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Comment by dartos | Hacker News Reader

No, the first profession AI was on track to decimate was artists, but that didn’t really happen.

AI just destroyed shutterstock.

The large majority of professional writers and artists produce thankless commodity output for things like TV advertisements, games, SEO content. These jobs should be threatened.

They get paid pretty low wages so it's not even clear that AIs will be cheaper. Consider also that you still need a human to evaluate their output, make adjustments, etc.

Freelance writers are having a hard time:

https://www.reddit.com/r/freelanceWriters/comments/12ff5mw/i...

https://www.reddit.com/r/freelanceWriters/comments/17zms9f/w...

> "It pretty much has killed most small jobs in writing."

> "entry-level writing jobs have ceased to exist."

... There isn't an infinite amount of demand for commodity writing/art/music/vfx, and AI inference is pretty cheap and rapidly getting cheaper.

Is most code being written the equivalent of high-art or Shutterstock?

I think most code being written is like a custom car made out of the most cost effective parts available.

Not pretty, but it gets the job done for the specific use cases of a given business.

Real production code doesn’t and have a shutter stock equivalent.

If you think most code is stock, then you just haven’t had enough experience in industry yet.

I actually like that analogy. It's somewhere in between. Enough that LLMs can help in many ways, but the current models are still far away from doing everything.

Yeah, they’re not useless, but I don’t really see them replacing the profession of programming.

Just another tool in the kit.

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