No, Artists and Designers Aren’t About to Lose Their Jobs to AI
As companies such as Facebook, Google, and OpenAI claim to offer groundbreaking advances in artificial intelligence, don’t forget to ask if it works.
Illustration: Sam Lyon for Bloomberg Businessweek.
Silicon Valley has a new obsession. It’s called “generative artificial intelligence,” and it refers to the idea of having computers take over creative tasks such as writing, filmmaking, and graphic design.
This may sound a little strange if you’ve been paying attention to the industry’s forecasts about AI over the past decade. But, having wrongly predicted the demise of truck and taxi driving and human customer service, venture capitalists and big tech companies are pouring billions into software tools designed to replace certain kinds of creative work. In doing so, they’re attracting awed media coverage and, because these things tend to go together, prompting a full-blown moral panic.