Job on my sleeve

By dav rauch

As I listen to Heart On My Sleeve and scrape my jaw up off the floor, I'm completely awestruck by AI’s newfound capabilities. It seems overnight AI went from making three word suggestions in Gmail to passing the bar exam and writing a Drake / The Weeknd song that’s indistinguishable from what the artists would write themselves. 

Yet I’d be dishonest if I didn't also acknowledge that I feel some anxiety about the daily news feed of AI’s extraordinary capabilities  — does this song announce yet another category of creatives (musicians) that will soon be displaced by AI? And, could my job be next? 

This daily emotional whiplash from awe to fear sent me searching for reprieve. Where did I turn for help? Where else? AI. I logged into Discord and typed in “/image prompt very very excited face 3d pixar hyper real”, then “/image prompt very very terrified face 3d pixar hyper real”. After about 50+ rounds of tweaks and some 3D compositing, I ended up with this animation, which gives expression to my AI-induced emotional rollercoaster:

My brain (+ emotions) on AI:

My brain (+ emotions) on AI

But my real reprieve came at AISF. Emmanuel de Maistre (cofounder of Scenario) said something that snapped me outta my AI-induced anxiety spiral. Long story short, he created an AI tool which creates 3D assets for video games — lots of them, more or less instantaneously. He expected job-anxiety blowback from the community of human asset creators who are much slower than his AI. But instead he found something surprising — as he studied his customers, he found that the folks who used his AI the most were the very people he had assumed would be put out of work by it. Huh. 

On the one hand, this is surprising. On the other — duh — totally expected. The difference just depends on our mindset. 

That designers are his primary customer is only surprising when we think of our work from the mindset of a zero-sum game: In other words, I have a job, if AI can do my work faster or more cheaply, then it takes my job. It wins, I lose, zero-sum. 

But on the other hand, it’s totally logical that designers themselves are Emmanuel’s primary customer, because after all: What designer wouldn’t want to increase their productivity by a factor of 10x? What designer wouldn’t want to incorporate new talents and skill sets into their work? What designer isn’t itching to get their hands on a brand new and stoopid powerful design tool? 

Duh. Every good designer. 

I don’t want to make light of any job lost, because that always hurts. But history has shown that for every job lost to a new tech innovation, there are ultimately many more added. For example, PCs and digital design tools initially led to a group of analog designers losing their jobs (the graphic designers who laid out newspapers and magazines by literally cutting and pasting paper). But these digital tools which created some initial job loss also radically transformed the landscape of design, multiplying the categories of design, which before long demanded many, many more designers — web designers, app designers, info designers, UI designers, motion designers, 3D designers, interaction designers, etc. 

The key to remaining employed during that digital transition had everything to do with the plasticity of the designers themselves: those that rolled with the changes and upskilled were rewarded with choices about which flavor of design they wanted to dive into. Those that did not found themselves, well, unemployed.  

So my lil’ epiphany from Emmanuel’s insight was to jump back into my creator mindset, the one that sees the world from a place of curiosity and exploration, has a seemingly insatiable appetite for making things, has so much more to learn, and is excited by the promise of change instead of terrified by it.

In light of this, the questions I’m now asking are, 

What are the things that AI is most likely going to start doing for me? 
Freed from the labor that AI will do for me, what new tasks and challenges will AI enable me to take on?  
Finally, and most importantly,
What do I need to learn now in order to make those changes?

Exploring these questions, and considering how to make AI work for me instead of against me feels much more proactive and fun than fretting the day when an AI walks away with my job. 

So now I’m looking forward to reading tomorrow’s daily news announcing some fabulous new creative capability of AI. But this time, I’ll plan to read it without worrying about wearing my heart — or my job —  on my sleeve.