To understand why this is too optimistic, you have to look at things where AI is already almost human-level. Translations are more and more done exclusively with AI or with a massive AI help (with the effect of destroying many jobs anyway) at this point. Now ebook reading is switching to AI. Book and music album covers are often done with AI (even if this is most of the times NOT advertised), and so forth. If AI progresses more in a short timeframe (the big "if" in my blog post), we will see a lot of things done exclusively (and even better 90% of the times, since most humans doing a given work are not excellence in what they do) by AI. This will be fine if governments immediately react and the system changes. Otherwise there will be a lot of people to feed without a job.

I can buy the idea that simple specific tasks like translation will be dramatically cut down by AI.

But even then – any serious legal situation (like a contract) is going to want a human in the loop to verify that the translation is actually correct. This will require actual translator skills.

AI art seems to basically only be viable when it can’t be identified as AI art. Which might not matter if the intention is to replace cheap graphic design work. But it’s certainly nowhere near developed enough to create anything more sophisticated, sophisticated enough to both read as human-made and have the imperfect artifacts of a human creator. A lot of the modern arts are also personality-driven, where the identity and publicity of the artist is a key part of their reception. There are relatively few totally anonymous artists.

Beyond these very specific examples, however, I don’t think it follows that all or most jobs are going to be replaced by an AI, for the reasons I already stated. You have to factor in the sociopolitical effects of technology on its adoption and spread, not merely the technical ones.

> Now ebook reading is switching to AI.

IMO these are terrible, I don't understand how anyone uses them. This is coming from someone who has always loved audiobooks but has never been particularly precious about the narrator. I find the AI stuff unlistenable.

> Book and music album covers are often done with AI (even if this is most of the times NOT advertised)

This simply isn't true, unless you're considering any minor refinement to a human-created design to be "often done with AI".

It certainly sounds like you're implying AI is often the initial designer or primary design tool, which is completely incorrect for major publishers and record labels, as well as many smaller independent ones.

Look at your examples. Translation is a closed domain; the LLM is loaded with all the data and can traverse it. Book and music album covers _don't matter_ and have always been arbitrary reworkings of previous ideas. (Not sure what “ebook reading” means in this context.) Math, where LLMs also excel, is a domain full of internal mappings.

I found your post “Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 (an update)” very insightful. LLMs are memory extensions and cognitive aides which provide several valuable primitives: finding connections adjacent to your understanding, filling in boilerplate, and offloading your mental mapping needs. But there remains a chasm between those abilities and much work.

> Book and music album covers are often done with AI

These suck. Things made with AI just suck big time. Not only are they stupid but they have negative value on your product.

I cannot think of single purely AI made video, song or any form of art that is any a good.

All AI has done is falsely convince ppl that they can now create things that they had no skills to do before AI.

> Translations are more and more done exclusively with AI or with a massive AI help

As someone who speaks more than one language fairly well: We can tell. AI translations are awful. Sure, they have gotten good enough for a casual "let's translate this restaurant menu" task, but they are not even remotely close to reaching human-like quality for nontrivial content.

Unfortunately I fear that it might not matter. There are going to be plenty of publishers who are perfectly happy to shovel AI-generated slop when it means saving a few bucks on translation, and the fact that AI translation exists is going to put serious pricing pressure on human translators - which means quality is inevitably going to suffer.

An interesting development I've been seeing is that a lot of creative communities treat AI-generated material like it is radioactive. Any use of AI will lead to authors or even entire publishers getting blacklisted by a significant part of the community - people simply aren't willing to consume it! When you are paying for human creativity, receiving AI-generated material feels like you have been scammed. I wouldn't be surprised to see a shift towards companies explicitly profiling themselves as anti-AI.