specialist to do considerably more than merely triple one's output.
Even ignoring the above, automation doesn't cause demand to materialize out of thin air; if you're a widget manufacturer and your sales team is able to sell 10,000 widgets a day, then multiplying the daily output of each widget factory worker from 10/day to 100/day will necessitate one of four things:
1. Figuring out how to multiply customer demand at the current widget price
2. Slashing widget prices
3. Slashing factory headcount
4. Slashing factory wages
1, 3, and 4 all minimize COGS and thus maximize profit margins. Unfortunately, 3 and 4 are both much easier than 1 (since 1 typically entails considerable effort to execute), so those are the options most companies pick. Both represent a severe loss of worker income - and thus, both necessitate UBI to compensate.
> A land value tax is a great idea, but irrelevant to what I was saying.
Assessing where the tax burden lies - and the impacts on that tax burden on spending ability, and the impacts of that on demanded wages - is pretty darn relevant to what you're saying. If you're paying an extra 10% (or whatever) on everything you buy, then you're going to adjust your wage expectations accordingly.
> We need people to do low wage jobs. If they get some wages for free, we need to pay them more to do the jobs.
Good. We should be paying workers a lot more than they're currently getting. The American (and for that matter, global) working class has been chronically shafted under capitalism for centuries now; God forbid we get shafted a little bit less.
> If we pay them more, then we need to raise prices on the goods in order to not go bankrupt.
Or the management could take a pay cut. I have very little sympathy for the "but what about our profits?" argument when C-level execs of even small businesses are skimming enough money on the output of our labor to be able to afford multi-million dollar homes and fancy cars.
> It's just a naive thing to focus on this founder idea.
Doesn't seem any more naïve than the idea that workers will somehow manage to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" in a socioeconomic system deliberately designed to ensure we're never able to accumulate enough capital to do so (even at all, let alone without significantly impacting our physical and mental health in the process). Entrepreneurship currently skews hard toward those who already have money. That's a problem which in and of itself needs solved in order for a society to actually have any semblance of that "equality of opportunity" to which "laissez-faire" capitalists pay lip service; that maximizing the ability for working class people to start their own businesses (be it as individuals or cooperatively with others) happens to also at least partially alleviate outsourcing-induced job loss is a nice side benefit.
> Is energy really scarce? Currently the entire world consumes about 165.000 TWh (Tera Watt per hour) which is a lot, but it just a tiny fraction of the energy we receive daily from the sun, which is about 174000 * 0.7 * 3600 TWh = 430.000.000 TWh. On top of this there is all the energy stored inside our planet and atmosphere, which has been subjected for billions of years to the sun’s energy transfer.
By this logic energy has never been scarce. Energy is one the most important scarce resources. Much of the world is currently undergoing an energy crisis.
> Is food really scarce? No, as it can be obtained by a mix of energy and chemical elements.
We have the sun, and there is soil, ergo food is not scarce.
> Are chemical elements really scarce? Let’s pick gold, an element which is notoriously considered rare. The total gold mined in all human history is 200.000 metric tons. But if we look at the abundance of elements on earth, even though the mass fraction of gold is just 0.16 part per million, knowing earth’s mass we can estimate the total gold on earth to be about kg * * 0.16 = metric tons. If we only consider earth’s crust, that’s about 100 times less, which is still a huge number.
Minerals that require more energy to retrieve than value they provide.
You state
> Now I’m going to state something which may either hit you as a profound insight or as an obviousness. Basic resources are not scarce per se, what’s limited is the ability to transform them and make them usable. The fact that we need a human to perform the job is what creates scarcity.
It's a really poorly reasoned thesis and your arrogance to call it a profound insight is just bad. If you have one human and you have a water pump that requires two humans' labor to retrieve one human's water, it is nonsense to say you have a labor shortage. You have a water shortage.That one resource can be used to acquire another does not meant there's only one resource on the board. Everything you've said about labor could be restated as useable energy.
Energy, food, materials, labor, land, time. It's all scarce.
