nicetriangle

Oof

Doubt

when they consolidate the country

Lol knew it

can't get enough of these kinda articles

Arguably the only thing keeping Taiwan from being fully annexed right now is what they have built up militarily and that they are an island.

The powder keg you're bemoaning is them maybe putting up a fight in the future vs getting steamrolled quickly and without much fanfare.

If you think China has a right to the country, then sure I can see why you have a problem with them being able to defend themselves. Otherwise, I'm not sure what your point is. Taiwan isn't building up for an attack on China so maybe ease up on the victim blaming here.

Yeah we've just cut back our consumption a lot and what we do watch is a lot more intentional and not just riding the algo for hours. And what we do watch now is done via JDownoader > Plex for the most part.

Yeah rent in desirable cities is high. It’s the price you pay for being in a cultural mecca with a lot of career opportunities. Not for everyone obviously but a lot of people would absolutely not want to live in a college town either.

I’ve done both and enjoy cities way more and consider the rent money well spent. Making that transition to a big city was transformative for me personally and my career.

Ew. Just ew.

Ya sure got me there! Congrats

Yeah I feel like it must have really done a number on the field of translation. Also voice over work at the low to mid budget is probably done for with what those voice AI models can do now. It's a sad state of affairs and it's disheartening to see so many people cheer it on without caveats.

Yeah for sure. Mostly indirectly. I know a few people in my line of work who lost jobs because the client decided to just use AI to generate something.

I've also seen a number of examples of publications using AI images for editorial pieces which absolutely used to be paying jobs. For example this Atlantic article on Alex Jones. An actual person would have been paid to do a piece like this before AI came around.

And also there was the San Francisco ballet that did a bunch of their Nutcracker promo campaign art with AI stuff last year. They had traditionally used artists and photographers for years to do key pieces for their promo materials.

And as far as I am personally concerned, I've seen a marked slump in the volume of work inquiries I've been getting in the last year. I've been fortunate enough to remain fully booked and in the past just had to turn down a lot of work, but right now I'm getting about half as many inbound inquiries as I would have even a year ago. Hard to pin that on any one thing but I am sure AI is a factor. I'd be lying if I said that there haven't been a number of my jobs over the years that couldn't have been done with one of these AI models and a little trial and error.

I've also had a few clients now send me Midjourney stuff and basically want me to replicate it but make it work for whatever thing it was they were needing artwork for. So right there, that's all the fun problem solving and artistic exploration out the window and it's basically a case of "fix the robot's thing." It's pretty depressing.

I'd be mostly fine with the robots doing away with all of our jobs if it meant we were heading into some post-work utopia where we got to just spend time doing the things that really matter to us, but that's almost definitely not where this is going. All the windfalls will go to the top, the jobs will be less interesting, and wages will be depressed.

Yeah that's pretty consistent with my expectations. A lot of work will transition into fixing the robots mistakes. So we'd be ceding the interesting, more creatively challenging aspects of our jobs to AIs and turning into data janitors. And that would only last as long as we'd be necessary. They'd hammer out the details making that janitor work eventually disappear.

I do design and illustration and it'd kind of be like telling me "Well we don't need you to illustrate this stuff anymore, but Midjourney still draws shitty hands with too many fingers. So your job now is to fix those hands." That is not what I came here to do and that does not provide the fulfillment I seek from a line of work. And following that analogy, Midjourney will eventually make flawless hands and I'd be out of a job.

Fortunately right now AI cannot hit a specific design/illustration brief to the consistent standards my projects require, nor iterate on a project based on specific and vague client feedback. So I still have work for now, but I see the writing on the wall. I'm always surprised other people don't see that writing too.

This whole thing is going to make an insane chasm of the wealth equality divide we already have.