What did smartphones do to photography?
I know what they did to cameras, but photography?
You still need the person who takes the picture, and the process of taking a picture hasn't really changed that much.
I know what they did to cameras, but photography?
You still need the person who takes the picture, and the process of taking a picture hasn't really changed that much.
I don't know why LLMs would do that with "writing" though.
The same might potentially happen with writing, where if anyone can generate a decent original story, poem, advertising copy, product UI writing, etc. in less than five minutes, the lowest and middle tiers of paid writing work will be eliminated.
It’s possible that because these writing-specific jobs were already low value / largely eliminated by the Internet at large, that won’t happen. But it could happen to almost any role that basically involves synthesis and summary of words and data, since LLMs are so general purpose.
But digital cameras for the everyday person existed long before the smartphone. And before that, point and shoot film cameras and Polaroid.
The marginal cost of taking a photo is now $0. It's a hobby that anyone with a smartphone can now take up.
It’s was already a near universal hobby.
20 years ago nearly everyone took pictures at some point. Every house had a camera or two, and disposal cameras were cheap and very widely available.
It was widely regarded as a universal hobby back then. My mom was a wedding photographer, and people would regulars make the same arguments back then.
If you look at historic BLS data the number of photographers has actually grown faster than the population has since 2020, and the wages in 2021 were about the same adjusted for inflation.
Clearly smartphones haven’t had a huge impact on job numbers or salaries. My hypothesis is because photographic skill was already as devalued as it was likely to get, and that actual technical skill is a very small part of the overall job.