My dream job has become obsolete bc of AI and I feel like nothing is real
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EDIT: I found this post, btw, just by searching reddit for "midjourney" and "career" when trying to gauge artists' sense of their career prospects in light of this disruptive tech.
The reality is anything but.
Art is not obsolete because of AI. In fact, they can probably, as an artist explore more ideas than ever before thanks to AI, without spending hours on an idea / project that may not pan out. Then focus your time on the ones that you feel will work. The field will evolve, and things will definitely change. People need to change along with it.
What AI cannot do (yet?) is replace human creativity and emotion. It cannot create things (reliably) that appeal to human emotion, because it is not human. It can't tell human stories, and feel joy, sadness or pain.
Art has always been about the expression of such things.
On the whole, I believe at a minimum, it definitely devalues digital art, since it will increasingly become difficult to distinguish authentic, hand-made stuff from the output of some AI.
My focus is on art as an expression of an idea or feeling - which AI can definitely improve and make more accessible. AI cannot create new art on its own - it still needs someone at the helm. If you are already an artist focused on that type of work, it is no threat to you.
If you're focused on art as cranking out designs and commercial work - then yes, it's possible that type of work will be harder to come by since it will make that part of the market far more accessible to others.
At the end of the day, AI is not sentient and can't take away jobs that require a human input.
The older I get, the more I think it's ludicrous bullshit. It doesn't seem to affect athletic people as badly as it does people with artistic or scientific dreams, probably because the game is over so much quicker. If your dream is to become a professional athlete and you haven't made it by the time you hit 23 then, for most sports (not all but definitely most), the dream is over. You might feel sad about it and have a period of mourning about that part of your identity but most people seem to get over it pretty quickly and go on to live fulfilling lives. Millions of sports fans pack stadiums world wide to watch their team play and a good majority of them probably dreamed of being on the pitch when they were younger. But somehow they can live contently with that failed dream and carry on enjoying their sport as a spectator.
For some reason, this seems to be harder for people with other dreams to take. Aside from the fact that you might waste a significantly larger chunk of your life chasing the dream only to fail, I wonder if some of it is tied up with the fact that the kids who choose these paths typically aren't the 'cool kids' and so an additional part of them has to deal with the fact that they no longer get to live out the fantasy of finding success in their field and thus getting both their reward and revenge for not being part of the in crowd. It means all their suffering was for nothing.
But it feels to me at least, that if you can get past this pain of not achieving your dream, there is some fundamental wisdom and growth that you earn that people who find success don't necessarily get until later in life, if at all. It's almost like a slice of true peace and confidence similar to going through something horrific and coming out of the other side. It brings you closer to other people because you realise all these stories people are telling themselves about how important all the stuff they're doing is and how incredibly they are is actually bullshit.
So many successful people are insecure and afraid of it, athletes take early retirement to go out on a high rather than come face to face with decline and not living up to their own expectations. I'd argue that some of them carry that insecurity well into their 40s as they struggle to adjust to a life where success in the sport isn't everything. Top business people might not realise it until they get seriously ill and then rethink their lives and start spending more time with family.
Not only that, but even people who are at the top of their game, are still unhappy and end up killing themselves either by their own hand or via drugs and alcohol. So this myth we're peddling, that pursuing your childhood dream as a career will solve all your problems, is clearly not a universal truth.
Yes, it sucks to lose something you love. But it happens to all of us in life at some point or another, be that a job, a house, or a person. The solution is to stop tying our identity and self worth to whatever it is we do to earn money or how big our pile of money is or just any one thing in general. There is nothing stopping this guy/girl from just creating art for their own fun and amusement and putting it out there for their immediate friends and family to see on a website or at a local art exhibition somewhere, just like millions of amateur musicians have no real ambitions to play anything other than their local open mic night. There can be fulfilment in that, especially if your life is also filled with other things such as good friends and family and a job where, even if it wasn't what you dreamed of as a kid, you can still see the value you are adding to your community.
But such change is slow and I agree it is scant consolation for the people about to suffer through little fault of their own. Not many people thought AI was a serious threat to art jobs a few years ago inside developer communities, let alone outside of it.
This is one of the major reasons why student loan forgiveness is so unpopular in the US (at least among those without student loan debt). But now it looks like for many, that greater earning potential is going to soon be severely truncated.