Something I find interesting is that ironically, AI is now levelling the playing field for many blue collar folks who were made to feel like art and literature was meant for people in white collar professions and had no space for them. Chad Rye has a great article about this:
The class-structure point is the part that actually travels outside the AI discourse. Once you put the weavers next to the copywriters, the “assault on the human spirit” claim starts looking like a status ranking of whose labor counts as human. I buy that. I also think education is already living a smaller version of it: we panic when a model drafts an essay, and we barely notice when it schedules the bus routes or grades the multiple-choice.
The printing-press analogy works until you look at who got a voice after the press. It was not only the old scribal elite learning to live with cheaper books. It was a lot of people whose arguments had never been expensive enough to copy by hand. That is closer to what I see in classrooms than the illustrator-versus-factory story.
I spent an evening in TikTok threads where art students and shop teachers were arguing this exact split, and the useful comments were buried under duets. I used https://toktoolset.com/tiktok-comment-viewer just to read those threads without the app collapsing them. It did not settle the ethics. It did make the class structure in this post feel less like a metaphor and more like a conversation that is already happening off campus.
I missed this when it was first published. The key really is who owns the machine. The quality of films and games have been deteriorating for decades, long before AI. There have been mavericks who've challenged the system, but the reason why there have been so few of them is mostly due to money. After years of stifling and restricting creativity, studios will now just continue that practice using AI (or at least try to), for as long as it's profitable.
Really nice post and point. Humans have been reinventing themselves for centuries. This is just the latest chapter. It reminds of the song Allentown by Billy Joel.
Do you think there is a different this time? It seems like previous waves came more slowly. Now it seems like I am not sure what people should become except mental and physical chameleons.
You could argue that this is a repeating pattern. But the problem is that repeating patterns are only repeating patterns for as long as they are actually repeating. So, nobody knows for sure.
Something I find interesting is that ironically, AI is now levelling the playing field for many blue collar folks who were made to feel like art and literature was meant for people in white collar professions and had no space for them. Chad Rye has a great article about this:
https://substack.com/@chadrye/p-189486950
Very true. Thanks for the comment.
The class-structure point is the part that actually travels outside the AI discourse. Once you put the weavers next to the copywriters, the “assault on the human spirit” claim starts looking like a status ranking of whose labor counts as human. I buy that. I also think education is already living a smaller version of it: we panic when a model drafts an essay, and we barely notice when it schedules the bus routes or grades the multiple-choice.
The printing-press analogy works until you look at who got a voice after the press. It was not only the old scribal elite learning to live with cheaper books. It was a lot of people whose arguments had never been expensive enough to copy by hand. That is closer to what I see in classrooms than the illustrator-versus-factory story.
I spent an evening in TikTok threads where art students and shop teachers were arguing this exact split, and the useful comments were buried under duets. I used https://toktoolset.com/tiktok-comment-viewer just to read those threads without the app collapsing them. It did not settle the ethics. It did make the class structure in this post feel less like a metaphor and more like a conversation that is already happening off campus.
Thanks for the comment. I need to look at those TikTok threads you are mentioning.
I missed this when it was first published. The key really is who owns the machine. The quality of films and games have been deteriorating for decades, long before AI. There have been mavericks who've challenged the system, but the reason why there have been so few of them is mostly due to money. After years of stifling and restricting creativity, studios will now just continue that practice using AI (or at least try to), for as long as it's profitable.
Really nice post and point. Humans have been reinventing themselves for centuries. This is just the latest chapter. It reminds of the song Allentown by Billy Joel.
Do you think there is a different this time? It seems like previous waves came more slowly. Now it seems like I am not sure what people should become except mental and physical chameleons.
You could argue that this is a repeating pattern. But the problem is that repeating patterns are only repeating patterns for as long as they are actually repeating. So, nobody knows for sure.