This is a strange line of thought. I mean, yes we'll get a whole bunch of bullcrap posts from people not involved, but effectively you're instead reducing the conversation to "Lets give the artist their 15 minutes of neo-luddism".

Artists are not the first group to fall under the hammer of technology and automation, and they will not be the last. I'm sure most blacksmiths thought themselves artists that worked hard to master a craft after years of work, and now a press stamps out that same work in seconds. This is hitting people hard now because things we think of as distinctly human are now being accomplished by machines (though was this not true in the past?).

There are discussions for artists here, but there are plenty more for all of society. Jobs will get replaced and change in form at an ever increasing rate due to technology if trends keep up. Will the rate of technology change job requirements faster than humans can retrain? If it does what are nations and societies going to do about this. Much like the AI safety issues, we need to answer these large scale issues now before artists and programmers are stabbing each other in the streets for breadcrumbs while multitrillionares that own the technology live like gods.

That's interesting. HN has a software bent on startups and such. As if programming is one of The Known Ways to create something. Fundamentally, our instructions are executed by a machine to some effect, one of which could be profit.

I wonder if artists are having their "software moment": a decade from now (or sooner) they will say, "Adobe Photoshop is the assembly language of digital art; use these AI frameworks/prompts/GPU cloud mix to do X and Y."

From that perspective, it's just pragmatic. No one writes assembly unless it's either for passion or practical.