OpenAI’s Mira Murati: “some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place” And you stole everything from creative people who provided free texts, images, forum answers, etc. To date, your company has refused to acknowledge any credit. Rich people truly live in their bubble and have zero sympathy for fellow human or their livelihood.
So, to be fair, the line after the quote refers specifically to those that produce “low quality” output.
So a charitable but not unreasonable read might be that she’s saying any creative role that’s easily replaced with AI isn’t really a loss. In some cases, when we’re talking about artists just trying to make a living, this is really some vile shit. But in the case of email monkeys in corporations and shitty designers and marketeers, maybe she’s got a point along the same lines as “bullshit jobs” logic.
On the other hand, the tech industry’s overriding presumption that disruption by tech is a natural good and that they’re correctly placed as the actuators of that “good” really needs a lot more mainstream push back. It’s why she felt comfortable declaring some people in industries she likely knows nothing about “shouldn’t exist” and why there weren’t snickers, laughter and immediate rebukes, especially given the lack (from the snippet I saw) of any concern for what the fuck happens when some shitty tech takes away people’s livelihoods.
If big tech’s track record were laid out, in terms of efficiency, cost, quality etc, in relation to the totality of the economy, not just the profits of its CEOs … I’m just not sure any of the hype cloud around it would look reasonable anymore. With that out of the way, then something so arrogant as this can be more easily ridiculed for the fart-sniffing hype that it so easily can be.
I get your overall point and don’t disagree.
The thing is about that specific bit - no job is a bullshit job when it’s what you rely on to pay your bills. Even if you don’t like the job, even if you aren’t the best at it, if it’s keeping a roof over your head, having it arbitrarily erased by some technology that didn’t exist 10 years ago is a pretty shitty thing. And even if that’s somehow an inescapable reality of progress (and I think there is a lot of discussion that could be had about that concept) it’s still shitty for her to portray that as no big deal. I don’t think context makes the comment much less shitty than the headline implies.
In addition to the fact that as has been pointed out repeatedly, AI learned how to do what it does from the output of the jobs it will now destroy, and without compensation of any kind to the people who created that output.