Destroying commercial art culture really might not be a bad thing. The overwhelming majority of visual artists, writers and musicians don’t make money from their art, and would continue doing it even if the big corporate parasites went bankrupt.
> The overwhelming majority of visual artists, writers and musicians don’t make money from their art
I wouldn't be so sure about that.
The overwhelming majority don't make big money, but many, many creatives make a living on their art, and a lot of them are OK with being fairly low-paid (I know quite a few). They do what they love, and get paid enough to keep doing it. As a musician friend of mine says "You know what's great? I get to play music for people, and then they pay me for it, when I'm done!". He is not a huge rock star, but does well enough to tour around the country.
People tend to sneer at creatives, thinking of them as "parasites," or "doing something that anyone can do, so why should they be paid?"
I can tell you that I appreciate having a trained professional designer, help me with my software design. They can do something like fart out a logo in five minutes, that can become one of the most significant assets a company has. That's a really valuable skill.
We'll have to see if AI can actually replace that. It probably will, for many contexts. It's gotta be better than some of the efforts I see, by engineers that think they are creative, but aren't.
There are way more people that draw, paint, sing, or play an instrument for their own and their friends enjoyment than any who make a living at it. Not sure how you could think that’s not true.
How would his career change if AI music become prevalent? He could still play for crowds and get paid. Does he ever play covers? He benefits from the work of others too. He might one day play covers of some hit AI tunes.
I believe the implications are a bit different. It takes a lot of time to learn to make music. If you can’t make it as a famous artists (the odds of which are about as high as becoming a football star), you previously still had the option to use your music skills to make money with boring work: music for ads for example.
That’s going away. Now it’s becoming a lot more like professional sports: either you make it, or your hard earned skills are useless on the job market. It increases the risk significantly and will lead to less people pursuing a musician career.
I hope that my explanation is not perceived as judging in any way, but purely as an explanation.
I've been out of work for close to 6 months now, actively searching, interviewing every week, and finding that what the job market seems to value is that you have done the exact same thing as what they are hiring for.
I've discovered breakthrough algos and delivered solutions which personalize medical care, sometimes with life and death outcomes.
Yet somehow that doesn't count when the company wants someone who has done personalization for consumer products.
I have other examples from other common DS roles/tasks, where I have done the equivalent thing to that role in a different context. And somehow that never seems to count.
So no, I don't have strong evidence that the job market values generic skills. Perhaps your experience has been different?
I can also hear someone saying "with the attitude that the poster is taking, I'm not surprised"-- so let me point out how difficult it is to extract attitude from text, and that the context here (presenting evidence to refute a claim) is very different from an interview context.
It'd seem to me that a society that values art would find a way to keep artists secure economically while letting as many people as possible enjoy their work. I tend to think of piracy as a scapegoat for the draining of the working and middle class's purchasing power. Napster and Spotify came along as people were beginning to find it prohibitively expensive to drop $20 on an album. People would pay if they could (some do, if vinyl sales are anything to go by).
