Everything else
.
I'd say people's hobbies matter to them much more than their jobs. There's a reason why the richer a country is,
the smaller its working hours are. Very few people actually want their lives to be consumed by their jobs.
View: https://x.com/akarlin/status/2045618278689833274
I'd also add that a lot of people already work useless and meaningless jobs (and knowing that you work one can easily lead to burnout and worse mental health), other people work jobs which are meaningful, but aren't what those people actually want to do, but the absolute main reason why I see generative AI as a godsend technology, is that without it, only very few people have any ability to express themselves with and pour their efforts into
anything else than their job.
This is the kind of stuff that doesn't really get said on the internet when it comes to AI, because just like AI creation itself, the discourse around it is dominated by top 1% income Americans who already have everything they could ever want and for whom the world already works as it should. For the rest of the world though, this is exactly the technology that could give them all the same opportunities those rich Americans take for granted.
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The best example of this is the movie industry. Consider how few people have any opportunity, privilege really, to create a good movie. Not just any movie at all (though more on that in the next paragraph), but one people would actually enjoy and watch it unironically.
Not a single such person exists in maybe 90% of world's countries. There are entire countries with millions of people which produce like 10 movies per year, with those movies as a rule being of shitty quality, and extremely cookie-cutter and basic. If you've ever watched movies from a country with a tiny film industry, you've probably noticed that, as a rule, they never really try anything special, because nobody in their country has ever done so, and they don't want to do something new just to fail. There's a reason why there are no Mozambican-Madagascarian epic sci-fi co-productions, or Uruguayan horror franchises, or Tajikistani-Moldovan-Montenegrin answers to LOTR. You get the point. It's not just about budgets either. Notice that even the "independent" and "underground" stuff that isn't meant for mainstream success is only ever good when it comes from the US. Even when they don't have big budgets, American movies often still have people with skills from a lot of other projects, people who might be starting but were taught and mentored at world-class universities by professionals with long careers in the industry, and so on. Even when the budgets are small, the skills of the people working on those projects are often high, specifically because the American movie scene is so big and active that there are a lot of opportunities for people hone their skills and to meet people who have already done so and learn from them. Countries with 10 movies a year don't have any of that.
We can talk a lot about "ambition", "perseverance", or "motivation", but the simple fact is, apart from the US, there's just a tiny handful of countries which can create both decent and numerous visual content. Even Europe struggles doing so by now. The US creates kick-ass movies, Japan creates anime, South Korea has some dramas and good movies, and that's about it globally.
Meanwhile, in those countries, those industries are heavily dominated by the nepo babies and industry insiders, with most newcomers into it being kids from top 1% income families whose parents' money paid for their education and opportunities. This report is about the UK, but I doubt it's much different for the other developed countries:
From nepotism to pay so bad that even Bafta winners are quitting the industry, the odds are stacked against working-class talent. No wonder stars like Lucy Beaumont want to ‘jack it all in’
www.theguardian.com
And of course, just being in the industry doesn't mean having a say in what gets greenlit and created. It's pretty wild to think about, but most of the internationally successful visual content that gets consumed worldwide is created by a bunch of richfag producers and overworked mangakas whose combined population probably wouldn't even qualify as a small town.
That is simply the world we live in right now. Well over a century after the creation of film, that's the amount of people who actually have the opportunity to create something worth watching with it. And, it is this world that suddenly got introduced to AI-generated videos just a few years ago. Suddenly, the ability to create Hollywood-tier clips and put them together into short movies changed into something anyone could actually theoretically do. There's like a million people who would like to create a high-quality movie for every one that actually could create it because of all the bottlenecks and hurdles that exist there, and now there's actually a technology that could allow all of them to do so.
Consider how big of a jump that is. If AI-generated videos get even better and affordable, literally anyone would be able to create what just a few years ago was the sole privilege of a couple of Hollywood execs. An incredible change. All the people who had to give up their dreams of doing so would suddenly be able to create their own movies.
And all of that applies to all other arts and entertainment as well. Movies are a perfect example of it because it has so many bottlenecks and people can clearly see how impossible it is for almost anyone to create one, but literature, music, video games, and so on, all have similar bottlenecks as well, if less numerous and often less visible. Book publishing, music publishing, video game creation, all of them get more common the richer a country is, but that doesn't mean that the people in poor countries, or poor people in rich countries, don't want to create them. They simply lack the time, talent, and resources to do so, but not the will. And now, there's a technology that makes it so that you actually only need the will to do so to create those.
It's going to change the world a lot when people realize the implications of all of this and how many people who previously would never have been able to create their own personalized entertainment will be able to do so. That is how I'd say AI is going to make human life better. More opportunities to create stuff you'd otherwise be excluded and kept from, to a massive degree.
