Dude we had this discussion just a couple days ago:

And I say this as an apex predator in a field that has already experienced an "AI-like" mass extinction event: there are far fewer professional mixers now than there were ten years ago but not because AI can do it, but because the massive proliferation of untalented executives who don't understand post-production made everyone read their television. If you don't need it to actually sound good, you've been able to do it at your house since shortly after Nirvana's "Nevermind" came out. If you need someone to pay for it, I'm right here with $30k worth of Pro Tools.

Are you arguing that my direct and existential experience with exactly this issue somehow disqualifies my opinion?

Nobody thought that computers would mean the death of stores, until they enabled people to shop from home and get it delivered.

To the contrary - EVERYONE thought Amazon was coming for their livelihood they just knew there was nothing they could do about it. Barnes & Noble was blocked from buying Ingram because it would have created a vertical monopoly; Amazon was allowed to eat everyone's lunch because they didn't have stores.

Robots were never supposed to replace workers in restaurants, except now even mid scale restaurants have discovered that it much cheaper to put a Wi-Fi enabled iPad on the table than pay a human to take your order.

The first time I read about the downfall of cheap service was in Newsweek in 1987. There's kiosks and there's table service and I think you will find that aside from the pandemic, hospitality employment has been growing steadily since WWII. McDonald's is definitely employing fewer workers per store but that's never really been considered an overly-desirable job and really - what have we lost?

AI is taking over a lot of office jobs now too.

Which ones? I recognize that my experience is a count against me but I've got more employees than fingers at this point. How much of your payroll have you farmed out to AI?

I mean we NEED mailroom staff, because all the people who work in offices started in the mailroom (in the 1980s) except now there hasn’t been a mailroom since 1990s because people realized that they could reduce their labor costs by using emails instead of inter office memos hand delivered by humans.

...is this a Sammy Glick thing? What are you getting at, exactly?

Let's back up a minute: I pointed out that it takes hundreds of skilled individuals to make a movie and you came back with

- retail

- fast food

- mail sorting

And you came back maaaaaaad.

Once more with feeling: Izotope came out with a plugin called "total mix" in 2011 or 2012. Theoretically it would take your shitty Discovery Channel audio and magically tweak it so that it sounded like a TV show. It was pretty comical; a lot of us beta-test for Izotope and that one was something they didn't even tell us about because... you know. We would have been mad.

It was okay though because instead they unleashed it on a bunch of editors who hate us anyway because we insist we need annoying things like "time" and "money" to make their pretty videos sound like television so Izotope didn't need us anymore anyway. Except the editors tried Total Mix and came back with "what is this hickory-roasted bullshit" because even though the "AI" (yes, they used that terminology) was definitely listening to their audio, and definitely doing something, it didn't know the audio equivalent of "cats have four legs".

It was such a catastrophe that Izotope spent a bunch of money scrubbing the Internet of any mention of "Total Mix." You won't find any record of it now - in part because RME's had a product called "Totalmix" for 20 years (nice job Izotope) and in part because mostly what AI is doing these days is data poisoning. And really, Izotope now has a number of garbage products they sell to neophytes - Vea, Nectar, Neutron, Tonal Balance Control and Neoverb are all "AI" products designed to make your dogshit amateur production sound less dogshit. And they do! They make your dogshit sound less dogshit.

But they don't make it sound good.

Izotope, wisely, still sells real tools. They're expensive, they're complicated and you know what? They are fucking chockablock with AI. I've been using RX for more than 20 years now and the stuff it can do is spooky. But it won't do any of that spooky shit for you because you don't know what you're doing. You could learn? You could get as good at it as I am! But you'd have to put in the time, and then you'd want to be paid. And then we'd be right back where we started.

Look. Let's say a robot can do 99% of my job. Let's say you spent $50k on a commercial with absolutely no humans in it. Let's say you're competing against an ad agency that you know has a human who gets a thousand dollars to do an audio polish. Let's be honest - you're going to pay me a thousand dollars. Because I can get you that last one percent that keeps you from losing your next contract.

Machines have been displacing human workers since the mutherfucking plow, dude. The skills change and so does the work. I tell you what, though - an Amish dude with a team of horses is always going to kick my ass in a corn-growing contest no matter how bitchin' my tractor 'cuz the Amish dude? Knows a thing or two about growing corn. Me? I'm gonna google "how do you grow corn" and try and figure out which of five contradictory snippets I should pay attention to. I'm fukt.

It's just a tool. It's feared by people who don't understand tools, and people who understand what happens when you let people do whatever they want with tools.