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Comment by sssilver | Hacker News Reader

The supply/demand picture here is more complicated than it looks.

If AI displaces human educators, yes, their supply shrinks -- but we can't assume what direction its demand will go.

We've seen this pattern before: as recorded music became free, live performance got more expensive, and therefore much less accessible than it used to be.

What's likely to happen is that "worse" (read: AI) education will become much cheaper, while "better" (read: in-person) education that involves human connection-driven benefits will become much less accessible compared to what it is today.

Most people may be consider it a win. It's certainly not a world I'm looking forward to.

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Important follow-up to my comment: as fewer people do X -- live music, medicine, education, you name it -- fewer talented people do it as well.

Fields need a large base of participants to produce great ones. This is exactly why software has been so extraordinary over the past 30 years: an unusual concentration of gifted minds across the entire humankind committed themselves to it.

In my view, Bach, Rachmaninoff, Cole Porter equivalents today probably aren't writing symphonies. They've decided to write code for a living. Which is why any Great American Songbook made today won't hold a candle next to one from 1950s.

Disagree, we do have the Bach's and Rachmanioff's today: John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Bear McCreary, Yuki Kajiura, Hans Zimmer, and probably a slew I'm not even aware of today.

We're in the greatest era of symphonies IMO, it's just that they're hiding in surprising places; movies, TV shows, games, etc.

The sound track to "Lord of the Rings" is one of my favorites.

I don't think we can know whether or not this is the case in our own lifetimes, because we are so immersed in popular culture that we can't be objective about it. Enough of our historical great composers weren't venerated until after their deaths, and to describe composers as "hiding" within the most popular media of our era is a great disservice to the many composers that don't have the fame, connections and reputation to be hired to write for these.

I would also point out that composing for a medium like a game or a movie places a great deal of constraints upon the composer, in terms of theme, cost of instrumentation, duration and most importantly: what is safe and palatable for an executive to approve of.

Do you think that composers of the past did not also face real-world constraints?

And AI is stuck in the past. As we prepare to launch a new product… people using AI won’t know about it for months or years, potentially. This will make startups have to seed the planet with text so an AI learns about it, not to mention normal SEO and other shit. I’m sure it is only a matter of time before you can pay to inject your product into the models so it knows about it faster, but incumbent companies will pay more to make sure they don’t.

The future is going to suck.

> I’m sure it is only a matter of time before you can pay to inject your product into the models so it knows about it faster, but incumbent companies will pay more to make sure they don’t.

You have just discovered the fully enshittified version of the business model ai companies hope to reach.

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