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Comment by thrdbndndn | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure how this contradicts what they said. AI would likely lower the number of paid opportunities.

Additionally, art requires practice. Sure, some "lower-tier" artists may produce work that AI could replace without anyone noticing. But by removing that step, we risk having fewer truly great artists emerging.

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The paid artist is, in fact, the outlier.

I will also be honest, if you expect to live off your art, you are doing it wrong.

If you expect to live off typing letters and numbers on a keyboard, (or off the labour of others, while you siphon up the lion's share of their productive surplus), you are doing it wrong.

You may not be able to be rich, but at least until recently it was possible to make a living and not be homeless/require patronage.

Absolutely ridiculous to assume that only some careers allow the makers to live off them.

That's the point: for almost everyone it's not a career. It's a hobby. Like some people have a career researching physics because they're extremely good at it and society has decided it makes sense to have a few. Then there's people like me who learn what they can of it in their free time, but I do something else as a career because realistically very few people have need of someone who's familiar with the Dirac equation or whatever. Among the general population I'm probably in the 99th percentile of math/physics knowledge/ability, but I don't do that for work because we don't need 1% of the population working on such things. And that's for a skill that causes most people to get anxiety; the demand mismatch is probably even greater for things that average people actually enjoy.

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