Maybe you are not quite recalling what happened when photoshop was released, it completely changed a whole industry of wet photography professionals. Those who would airbrush models, create montages from literally cutting and pasting.

Also, we told we were going into an age where anyone with $3000 for a PC/Mac and the software could edit reality. Society's ability to count on the authenticity of a photograph would be lost forever. How would courts work? Proof of criminality could be conjured up by anyone. People would be blackmailed left, right and center by the ability to cut and paste people into compromising positions and the police and courts would be unable to tell the difference.

The Quantel Paintbox was released in 1981 and by 1985 was able to edit photographs at film grain resolution. Digital film printers, were also able to output at film grain resolution, this started the "end of society", and when photoshop was introduced in 1990 it went into high gear.

In the end, all of that settled and we were left with, photographers just using Photoshop.

Exactly

And I actually thought photographers were extinct a long time ago by every human holding a cellphone (little to no need to know about lens apertures, lighting/shadows to take a picture). Its probably been a decade since I've seen anyone hauling around photograph equipment at an event. I guess some photographers still get paid good money, but they're surely multiples less than there were 10-20 years ago.

The NLP (Natural Language) is the killer part of the equation for these new AI tools. Simple as knowing English or any other natural language, to output an image, an app or whatever. And it's going to be just like cellphone cameras and photographers, the results are going to get 'good enough' that its going to eat into many professions.

> Except this is the first time we have a new "generalist" technology. When Photoshop was released, it didn't reduce employment opportunities for writers, coders, 3D designers, etc.

Computing has always been a generalist technology, and every improvement in software development specifically has impacted all the fields for which automation could be deployed, expanded the set of fields in which automation could economically be deployed, and eliminated some of the existing work that software developers do.

And every one one of them has had the effect of increasing employment in tech involved in doing automation by doing that. (And increased employment of non-developers in many automated fields, by expanding, as it does for automation, the applications for which the field is economically viable more than it reduces the human effort required for each unit of work.)

Hmmm... People probably said the same exact thing about taxi drivers and really anyone who drives for a living when waymo demo'd self driving cars 10 years ago.

1. Compassion is key 2. I'm of the opinion one should listen to the people in the room who are more well-versed on the topic at hand. 3. Harmonious living. I like to write music as a passion. Many others have written music too. Whats the difference between that person being biologically-based, or transistor-based? 4. It's not a zero-sum game. It's not a chase game. It's play.

Productivity enhancements increases employment. Saying they'd decrease them goes against all empirical evidence.

You might as well be worried the invention of the C compiler hurt jobs for assembly programmers.

Its just going to become self aware and start spitting out photographs?

Every scenic view, every building, every proper noun in the world has already been photographed and is available online. Photographer as "capturer of things" has long been dead, and its corpse lies next to the 'realist painters' of the 1800s before the dawn of the photograph and the airbrush artists of the 50s, 60s and 70s.

However, my newborn hasn't, hot-celebrity's wardrobe last night outside the club hasn't, the winning goal of the Leaf's game hasn't, AI can't create photos of those.

And the conceptual artistic reaction to today's political climate can't, so instead of that artist taking Campbell Soup Cans and silkscreening its logo as prints, or placing the text, "Your Body is a Battle Ground" over two found stock photos of women, or perhaps an artist hiring craftspeople to create realistic sexual explicit sculptures of them having sex with an Italian porn star; an artist is just now going to ask AI to create what they are thinking as a photo, or as a 3D model.

Its going to change nothing, but be a new tool, that makes it a bit easier to create art than it has been in the last 120 years, when "Craft" no longer was defacto "Art".

In the same way other photographers taking pictures have displaced each other throughout history?