The perspective is different for a software engineer compared to an artist or an actor. Jon Stewart is not talking about the IT industry

Which artist or actor has lost a job to AI?

Jon Stewart, in the original context, is concerned about the near future. That is not to say the impacts on the film/tv/screen-writing industry are not already being felt today.

The SAG-AFTRA strike was in large part about AI. The fact the strike happened, that approximately 200k people were that concerned about their livilhood that they went on strike is all quite strong evidence there is a real concern. At this juncture, I think the burden of proof would be on you for why those 200k people had no concerns, that they skipped paychecks and sold their homes for nothing.

A strike that was so painful to the union itself, seemingly would have been about something important. "the "harshest pain" was "perhaps felt among the below-the-line workers who've had to sell or mortgage their homes, and wipe through IRAs to survive." [1] If that strike was over nothing, that sure was a lot of pain to inflect for no cause of concern what-so-ever. I would trust those people to know their own industry far better than myself.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_SAG-AFTRA_strike

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I don't see Devin or any other type of AI practically replacing a software engineer any time soon. I believe we agree there, and perhaps that was your original point. I think that point was incorrectly extrapolated to other industries. Further, the timeline for when jobs can be taken by AI is different for different industries. This article, where I was trying to see if I could find any raw numbers, summed up the concern pretty well for actors & screen-writers (in essence, AI is already there for them):

> Using AI to create performances that never took place is not just hypothetical. It is already happening. But AI-generated deepfakes, such as a series of convincing but totally fabricated videos of a Tom Cruise doppelganger, are mostly found on social media, not in movies or shows from the studios.

> But the same technology could easily be used to replace the actors in background roles in studio and streaming productions — the ones listed in the credits with titles like “second police officer” or “waiter in the restaurant.” These roles generate a huge number of the jobs that SAG-AFTRA members depend on to pay their bills. [2]

Which is to say, as a software engineer, when I look at Devin, I call BS that it can replace another software engineer. Though, if my trade were creating images, AI is already there were a film industry could decide they want pictures of 6 fingered people because it will boost their profit margin, that is already a reality. If I were shown an AI that did almost exactly my job, I would probably be concerned.

Is this all a bad thing, a good thing, avoidable, or even necessary? I don't know. Is it happening - yes, in different industries to different degrees. (Frankly, we in hacker news need to get our heads out of our asses, not everyone in the world is a software engineer)

[2] https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/18/business/ai-actors-strike/ind...

Voice acting as a profession will not exist in a couple of years.

Remember how a decade and a half ago everyone was convinced that taxi drivers and truck drivers would be replaced by AI in the coming years? There were even mass protests over it, and governments started to make contingency plans and enact legislation. The topic was discussed to death non-stop all over the internet and news media, just like AI is right now. Meanwhile today not a single driver has lost their job, and in fact there are shortages in all these industries.

Don't try and solve a problem before it is even a problem. Heck if anything good AI generated voiceovers will be a huge boost to the indie gaming industry, so I hope it can actually happen.

> Remember how a decade and a half ago everyone was convinced that taxi drivers and truck drivers would be replaced by AI in the coming years?

I remember that as an AI-car company driven hype cycle that was used to justify beta testing their cars on public roads. According to them, traffic Jams were supposed to be a solved problem and everyone would be making 20k/yr leasing out their car as a robotaxi.

With that said, the impact of AI is not equal across different industries.

Also remember when Geoffrey Hinton famously predicted all radiologists would be out of a job by now in 2016? That also didn't happen. So yeah, I would take these predictions with a massive grain of salt. So far the employment numbers in the US are looking extremely good.

Many, many predictions about job losses came true. Jobs stop existing if they can be performed automated to a large extent, this has come true for many, many jobs over time. There is a great German video series about elderly people (in their 80s or even 90s) showing the trades they learned when they were young. They were doing stuff like carving troughs out of trees, making wooden wheels, operating water powered saws and similar stuffs. None of these jobs exist anymore.

In fact it is completely natural and healthy that there is a transformation in the job market, although it can easily be a tragedy for the individual.

>So far the employment numbers in the US are looking extremely good.

Voice actors are a tiny group. They don't really factor into nation wide statistics.

Autonomous driving doesn't exist. Convincing Text to speech does, it is just a matter of tooling around it.

>Heck if anything good AI generated voiceovers will be a huge boost to the indie gaming industry.

And all other video game industries, which will also not be paying voice actors.

>Autonomous driving doesn't exist.

You haven't been paying attention. There are Waymo fully autonomous rides happening already in multiple very large cities. It exists every bit as much as AI voice acting platforms.

I doubt very much it's going anyway. But the pool will be smaller. Same with actors replaced with AI. Same as MoCaP, sure an AI can do these things but a human is still better at being a human and human nuance - and much easier to direct.

I have a hunch the arts don't need to worry as much as they do now.

Celebrity is, has always been and will continue to be a draw.

Still need voice directing, and the voice director will have to act out the inflections, line delivery, etc before the voice gets switched out for another one.

Can't go from text to the desired inflection yet.

Is there a good text to speech interface? I’d like to use one to help me to help proofread

There are various online AI tools which do reasonably convincing Text to speech.

All you need is a little push and good tooling around the software to make voice actors entirely replaceable.