I'm going to be level with you: I don't want to pay for someone's food and board so they can draw lines on paper (which won't sell) all day. Likewise, I don't expect anyone to pay for my food and board so I can do fuck all either.
If you want a living, earn it. If you want wealth, earn it. Might not happen with your favorite school of craft, but the vast majority of people don't/can't make money doing something they are passionate about.
It's called a basic income because it's subsistence living. Most people won't just live off it and do nothing. And those that would, well, they aren't really going to do much anyway if you force them to work, other than the bare minimum of the most menial labor.
So far every experiment in UBI has shown that almost everyone getting it does something useful with the money and doesn't just sit on it.
And frankly, I have no problem with paying someone to sit on their ass drawing lines, if it means they aren't starving and homeless.
He clearly doesn't expect everyone to be generous, hence why he advocates for UBI. UBI would be mandated and would therefore force participation from those without such generosity (according to their means, of course). By claiming that he holds a viewpoint which he obviously does not you've utterly failed to refute his argument. Perhaps you should seriously consider why his argument works and yours doesn't. You may come to a surprising change in your point of view.
This is the thing with automation, we're on a path to destroy most jobs that you can earn a living from self driving cars, automated kitchens (and ghost kitchens) self checkout, automated bookkeeping and mid level managerial positions, all of those are more or less set to be automated on the close future
Even if that only kill half the positions, we're still looking to a situation where humans overall don't have anything attractive to the market, if you can't earn a living wht would you do?
i don’t think your point is a valid retort; when you’re paying a landlord you are receiving something of value that you want for yourself, just like when you pay for a cheeseburger.
> when you’re paying a landlord you are receiving something of value that you want for yourself
No I don't. I receive a temporary lease to something of value that is fundamentally necessary for meaningful existence in modern society. Landlords are pure middlemen - and while there's a place for middlemen in society to provide initial capital, at some point that value dwindles down to zero as that initial investment is repaid, and then dwindles past zero as the landlord continues to parasitically rent-seek despite contributing nothing that the tenants themselves could accomplish for far cheaper.
Your retort to my retort would be valid (or at least actually equivalent to your cheeseburger analogy) if - in exchange for my rent checks every month - I received ownership stake in the property and/or the company that owns it. Such an arrangement has more in common with a housing cooperative than with a typical landlord/tenant relationship.
This focus on other people "earning it" almost seems religious to me at this point in our evolution, especially as we look forward towards automation potentially creating plenty. If we need people to work jobs, great, but why confabulate jobs just so people you can feel good that other people aren't getting their food and board paid for?
I agree with this sentiment, always have, but I always like to probe for issues with it.
When "earning it" takes much more than it used to due to technological shifts or otherwise, the only ones who can afford to walk the path toward mastery are the very well-off. This of course violates the modern western liberal ethos of equality for all, particularly in regards to educational pursuits.
We end up with a McDonald's worker class, their menial profession determined from birth, and their noble masters.
Maybe c'est la vie and there's nothing we should or even can do about it. But it's unpleasant, to say the least, knowing there's an entire class who's destined from birth to perform cheap menial labor their whole lives, without the slightest hope of doing anything else. After all, slavery is necessary for civilization, always has been.
seems like you're missing the main idea behind ubi? if automation gets good enough at enough things, there might not be jobs for everyone to do. if, when, where, and how the above might happen are up for debate - but your post just sounds like typical anti-welfare nonsense
I work in tech, and while it's mostly meetings and leaning on some knowledge of various Java and SQL use cases, as well as some niche knowledge of crappy languages like D, I probably don't work as hard as someone scrubbing the toilets or making the beds in the local Marriot hotel.
I can accrue money doing what I'm doing - they can't.
Perhaps seek recourse in one of the vast lucrative industries created from scratch in your lifetime (video games, b2b software, smartphones, internetworking, robots, ... )?
I don't think UBI can work. I love the idea of it, but as soon as you have a democracy and state provided income, it's too easy to vote yourself a raise. Look at countries like Argentina, Spain, Greece, Venezuela, where there are or were a huge percentage of people on the dole. Their economies collapsed. You can't keep squeezing a small upper middle class to pay for everyone. We're pretty much at the limit there as it is in many countries. I think UBI is fundamentally at odds with human nature in a way that would prevent it from being successful at scale.
