Buggy whip makers are a standard economic shorthand for those who lose their jobs owing to technological advance. The buggy whip makers would like a word with the childrens’ authors:
A Tech Worker Is Selling A Children's Book He Made Using AI. Professional Illustrators Are Pissed.
Ammaar Reshi told BuzzFeed News that he has received death threats and messages encouraging self-harm on social media.
The argument being used?
One critic is Anupa Roper, a children’s book author based in the UK, who said she had a “sinking feeling in the pit of [her] stomach,” when she saw Reshi’s tweet. “I’m thinking, Is it really that easy to create something that I had to pour my heart and soul into?" Roper said.
Well, perhaps it is. If it is, isn’t that great and wondrous? We can now have more childrens’ books with the use of less human labour.
Fellow UK children’s author Josie Dom refused to download Reshi’s book. “I don’t feel he deserves to earn any money from the book, because he has not actually put much work into it,” she said. However, based on reading the sample pages on Amazon, Dom said, she is “concerned that the use of AI in creating stories will create a proliferation of poor-quality stories, both on the writing and the illustration side.”
That’s a bit Marxian really - as little labour has gone into it therefore it must be worth not much.
“I totally understand as an artist if you see this as an existential threat to your livelihood. This makes absolute sense.”
It is indeed understandable just as was that a century and more back. Who will buy my buggy whips if this new-fangled car thing is allowed to proliferate?
We’ve a couple of reasons we don’t in fact worry about this very much. One is that the AIs and ‘bots have been coming for the sector where some of us make our living for well over a decade now. Financial reporting used to have a bread and butter sector of producing a quick precis of a corporate report. That’s now all automated, the children of economic writers go crustless as a result. Thanks for all that support we got from childrens’ authors.
A second is that it’s not in fact all that much of a threat. As with economic writers at the top of their game so with childrens’ authors now. There have long been hundreds of millions out there who can type, very few who produce something which will capture the attention of a child or a politician, to the extent there’s a useful difference. Adding more typists doesn’t change this.
But the really important point here is imagine that the AI can in fact produce childrens’ books - or economic commentary. This will indeed displace those who currently do those things. Which is good, this makes us all - in aggregate, there are those wounded in the process - richer. For now we are able to enjoy economics, or bedtime reading, without having used human labour to gain it. That labour can then go off and produce something else that we can also consume. We get to consume that new production and also that economics, that Goodnight Moon as well. We’re richer.
This is, in fact, what all economic advance is about - using less human labour to produce what we all may consume. The entire point of technological advance is to destroy jobs - those jobs that are a cost of the production.
Actually, that’s a point. One of us has at least 10 million words out there on the internet. How much do you need to be able to train ChatGPT in a particular style……hmmmm….