I’ll resume it in a single phrase: It removes the skill from the skilled. And that is the wet dream of FAANG, so they can have fewer expensive, pesky engineers.
It sucks, because you have to study and practice your craft for years, then be replaced by a machine. Now we know how people in the early 20th century felt when the factories started replacing workers with machines, don’t we?
But it hits a bit differently now; not because it is not manual labour, but because it replaces a hard-earned skill, that you not only had to make sacrifices to have it, but it is part of your identity. I’m feeling that as a programmer (even though I know it’ll take many years until AI is actually capable of running unsupervised for large production codebases), so I can’t even fathom the hatred artists feel towards AI. Imagine you taking 12 hours to do a drawing, then an AI, trained on your own art, does it in seconds. You feel obsolete, Silicon Valley trained their models on your work, stole your job, and gave nothing back.
I know just a tiny bit how they feel, because I play guitar as a hobby, and I made some music with a band in the past. It takes many days until you finally have a good song, even more if you’re trying to make an album; and Suno can do it in a few minutes… the feeling is not only of being obsolete, but of being powerless.
Reality is brutal, because these tools aren’t going away; it is a new world, and many people feel lost in it. Isn’t it weird to have this feeling at your 30s, while most people have it at their 60s? The feeling that the new world is different; a different you feel uneasy about it, that is unknown.
As an engineer, fighting back is pointless; I have to use these tools to my advantage, otherwise I’d simply get fired. It does make my work faster, as I have commented in another post, but the feeling of uneasiness never goes away, even more when you know that these models are being actively trained in your work. The more you use it, the more data you give, the more they tune and improve the model, and the more likely you’re to be replaced soon.
We all hope that these companies get bitten in the ass later on, that they’ll have many security breaches due to vibe coding, that many lawsuits will slow them down, that justice is served. But as I said, reality is often disappointing, and this hope is just coping.
There are too many companies and governments interested in the advance of AI, and once it becomes a geopolitical battle, the amount of resources being poured into it is of a scale never seen before.
Remember the dotcom bubble? The problem wasn’t that the internet was an illusion, that is, promises were too good to be true. The problem was timing and infrastructure. All the promises made in that era were fulfilled, and our current internet is far more advanced than we previously thought possible, and that is the scary part. Because it means AI is going to get insanely better.
So, brace yourself, folks, no amount of regulations is going to stop Silicon Valley’s ambitions. It is a new reality we’ll have to learn to live with.