Adam Sand traces how AI tools reshaped creative work, from DALL·E disappointing users to ChatGPT turning coding into autocorrect. Code either runs or fails, making AI code generators an immediate threat to software jobs in ways image generators never were.
The first place where AI kind of took jobs, right? Um, was ironically like the first, I guess, volley of attacks, the first, you know, fires across the bow of the ship was graphic design. The very first model that anybody in the general public got access to was actually DALL-E and DALL-E 2, which is graphic design, but it sucked. We all know it sucked. And then you had Midjourney and then you got the very first video generators and you had the Will Smith eating spaghetti video. And then everybody kind of said, see, AI sucks. And then we got ChatGPT. And then we started using it in Copilot and this thing called Replit. You had these tools for autopilot, or sorry, autocorrect in code. So you could type some code, it would kind of in blurry text, not blurry, but like faded text, show you what the end of that particular function would be. You could hit Tab, Enter, and it was like autocorrect for code, right? And it felt like spell check. So it felt non-threatening. But what happened was AI downloaded all of code. And because code is deterministic, images are probabilistic, Right? It's probably going to look like that. But a code is deterministic. It either works or it doesn't. You run it and it works or it doesn't work. And so there was these sites like Substack and whatnot where you could go to get coding advice.
