Death of a Copywriter.

You may think that title sounds familiar, with a nod to “Death of a Salesman”. If you didn’t have to read the play in high school, here is a quick synopsis.

The two act play revolves around Willy Loman, a salesman who is unhappy with his life and may be senile. The play features a variety of themes, however the one that I think of the most important in this discussion of AI is the American Dream.

The American Dream is a set of ideals that include democracy, rights, liberty, and equality, however most of this falls hand in hand with the idea of hard work and capitalism.

However, how does AI fit into the standards of hard work and capitalism? I don’t think it does, and that is the issue.

The use of AI in jobs, working smarter not harder, seems like a win-win situation. Base level skills are still needed to do some tasks, but there is a lot that AI could take care of to take the weight off of people. In addition this could lead to those who would typically spend hours working, making their jobs less taxing or less time consuming. Mean more hours working on their on personal projects, passions, or cultivating time with family and friends. AI could make us more communal as we find some jobs to just be obsolete. However, with the good, also comes the bad. If AI is used to assist in our daily tasks giving the workforce more time to relax and participate in a communal society, I think the government would need to quickly address the issues of homelessness, health care, a universal basic income for everyone, or the wealth disparity will only get larger.

The second AI use is art. While the art AI can create is beautiful, it is fully copywritten and stolen. While it could be a super valid tool for artist of all kinds to use for planning and reference images, the use of AI to create the art when it is based off of others hard work, without their permission, payments, or any type of credit, could destroy the industry. While it has the potential to make art creation easier to obtain for some, it may also invalidate any digital artist that exist, or any artist who has put their work on line as it could be used as source material for the AI learning.

AI will be the next revolution for us as a society, just as the industrial revolution did in the 18th century. As we grow and learn, we will have to all adapt to the changes that will be coming within the next few years.