this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2025
113 points (99.1% liked)
Fuck AI
4849 readers
784 users here now
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Assuming Nvidia manages to survive the burst and pivots into consumer-grade AI hardware (rather than $50,000 a pop datacenter GPUs), then I suspect a lot of companies and rich hobbyists will buy and use specialized GPUs for art. Meanwhile starving artists won't be able to afford the $1,000+ GPUs, so that will put more bargaining power in the hands of employers and they'll use AI as an excuse to drive their wages down further. Of course artists are already some of the most underpaid jobs out there so I don't think there will be much of a push to replace them completely — just to pay them even less while expecting them to do more than before.
I doubt it will ever be cost-effective to completely remove human artists from the pipeline because I doubt it'll ever be possible to produce AI art that isn't recognizable enough to produce backlash. AI will still be used for cheap shovelware, sure, but serious projects will probably just use it for rapid prototyping and continue to use (underpaid) humans for the final production art while pretending they're work is less valuable than ever.
I suspect it will be a similar story for software engineers, too. Even if it costs an employer 50k every few years to maintain a rack of GPUs in a server closet somewhere, that's still cheaper than paying a mid-level engineer, so they'll cut as many devs as they can and ask the remaining ones to use the AI tools to do more with less. Wages will probably stagnate in this sector as well as a result (for the devs who aren't laid off).
nvidia will most likely survive. they didn't get big from ai, they got big from gaming and then exploded in size. they're selling shovels in a gold rush, and shovels are useful for other things.
as for quality, there are some damn good models out there built by amateurs. you just don't see them in the mainstream because they're even harder to credit than the normal piles of stolen assets. which of course means even less reason for execs to keep artists around, unless they know the tools. prompting is such a small part of actually getting good results. or rather, good enough.
the software angle brings up an interesting point because in my sector there is no ai use at all. letting ai do embedded work isn't really possible right now because the dataset is too small to train on. there are niches of art like this too.
My sector is web development, and there's a TON of AI exposure there right now (which is not surprising since web companies and web developers alike have always been some of the most 'trend-chasey' in tech). I'm not all that confident I can predict how software development will change, but right now my gut tells me that the industry will both shrink and "stratify" into a couple of separate classes.
One class will be analogous to the "senior engineer" of today. This will be a role you'll go to college to learn, and you'll continue to get prestige pay and benefits for doing it. There won't be many of these positions available and they will either work creating new AI systems, work on systems where AI code generation is impossible, or they'll be supervising the other class of developers.
This other class will be more akin to a skilled "trade" like plumber or electrician — both in terms of compensation and in education required. These workers will mostly use AI to produce code that's substandard but cheap, and a senior engineer will do the required clean-up to make it production-ready. Unlike today, these junior devs won't have a promotion track up to the senior level. The relationship will be more akin to the relationship between doctors and nurses, I think. There will be more of these positions available (but still fewer than that number of junior dev jobs today), the pay will be lower and the turnover will probably be higher since they'll get all the stress of crunch and mismanagement without any of the perks the seniors enjoy. They'll also be viewed and treated as disposable by management. I think there will be a lot of cross pollination between this group and QA, which will experience a lot of the same issues. In fact, this role and QA may just merge into one.
But I'm also just a random guy talking out of his ass on the Internet, so who fucking knows.