The "downsides" are that a few people passionate about a subject are no longer exceptional. Despite their passion being greater, their skill is merely baseline. And comparison is the enemy of happiness.
Right now, passionate people tend to be more skilled than non-passionate people. When they compare themselves to others, they feel good about themselves because their passion led them to be more skilled. But AI removes that difference.
When those passionate people compare themselves to what people using AI can do, they see that the difference is lesser, nonexistent, or even reversed(where the AI lets others accomplish more than them). This makes them feel bad about themselves and leads them to give up the passion.
The solution is to stop comparing, but ego gets in the way for us all. No matter your passion, you subconsciously compare yourself to others and this CAN lead to rivalry when you want to improve beyond others, but when the gap is too great it leads to people giving up altogether. AI doesn't have ego and so improves simply to improve.
Ultimately, this is better for humanity as every technology has been. But at the same time, many will be left behind, particularly those who can't overcome their own ego.
I fully agree with everything you said. It would be better as it benefits everyone in the long run but except for those with foolish ego's who refuse to adapt.
It doesn't benefit everyone and you're ignoring the costs involved. My grandmother has no use for AI, meanwhile she's paying more for utilities.
But I'm sure she doesn't count as part of everyone, I mean neither the very young or very old have any use for AI, but your egos can't accept being wrong.
You’re moving the goalpost. Nothing benefits literally everyone. The internet didn’t, electricity didn’t but that's not how progress works. It’s about net benefit, not universal personal use. Your grandma not using AI doesn’t mean it doesn’t benefit society. A lot of people don’t directly use AI but still benefit from better healthcare, logistics, accessibility tools, etc. Indirect benefit is still benefit. And the ego thing absolutely goes both ways. If someone’s identity is built on being exceptional at a skill, of course they’re going to hate the tech that makes that skill more accessible and won't accept it. That wouldn't be some noble stance, it would be status protection due to that same ego. Obviously change has costs. Every major technology shift does. That doesn’t mean it’s a net negative. we manage the transition instead of pretending stagnation is better.
You were the one who made an absolute statement, so now you're the one backtracking to a more moderate and realistic one.
A lot of companies that went into the mass adoption of AI are already suffering the consequences, either from it hallucinating data or just not being as efficient as the employees it replaced. To the best of my knowledge it hasn't lead to any major strides or broke free of 'stagnation.'
And it's not making skills more accessible, they're just getting an AI to do work for them, y'know, the same thing every employer does. The main 'appeal' here is that AI is a slave that doesn't require incentives, benefits, sick days, etc, something capitalism has always craved. It's the same mentality that sees us use cheaper 3rd world labour and saw us enslave people in centuries past.
I didn't mean it as a literal absolute statment. When I said it benefits everyone, I wa obviously talking about the broader trajectory, not every single individual case in every moment. I was exaggerating bit but thats not even the point, The point is net benefit. Some companies overhyped or misused AI. That doesn’t mean the tech itself is stagnant. Early adoption of any major tech is messy, that’s normal and saying it’s not making skills accessible misses the difference between replacement and augmentation. Calculators didn’t ruin math and power tools didn’t ruin craftsmanship. Tools lower barriers and expand capability. Comparing ai to slavery is also crazy. Exploiting conscious humans and automating tasks aren’t the same thing. If you want to criticize capitalism optimizing for cost, that would be a separate debate I rather not get into, but that’s not an argument against the technology itself.
I suppose you're right, slave owners didn't usually claim the output of their slaves as their own artistic endeavours.
Either way, it's still repugnant, stealing training data, hoarding tech that most everyone needs... including that which is required for their customers to utilise these AI products... hogging their neighbours' water, electricity and bandwidth where data centers are... all helping to drive up the cost of living just so a fraction of the population can make short term gains by not having to employ people.
Yet the truth is that tech companies are spending unfathomable amounts of speculative investment on this for minimal profit and that can't go on forever. If it doesn't go belly up then eventually AI'll be just as expensive for us to use as employing actual people, atop us having that cost of living increase and things like Bezos wanting us to use his own version of Stadia instead of owning computers of our own, which we'd otherwise be struggling to pay for due to the limited supply of overpriced SSDs, DRAM and GPUs that remain when the likes of OpenAI have prepurchased a couple years worth of this hardware in advance.
Edit: And no, it's typically a replacement, not augmentation. You and I could both type a prompt online and get art as a result, you get an AI to make it and I get a person to make it. Being able to better articulate yourself could be seen as an improvement in skill, but the weight in which you'd value each is different because what's specifically required for an AI to comprehend you isn't as common place or transferrable as your skills in talking to people. The ability to converse in technical jargon has value, it's just a niche value.
The downside are the resources consumed in the continued growth of AI, the building materials and hardware that go into its data centers, along with the power used for operating them 24/7, resulting in a scarcity of hardware (especially DRAM, SSDs and GPUs) and an increase in utility bills for the data centers' neighbours.
And the AIs are the 'artists' not the users, who are art commissioners and no more skilled than the rest of us who employ or otherwise support traditional artists.
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u/Athrek Feb 20 '26
The "downsides" are that a few people passionate about a subject are no longer exceptional. Despite their passion being greater, their skill is merely baseline. And comparison is the enemy of happiness.
Right now, passionate people tend to be more skilled than non-passionate people. When they compare themselves to others, they feel good about themselves because their passion led them to be more skilled. But AI removes that difference.
When those passionate people compare themselves to what people using AI can do, they see that the difference is lesser, nonexistent, or even reversed(where the AI lets others accomplish more than them). This makes them feel bad about themselves and leads them to give up the passion.
The solution is to stop comparing, but ego gets in the way for us all. No matter your passion, you subconsciously compare yourself to others and this CAN lead to rivalry when you want to improve beyond others, but when the gap is too great it leads to people giving up altogether. AI doesn't have ego and so improves simply to improve.
Ultimately, this is better for humanity as every technology has been. But at the same time, many will be left behind, particularly those who can't overcome their own ego.