Look.

1. I've seen one or two ads that very clearly were AI generated. I think one of them was coca-cola.

Are you seriously arguing that Coca Cola, with its phone number advertising budget, is putting people out of work by economizing on ChatGPT? Or are they maybe just riding the zeitgeist, not quite as stupidly as Pepsi? If I were Coca Cola I'd hire four extra interns just to look for inadvertent naziism or some shit.

2. Some local place's fliers now use AI Art. They used to be scrapbooky doodles and I liked that better.

And I guarantee the scrapbooky doodles were pulled off of Canva or Shutterstock or Fiverr or whatever. 'member back when everything looked like an Instagram filter? that sucked too. Lo and behold people got sick of it as fast as they thought it was awesome. No jobs were destroyed.

3. A friend of a friend who I had a conversation with works in making corporate animations said that he's being given shorter timespans to make things, necessitating the backgrounds being done in AI which he's sad about because it's less fun and doesn't look as good.

Mattes are fucking awesome! Some of the most talented artists in America made matte paintings. The ones for Blade Runner are legendary. I've got a framed one from Total Recall drawn by a buddy of mine - it was up six months before the movie came out and people would ask me what it was. They still do because nobody watched Total Recall. But we're talking corporate animations and that shit has never been about quality.

First movie I ever worked on? Our effects were either done by us or on stolen company shit in the middle of the night when the big houses looked the other way and let their dudes bring in a little side scratch. I've been doing this so long that the first special effects I ever shot

were chest-sized models

against a blue screen

on 35mm film

using tape-measure-and-stopwatch motion control

And it was a total fucking pain in the ass to get something of any quality. But we put in the effort. Because the coin of the realm is EFFORT. I've worked on movies where the effects are done by pixel-pushing college students an ocean away and the question is never "how much to do this" it's always "what can we get for $500." Throw an AI at it and if we don't get more bang for our buck, we don't use AI. It's that fucking simple.

If I were to do that first movie again I could generate fucktons of photorealistic shots. I could green screen the space station we built painstakingly out of vacuformed panels and plywood. We could shoot it in 8k all day rather than cooking off a dollar a second on ends. And the $40k we ended up spending would have gotten us halfway to Gravity instead of inspiring Gravity.

But the $40k would have been spent.

Your friend of a friend? Not getting less work. Not doing fewer hours. Not being paid less. Shifting from "ooh this is fun" to "ooh this is less fun" because yeah - AI is perfect for generating background mattes. If I were him I'd get good at talking the AI into coming up with the mattes he needs because if the difference between "shitty matte the boss is happy with" and "bitchin' matte everybody loves" is an hour? He'll get that hour without having to fight for it.

There's this real need to argue that AI is taking people's jobs when in fact all it's doing is making them harder or easier. There is NOTHING AI does well enough to do without supervision and let me say this with all my authority as a supervisor - if one of my employees is a pathological liar, they aren't allowed to answer the phone. If you have a pretty sound suspicion that Tesla will drive you into a wall when you least expect it, why would you let go of the wheel? And if you have a pretty sound suspicion that AI will Nazi up your brand, why let it speak for you?