This is one of the first parts LLMs tried to automate. They were literally released in a form of chatbot. Whether it succeeded is another question.
> Did the world really wake up one day and concluded that, "wait, we're spending too much on musicians"?
I'm not sure about musicians specifically, but in the whole past decade studios have been complaining how costly it is to make AAA games. And the cost mostly came from art asset side.
In any case, during perhaps hundreds of interactions with chatbots accumulated during many years, I have never encountered even one when the chatbots were useful, but they were always just difficult to pass obstacles in the way of reaching a human who could actually solve the problem.
To be honest, even in the case when some services still had humans answering the calls, those were never more helpful than the chatbots, but at least when speaking with humans it was much easier to convince them to transfer the call to a competent person, which with chatbots may be completely impossible.
These things generally have self-service options, but many many people are uncomfortable with them and would rather have an agent solve it for them.
Consider that a lot of users nowadays only have a cell phone, no PC. It seems like an edge case consideration but it's really not.
> This is one of the first parts LLMs tried to automate. They were literally released in a form of chatbot. Whether it succeeded is another question.
I don't think that's right. They tried to automate customer support dealing with me, not me dealing with customer support. The goal is to reduce costs of serving customer support even if it results in the customer doing more labor than a customer support professional would need to do to fix their problem, or the customer just living with their problem.
Obviously both parties would be happy with a result where I get what I need easily and for free, but the company is also generally happy if I live with it or expend a lot of effort solving it myself.
Or we may see a realignment of interests, with the current AAA paradigm replaced by something else. Maybe something free to play or gacha based, such as Genshin Impact, Fortnight, Roblox...though Epic just laid a lot of developers off, so it may transform into something stranger still.
At least today, LLMs make bad creative writing, music, and art. They’re automating sweatshop work that, in an alternative timeline, goes to Fiverr-esque contractors who accept the lowest wages and sacrifice quality for efficiency in every way.
LLMs make developers more efficient but can’t fully replace them. This reduces jobs, but so did better IDEs, open-source libraries, and other developer improvements.
> Meanwhile the parts of my existence that I actually hate - dealing with customer support, handling government forms, dealing with taxes - is far from being automated by AI
LLMs can at least theoretically do these things. I’ve heard people use them to mass-apply to apartments and jobs, and send written customer complaints then handle responses.
> Look at Suno. Fantastic tool, but where was the capital need to make music generation so cheap that no musician could ever compete with it?
There’s no “capital need”, but a benefit of Suno is that it lets individuals, who otherwise don’t have the skill, to make catchy songs with silly lyrics or try out interesting genres. And the vast majority of top artists are still human, although most streaming revenue has already gone to a few celebrities who seem to rely on looks and connections more than music talent.
The fact that people are using it to flood the world with slop is a hyperscaled continuation of the overabundance and discovery problems we already had, but that doesn’t mean that writing is dead or dying.
The technology simply doesn’t have the capabilities right now, and even if it develops them, what will be put to the test is whether literature is about the artifact or the connection between the author and other humans.
Customer support is kind of something you can use AI for; most companies will foist you off to some system of exchanging written messages, which is annoying, but then you can use an AI to write your side of the conversation. It’s ill-mannered to do this when you’re interacting with actual people, but customer support is another story.
> Look at Suno. Fantastic tool, but where was the capital need to make music generation so cheap that no musician could ever compete with it? Did the world really wake up one day and concluded that, "wait, we're spending too much on musicians"?
People didn’t know what LLMs would be capable of until after they were invented. Cheap music generation turned out to be easy once we had cheap text generation, and cheap text generation turned out to be a tractable problem.
But recorded music was a crisis. And it did tempt a lot of people into supporting fabulously abusable, rich-enriching "intellectual property" law as a means of financing art.
Rich people are lobbying to capitalize on this crisis as well.
AI is killing writing, music, art, and coding. I've done all of these voluntarily because I simply enjoyed them
Meanwhile the parts of my existence that I actually hate - dealing with customer support, handling government forms, dealing with taxes - is far from being automated by AI
Look at Suno. Fantastic tool, but where was the capital need to make music generation so cheap that no musician could ever compete with it? Did the world really wake up one day and concluded that, "wait, we're spending too much on musicians"?
Seems like a complete misallocation of capital if I'm perfectly honest