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Comment by georgeecollins | Hacker News Reader

I think we are in a 3D Printing/ Block Chain/ VR hype cycle where something important is happening but everybody is over reacting.

I really doubt 90% of anyone's skills have become worthless. Mediocre art and mediocre writing weren't valuable or expensive last year. People have been having programs write articles for a long time now. In the long run, yeah things are going to change a lot. But we knew that didn't we?

I wouldn't invest into this now, because there is too much is being promised too soon.

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We are in the selling shovels to the paranoid neurotic upper/middle class that is dependent on tech for their livelihood phase. A new form of the hustle culture.

Think about it this way. When the true revolution arrives, you will not get open access to it. The person that has access to such an AI has access to infinite labor. They will be the closest thing to a living god and will attempt to protect that moat at all costs.

> Mediocre art and mediocre writing weren't valuable or expensive last year.

At one point every town had a blacksmith, even the smallest villages. You could go there to get your horse shod, buy a pair of fireplace tongs, get a new latch for your door, and so on. In the nature of things, most of these blacksmiths were mediocre, but still, they made a living.

Now, there are certainly still a few people who make a living by being blacksmiths, but you sure won't find one at every wide spot in the road.

Except in this analogy, we're in the mid-20th century and you're lamenting that a new horseshoe-making AI is going to put mom & pop blacksmiths out of business.

Mediocre art, writing, and music on their own were already completely worthless. Go look on Soundcloud and watch as hundreds of new songs get posted every minute, most of which get 2 or 3 plays; no AI necessary. Even before ChatGPT, if you looked at the latest Medium blogs it would be a steady flow of articles with a handful of views.

Flooding the internet with AI-generated garbage content is going to be virtually indistinguishable from what we have now.

> you're lamenting that a new horseshoe-making AI is going to put mom & pop blacksmiths out of business.

I'm not "lamenting" anything, and can't imagine where you're getting that from.

> Mediocre art, writing, and music on their own were already completely worthless.

Nope. Plenty of people get paid for creating mediocre art, writing, and music. The guy who writes commercial jingles for Bob's Used Cars is not Johann Sebastian Bach. But he still gets paid.

ok, but has there ever been a time when mediocre artists or writers made a living?

Before the advent of music recording there were many more musicians since the only way to hear music was to to hear people play it. Of course music recording created a lot of job that didn't exist before too. But many of these musicians were presumably mediocre but they made a living doing it.

Today? Or before the internet when people’s idea of mediocrity and access to top talent was more limited? Depending on where in the world you live a $30 commission is a lot of money.

Sure. The people who write clickbait articles get paid even now. Not very much, as a rule, but they do get paid.

I don’t know, do TV writers make a living?

Writers working on network TV represent the most successful 1% of all writers.

Yeah I’d say most of that is pretty mediocre.

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