Yes, but the consequence for society is that professionalization is coming to every single field, and the blue-collar jobs are evaporating, and we had better fi

Yes, but the consequence for society is that professionalization is coming to every single field, and the blue-collar jobs are evaporating, and we had better figure out how to get all those people either white-collar jobs or some other form of income if we want to avoid significant social instability. It used to be that you could find work as a political cartoonist and draw a picture of some satirizable politician each day - maybe Dr. Oz with a funny-looking vegetable platter, or Biden falling off a bike labeled "build back better," or something - and that would be a career. Now it seems you can just type "Dr. Oz holding a vegetable platter, political cartoon" into one of these AIs and the bulk of the work is automated. Sure, you could spend the rest of the day refining it, but nobody's really looking for perfection or transcendent skill in their political cartoons. You can still find work making political videos of Dr. Oz and vegetables (e.g. https://twitter.com/JohnFetterman/status/1564432981841907713 https://twitter.com/JohnFetterman/status/1564432981841907713). Today's image generation AIs cannot do videos like that. Tomorrow's will, before we know it, and again nobody's looking for more than a baseline level of quality there either. And even the local newspaper that might have been employing a political cartoonist is being swallowed by high-capital-ownership companies that can replace a lot of the writing with AIs. The expectations of quality are a bit higher - though the AIs have mostly gotten the hang of sports writing - but again people don't expect The Smalltown Gazette to have the standards of The New Yorker. Sure, the highest-quality drawings, feature films, and longform journalism will get a lot better. And that's great! But most people don't work on such things. What are they going to do? If nothing else, how will they remain an audience with money to spend on the highest-quality works? (I am not advocating for stopping this process, to be clear. Smashing the AIs isn't a coherent proposal, and smashing the physical machines of automation didn't actually work when the Luddites tried. I'm advocating for admitting that this process is happening and drying up employment, admitting that keeping as much of humanity as possible under a good standard of living is important for humanity, and figuring out what to do about it.)