If Native Americans in any significant number are receiving UBI already, then that's news to me. They're disproportionately in poverty - and thus disproportionately eligible for various strings-attached welfare programs like food stamps - and tribal members / reservation residents receive some additional pittances of federal funding as a sort of "sorry we stole your lands and attempted to genocide y'all, now shut up about it and take this spare change we're throwing at you", but that's about it. The only thing even vaguely resembling tribal UBI of which I'm aware is annuities from casinos, and last I checked those don't come anywhere close to even meeting the poverty line, let alone sufficient for anyone to live off them - i.e. they don't satisfy the "basic" in "universal basic income".
UBI is the solution, not the problem - and on the topic of Native Americans, funding it can and should start by taxing the unimproved value of the very lands we conquered from them.
The assumption is that most basic needs will be provided by automation, not humans, hence the need for a UBI. Also, immigrants, since they don't get UBI (but hopefully get a lot of protection so as not to become a slave class).
That’s a pretty stupid assumption given how many of the jobs that support basic human needs are labor intensive (home construction, farming, medical attention, infrastructure construction for energy and water, etc, etc).
We aren’t even close to automating basic needs. We can certainly automate the manufacturing of some complex individual items though. Seems like a pretty fundamentally flawed assumption of UBI.
Just to illustrate what the problem is using an extreme example: Oh good, we made it so anyone can turn the whole of the earth's crust into paperclips with a push of a button in a fully automated way that doesn't require any human labor and the energy to do it is completely sustainable. Hmm... Maybe that wasn't such a good idea.
I'm not understanding your objection. Would you be able to fill in some of the steps between "UBI" and "the entire earth's crust has been turned into paper clips"?
I'm guessing that they're imagining we'll give the productivity AI too much leeway, because it prints money so nobody has to work, until it goes unchecked and eventually starts making decisions contrary to typical human interests, because we based its reward function on profit instead of understanding what people really need/want to be happy.
Let's say that we have completely automated fishing boats. They can trap every fish in the sea. We give everyone UBI. They all decide to eat fish. No humans have to work or do anything to completely remove all fish from the sea. Is this a good idea? In previous eras we were constrained by the need for human labor to do all these things, but now AI does it, so we can have as much of it as we want until the natural resources run out. This creates problems with sustainability however, so how is that controlled?
This is a problem we already have to deal with: people got rich enough that they could afford to pay people to overfish the oceans, and we responded by limiting how much people are allowed to fish.
That is, I don't think UBI adds a new problem beyond "how do we make sure that humanity properly accounts for externalities" and "how do we make sure that AI does what we want it to do".
I was using fish to make an obvious example. The answer is regulation, but there are so many things like fish in the world. Do we have to have a regulation for every single one? It seems like it will end with whack-a-mole micromanagement of everything. It almost seems like we'll get communism eventually out of it. Except there is no all labor is of equal value, because there's no labor. I wish there was some alternative.
I'm sorry, I just still don't see the path by which UBI leads to a dramatic increase and how much regulation we need? Would you be able to give an example that is specific to UBI, and that describes a problem we wouldn't have without it?
Economists are still divided on the subject. So far localized experiments in UBI have not caused localized inflation, but it's hard to tell since it's small scale.
I'm not so sure it would actually happen though. We already give support to a lot of poor people through various programs like EBT and Medicaid. This just converts that help to cash, which gives people more freedom on what they want to spend on.
The problem with UBI experiments is that it hasn’t been U. If it’s localized and small scale it’s obviously not Universal, which makes it hard to draw conclusions.
With tools like stable diffusion, mastery means something different than it used to. Now a master is understands style and composition, who knows how to use the tools effectively to produce stylish, well composed images, then has sufficient editing skills to clean up/paint over tool output in order to produce professional results.
