I agree that the system we have now were everyone has to be shackled to a job in order to be considered valuable is terrible. And that a system were work is entirely at will is both desirable and achievable. But I’m afraid gen ai isn’t the way to that goal.

Gen AI is impressive but you have to understand how it works; it is just a statistical model, every word or character is decided by probablity. It will have a list of words (or changes to an image) that might come next and will have different probabilities for each one. One will be randomly picked according to their assigned odds and then the algorithm calculates the words and odds for the next word till it’s finished. The fact that this system produces such consistent output is an achievement. But there is an issue: the ai needs a constant flow of new training data or it’s outputs start to become very similar, it’s facts start to get out of date and it’s use of language starts to fall behind natural linguistic drift.

Leaving aside the rather weighty issue of where and how these ai companies have typically gotten the enormous amount of data they require; they need a constant supply of human generated data to train on. Training on only machine generated data threatens model collapse so there must be a majority of human generated data in the training data to prevent that.

To put it another way AI isn’t the solution to needing human effort its just laundering where the human effort is coming from.