I’m a graphic designer.
The entire point of AI as it exists in the western imperialist world is to cut out workers, labor rights, and the means of production by automating jobs, capturing processing power to replace brain power, and essentially to funnel money from consumers to those who control AI. Those companies are using our materials, our work, our capital, and our attention to train their models, and NONE of it is meant to make our material conditions better. What do we get from it now? Text that sounds like a middle manager, and that’s factually correct as often as one. Images that look like shit, and that are making people dumber. Cars that disable their AI at the last possible moment specifically to avoid responsibility, and that doesn’t work well-enough to be road legal under ideal circumstances. Search engine answers that show nothing but that AI has automated being confidently wrong on the internet. Entire towns that no longer have water or electricity, but do have constant jet noise, diesel pollution and markedly higher temperatures.
We aren’t even at a stage where anyone but Nvidia is actually getting anything out of it. Budgets aren’t being saved because companies are using AI, they’re just spending the money on AI instead of for actual work. It’s a cult. It’s operating as a cult, and for some reason, no one is treating it as if it’s a cult except “Rationalists”, who are balls deep in it because it’s a cult.
Honestly, the only parts I’ve felt as if AI has impacted me is in hiring. Designers tend to sell themselves based on their portfolios, and most of the decently-paying companies seem to now be using AI to sort through résumés, so regardless of how good your work is, you need to use arbitrarily-selected keywords or you won’t even get an interview. The other way is that HR departments list being “proficient with leading AI platforms” with no idea how that might be important to the job, and from what I can tell, resistance to that is a red flag.