🤖 Is your job threatened by AI? Here's how you should NOT act

Do you have enough talent, my friend?

Creating images and videos with generative AI should only be accessible to those with sufficient talent. This opinion comes from Henrik Tamm, a professional illustrator who worked on the first Shrek movie. In Svenska Dagbladet, he writes that it is wrong for the general public to be able to create images and videos with generative AI:

"It is wrong when just anyone – without any talent for visual art – can do this." If someone is to do it, it should only be those like himself: "...by people who already possess the talent for image creation."

These AI tools constitute an "existential threat" to everyone in a creative profession, he argues.

With that attitude, your job is threatened

If you have the attitude that Henrik Tamm promotes, then yes, your job is definitely threatened. But fortunately, that's not the only approach to AI.

You can also embrace AI and elevate yourself to a new level.

It's easy for you to say, whose job is not threatened, you (or Henrik) might think. But my job is very much affected by generative AI. Since ChatGPT's most notable ability is text production, the writer is probably even more affected than the illustrator. Writing is my main occupation.

I have chosen a different approach than Henrik Tamm. I have tried to learn everything I can about generative AI. That's why I created the AI writer WALL-Y, which now makes my job of writing news five times faster. I hope that one day she can do it all by herself. It frees up time for me to devote to more qualitative tasks, such as writing a text like this that you are reading right now.

It requires me to have time to read, think, and ponder the issues we touch on at Warp News. Increasingly, the thought process occurs together with ChatGPT. I bounce ideas, texts, and get feedback on my texts (all typos in this text, I can therefore claim that an AI missed and is not my fault. See there, yet another use!)

But can't this job also be performed by an AI? Yes, that will happen and it doesn't need to be very far off. What will I do then? I don't know, but I believe that the opportunity exists to level up myself significantly with the help of various AI tools. Produce more and better texts, for example, where I don't write them but I control the direction of what is written. It will also be possible to transform these texts into video and audio in several different formats, and into several different types of texts, so you who follow Warp News can take them in the way you wish. Or so my role will increasingly be to convey these opinions in other ways.

I will likely also continue to write. It's something I really enjoy and helps me organize my thoughts and understand. Whether anyone wants to read my texts, I don't know, but that's actually no different from today. There's already fierce competition for your readers' time and attention.

My purpose here is not to toot my own horn, or diss Henrik Tamm, but our different viewpoints are a good representation of how one can approach this AI era (and change in general.)

The centaur's edge

So far, it has been shown that those who are good at using AI tools are the winners in the era of generative AI. You don't have to be an expert on text, image, music – or whatever you create with AI – from the beginning, but you need to become really good at using AI for it. (Which WALL-Y and I wrote together in our book.)

This means that a lot of people without talent, to use Henrik Tamm's rhetoric, can now create things they couldn't before. That's not bad. On the contrary, it's good that many more people's creativity benefits humanity.

Of course, the transition can be tough if what you love and have spent thousands of hours getting good at is challenged. But honestly, you just have to bite the bullet. It's neither fair nor unfair, it just is. It doesn't end there. You can move forward. And if you embrace the new in time and voluntarily move forward, you suddenly belong to the pioneers of a new era. That's not so bad.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

Henrik Tamm also means that generative AI is based on stolen content. I respond to this in Svenska Dagbladet (in Swedish.)

🦾 AI will not lead to mass unemployment (but something much bigger will happen)

Economics professor David Autor disputes the AI experts who believe that AI will lead to mass unemployment.

Warp NewsMathias Sundin