I wouldn't be so sure about that.

The overwhelming majority don't make big money, but many, many creatives make a living on their art, and a lot of them are OK with being fairly low-paid (I know quite a few). They do what they love, and get paid enough to keep doing it. As a musician friend of mine says "You know what's great? I get to play music for people, and then they pay me for it, when I'm done!". He is not a huge rock star, but does well enough to tour around the country.

People tend to sneer at creatives, thinking of them as "parasites," or "doing something that anyone can do, so why should they be paid?"

I can tell you that I appreciate having a trained professional designer, help me with my software design. They can do something like fart out a logo in five minutes, that can become one of the most significant assets a company has. That's a really valuable skill.

We'll have to see if AI can actually replace that. It probably will, for many contexts. It's gotta be better than some of the efforts I see, by engineers that think they are creative, but aren't.

Actually, that's what I do, these days. Take a gander at my work. It's not exactly "Hobby grade" stuff, but I don't make a dime from it.

I'm grateful for the many years of being a professional, that helped make it possible for me to do it creatively, these days.

This transaction does not need IP protection at all.

That’s going away. Now it’s becoming a lot more like professional sports: either you make it, or your hard earned skills are useless on the job market. It increases the risk significantly and will lead to less people pursuing a musician career.

I hope that my explanation is not perceived as judging in any way, but purely as an explanation.

I think uncommon focus, discipline, physical and mental dexterity along with the ability to perform under pressure are being undervalued here.

I've discovered breakthrough algos and delivered solutions which personalize medical care, sometimes with life and death outcomes.

Yet somehow that doesn't count when the company wants someone who has done personalization for consumer products.

I have other examples from other common DS roles/tasks, where I have done the equivalent thing to that role in a different context. And somehow that never seems to count.

So no, I don't have strong evidence that the job market values generic skills. Perhaps your experience has been different?

I can also hear someone saying "with the attitude that the poster is taking, I'm not surprised"-- so let me point out how difficult it is to extract attitude from text, and that the context here (presenting evidence to refute a claim) is very different from an interview context.

Your skills are cause you wanted to do it, not because you wanted to be famous. That's the by-product.

I don't know about financial success but I think losing ego building as artist incentives might not be a bad thing. Maybe it's an unhealthy focus and probably shouldn't be supported.

Intuitively, I think those kind of drives will not go away no matter what support you give it. However, I can't believe that feeding that beast is not having an effect.

In the case of software (a creative product that many, here, have a vested interest in), pirating can actually lead to future sales.

I think one of the most pirated programs out there, used to be Adobe Photoshop.

This resulted in a huge number of folks that became expert Photoshop users, and that drove sales of the app, in their careers.

The same probably cannot be said for games. I suspect a pirated game, is a lost sale.

A lot can change in 19 years, but I've gone back and bought most every game I pirated on steam now that the income isn't as scarce.

It's a bit dispiriting, to be sneered at, for it.

Lemmings was a great game, but that isn't informative as to Grand Theft Auto, which isn't.

AutoCAD, in particular, used to be[1] super smart about this and went out of their way to get their toolchain in front of high-schoolers (even back when that involved pricy copy-protection solutions like physical dongles).

[1] Not to imply they are no longer super-smart about it; I just no longer have clear signal.

I pirated every single game I have ever bought first, with the exception of games that had Demos. If it's a Denuvo game, I refuse to ever buy it (especially since the pirated version is guaranteed to be a better experience).

What leads to lost sales in the video game world (at least if we look at people like myself) is making bad games, whether it be horrible optimization issues, bloated spyware like Denuvo, broken/buggy games etc.

Like Gaben said, people have no problems with paying for stuff, it just has to be high quality and reliable, and most modern games are neither for the most part.

You’d have a stronger argument if it was at least fair to the artists that it purportedly represents. It’s not.

But it is also the one that has been making it possible for creatives to become obscenely rich. It's actually only fairly recently, in history, that creatives could become independently successful, without having patrons. I don't know of anyone that has become rich, using Patreon (I could be wrong, though, as it has never really been something that I've paid attention to).

Not sure if the patronage model works for creatives.

It's fascinating to see folks in tech, who are obsessed with becoming rich robber barons, get upset at the prospect of other people getting rich, doing non-tech stuff.

At least in tech, the pot is more evenly distributed and for more types of people. It even contributes to the broader economy as a whole with genuine innovation as opposed to just collecting rent on IP.

In fact, if you look at the behavior of many tech company legal teams, that seems more like what tech corporations do, than individual creatives.

This is the stuff I did in the 1980s, when I was considering making a living at it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40917886

The behavior of music labels is far worse and less valuable to society than the tech industry

The jury's still out on that.

The music industry can't hold a candle to some of the raw destruction that has been wrought by tech.

It's just balanced by a lot of good (and making tech billionaires isn't really what I consider "good").

Yes, the tech industry is an interloper in an industry that has had long-standing sweetheart deals with governments both liberal, neoliberal[1], and otherwise. However, that industry - the creative industry - was not at all pro-artist beyond making sure artists had something worth stealing. The tech industry started out not understanding the creative industry's norms and laws, but has long since graduated into facilitating new versions of some of its worst abuses. We're not the same tech industry that gave the world Napster anymore. The whole reason why, e.g., Apple gets to charge a blatantly supra-competitive 30% on every purchase on iPhone comes down to copyright ownership over iOS.

To wit: most of the biggest cheerleaders for generative AI are in the creative industry. You have CEOs ranting and raving about how once the plausible sentence generators are up to speed, they can fire entire classes of artists and workers. Videogame companies make voice actors audibly consent to voice cloning at the start of each recording session. The RIAA is not suing Udio to protect the role of musicians, they're suing so they can produce a "licensed" model that nicely cuts artists and bands out of their royalties.

Yes, the people in the GenAI space have a "fast and loose" interpretation of copyright, but that's less "information wants to be free" and more "we'll ask for forgiveness and take a license once all this AI fairy dust pays out". Licensed GenAI is not going to be any better than the current state of affairs because the threat of GenAI is not the copying of any one individual work. Copyright is an individualistic system, and ownership is for owners, not workers. And even if you decide you'll never license your specific work to AI, someone else will, and the system will still work the same.

As creative workers, the threat to you from GenAI is from collective obsolescence, a loss of social position and privilege, and decreases in your material standard of living due to the above. Copyright exists to perpetuate capitalism, and thus considers none of those consequences to be violations of the law. There is no copyright law that would, say, prohibit soundtracks in motion pictures so that live musicians could continue playing in theaters[2]. The law could require the specific artist who wrote and recorded that soundtrack to be paid, but that's only one person, getting a far larger windfall. Everyone else got screwed and the artistic landscape got just a bit more unequal.

[0] as in, people who want copyright-free / freely-licensed cultural works and do so legitimately through consent

[1] Fascism with extra steps

[2] To be clear, GenAI is not like having a soundtrack in a movie, the analogy just happens to be illustrative of my point.