But the problem presented in GP still exists right? Not everyone starts out with a good understanding of style and composition from the start. They need time to master those skills but also need a line of income to survive till then. If mediocre level work is all automated someone starting out might not get the time to reliably skill up
Learning composition and style is a different thing than developing technical skill though. You can learn the principles of composition/framing and get a good survey of art styles in months, compared to technical skills which frequently take years and years to develop. With this tech, you could start out as an enthusiast generating your own art, then get hired as an assistant of sorts to do low level prompt and input "exploration" for a head artist in a sort of apprenticeship.
The general public are not going to be the ones using these tools for the most part. Sure some people will try it for fun and some will become hobbyists but the ones actually producing salable work will be in the industry or attempting to get into it. So now instead of drawing a bunch of crude pictures and selling them for cheap they’ll be generating those images with an AI and selling them cheap.
All of said tools having the most godawful interfaces and documentation known to man if the JS ecosystem is any evidence of the direction things are going.
Was there really an apprentice level for digital artists before AI models? I know somebody who does a lot of digital art as a hobby. They have spent years and years working on stuff for their own enjoyment, and to hear them tell it they're only now reaching the point of marketability.
What's the market for mediocre art today? I long ago worked on tech for magazines, which would sometimes use adequate commissioned art to jazz things up. But that was before the rise of vast stock art collections that were instantly accessible. Looking at some popular web-based magazines, it seems like the still commission the occasional original illustration, but that it's mainly stock photos or photo-composite illustrations.
Learning to play an instrument, to draw, sculpt or basically anything is hard, or at least it takes time.
There was never a market for mediocrity... but people will happily pay for exposure (to play in a bar, rent a space as a gallery and so on).
The problem is that even for good art it's hard, and it has always been. The rise of accessible stock art doesn't help, and AI will not.
Still one point is important: if you want to create something new, and not reassess (derive) the same thing, I guess we (human) have still a place. At least for now.
I don't know about digital art, but centuries prior, traditional artist training followed the apprenticeship model just like any other trade at the time. Leonardo da Vinci walked this path.
And less than a century ago, scores of people drew background images for Disney animated feature films, with the better ones getting allowed to draw main characters, and the best having final say in accepting or rejecting drawings.
I guess the same happened with those creating and animating 3D models for the likes of Toy Story.
Sure, but we're talking about the near-future impact of AI. My point is that I don't think this is going to make much of an impact on available apprentice positions. I'm not worried about da Vinci; he won't be harmed by this.
The thing is, the job of the digital artist of the future will include Stable Diffusion or whatever comes next. The apprentices of tomorrow will be apprentices not at creating this kind of work by hand but at using these technologies to make art. The problem is there aren't any masters at this, yet.
As an aside, I'm not sure I'd use the term "apprentice" -- I'd maybe say "junior" as in "junior developer" or "junior designer". They're learning how to make good work, but they're still a professional in the field.
I think this argument is a bit like saying that mechanized looms will destroy the art form of weaving. The apprentices won’t be able to practice their craft by slogging away at menial tasks but they will be able to learn the new craft of AI enhanced art and coding. They’ll need to learn a new set of skills along with some of the old skills in order to succeed and what they produce will be magnified by the power of this new technology.
I think the apprentice model will still exist, they’ll just use AI to aid them. Only the very experienced, talented artists will know when AI is hindering them. Same way a really good programmer will understand when not to use a web framework or whatever, but an inexperienced programmer who knows how to make a crud app with django or whatever is still valuable.
The path of a digital artist is long and arduous. For a time on this path, the artist may be considered mediocre, or to put it better, they are an apprentice.
Just as in other physical trades, an apprentice who is mediocre at their craft can still practice aspects of that craft well enough to be useful and earn some money. It is also through practice that the apprentice improves their skills. In this way, the apprentice is financially supported and even incentivized to improve at their trade, until one day they become truly good at it.
So what things like DALL-E and Github Co-Pilot and your clip art package do is displace the apprentice. With no path of mediocrity for the apprentice to walk, to earn a stipend for training, how then can they receive the financial support necessary to train until they're a master? They would need to already be independently wealthy or receive financial assistance.
In order to train more master artists and programmers, we would need to provide them with financial support while they train without us receiving anything useful in return.