Artless

As might be expected, there's been significant uptake of "artwork" generated by automated systems on LinkedIn. While I suspect that some people have attempted to use photorealistic images, much of it is the somewhat cartoonish, clearly artificial-seeming variety, often of dubious (at best) quality. It's the sort of artwork that one uses because LinkedIn says that posts with pictures or videos can generate 40% more "engagement" than because it actually does anything to help convey whatever point someone is attempting to get across.

All of this bodes poorly for people in the creative industries (as if the ability to have computers generate "art" on command didn't bode poorly for them already), mainly because the seeming ubiquity of basically garbage illustration seems to be an indicator that a) people will tolerate it and b) that it's getting people what they want (that 40% more "engagement" that LinkedIn touts).

Which is unfortunate, but predictable. A lot of things today seem to exist solely for the sake of existing, without much regard to quality or genuine fitness for purpose. And in that sort of environment, there's little call to employ any more people than are absolutely necessary. Which is nothing new. People have been looking to automate away other people's livelihoods for more than a century now, as a way of making, or retaining, more money for themselves.

What the current generative automated systems revolution promises, or threatens, is a way to do this on a large enough scale, to enough people, that the goose that laid golden eggs finally starves to death; thus spelling the end of companies that rely on the disposable income of the middle and lower classes (not that the lower class really has all that much disposable income to start with) in order to keep their lights on and doors open.

Henry Ford was said to have understood that his workers would make for good customers, and he wanted to pay them enough that they could afford to give a pretty good chunk of their salaries back to him in order to buy automobiles. Whether Mr. Ford believed this or not, it's long gone out of fashion, and mainly because the general public's tastes simply don't require that the work really be put in. Which will, I suspect, soon enough result in very little need for a lot of people to put any work in.