AI’s coding evolution hinges on collaboration and trust

I'm tired of the anthropomorphization marketing behind AI driving this kind of discussion. In a few years, all this talk will sound as dumb as stating "MS Word spell checker will replace writers" or "Photoshop will replace designers".

We'll reap the productivity benefits from this new tool, create more work for ourselves, output will stabilize at a new level and salaries will stagnate again, as it always happens.

Generative AI is replacing writers, designers, actors, ... it is nothing like just a spell checker or Phtoshop.

Everyday, I see ads on YouTube with smooth-talking, real-looking AI-generated actors. Each one represents one less person that would have been paid.

There is no exact measure of correctness in design; one bad bit does not stop the show. The clients don't even want real art. Artists sometimes refer to commercial work as "selling out", referring to hanging their artistic integrity on the hook to make a living. Now "selling out" competes with AI which has no artistic integrity to hang on the hook, works 24 hours a day for peanuts and is astonishingly prolific.

> Everyday, I see ads on YouTube with smooth-talking, real-looking AI-generated actors. Each one represents one less person that would have been paid.

Were AI-generated actors chosen over real actors, or was the alternative using some other low-cost method for an advertisement like just colorful words moving around on a screen? Or the ad not being made at all?

The existence of ads using generative AI "actors" doesn't prove that an actor wasn't paid. This is the same logical fallacy as claiming that one pirated copy of software represents a lost sale.

It's really both effects happening at once. AI is just like the invention of the assembly line, or the explosion of mass produced consumer packaged goods starting from the first cotton gin. Automation allows a massive increase in quantity of goods, and even when quantity comes with tradeoffs to quality vs artisanally produced goods, they still come to dominate. Processed cheese or instant coffee is pretty objectively worse that the 'real' thing, but that didn't stop cheap mass production still made those products compelling for many million/billion of consumers.

You can still find a tailor who will hand make you a bespoke clothing or sew your own clothes yourself (as even the boomer generation often did growing up), but tailored clothing is a tiny fraction of the amount of clothing in circulation. Do tailors and artisanal cheese makers still exist? Yep, they are not extinct. But they are hugely marginalized compared to machine-made alternatives.