Software engineers should be asking themselves that same question day in and out. All know workers actually. The cost to produce art has dropped to zero. The cost to get knowledge on a topic - effectively zero. The cost to write basic software - effectively zero. The cost to produce today’s software will never be higher than today. In six months the chances that it’s significantly cheaper to do so are very high.

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onion2k 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The cost to produce art has dropped to zero.

The cost to produce an image has dropped to pretty much zero, but whether an image is 'art' is a question people have been struggling with for a long, long time. Art is usually considered to be the expression of something more meaningful than just making a picture, and in order to express something as a work of art you need to live, feel, and experience that thing (or a proxy of that thing.) There's a reason why we have entire art movements called things like "impressionism"; that's the artist creating what they believe impressed something on themselves, and trying to transfer some of that feeling on to the viewer of their artwork.

That is entirely missing in AI generated artwork.

The problem for artists is that very few people care about that aspect of art, and just want something nice to hang on a wall.

	▲	ehnto 24 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I am on the side of humanity here, but people don't pay for art. People pay for status, consumption, image and authenticity. But commercial art consumers, where most artists make a living, ie ad agencies, game studios etc, they actually don't give a shit about any of that. Some do, you can probably think of some, but they are the notable minority. Most don't, most are just out here to make money. They begrudgingly pay artists, and will love the day they can stop (some already have stopped) Can we see that in their output? Absolutely, but if it doesn't affect their bottom line they will not care. Anyway, to the GPs point, that is true for software in a much larger way. Nobody ever cared about the soul and craft of software except the developers. The moment we can be replaced for cheaper, it will be nothing but business.