I had a realization recently that genuinely disturbed me, and humbled me. I watched Claude one-shot things that would've taken me months, maybe years, to learn and get good at, and a very long time to actually make. And it didn't do them badly. It did them well.
AI is getting good. Scary good. And I'm not the only one noticing. Elon Musk tweeted this the other day:
Now, I know the catch. Elon, and basically everyone in the chain of this AI thing, is massively incentivized to make claims exactly like this. Hype is the product. So part of me wants to roll my eyes. But it feels too risky to downplay it just because the messenger has something to gain. And notice what he actually said: "I might be one of them." This is someone sitting near the very top of the pyramid. If the people up there are nervous, you kind of fear for everyone standing below them.
I can really only speak to my own corner. I'm a designer. I've been a graphic designer for a long time, so that's the thing I actually know. And honestly, graphic design sits in a high-risk zone. AI can already do 90% of the grunt work. You don't even need to touch the interface anymore. Wire some code to Adobe, even unofficially, and you can drive Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere, and it does more than you'd imagine.
A lot of people's jobs are, quietly, already doable this way. It's only a matter of time before everyone finds out. And the day Adobe opens its apps up officially, to Claude, to OpenAI, or ships a genuinely good model of its own, well. It's basically taken.
So, the question: should you learn anything? My honest answer is yes, you have to, but not in the ways you think.
For most of my life, the value was in doing the work. Knowing the tools, grinding out the file, being fast. That's exactly the part that's disappearing. So I think you learn the other half now: taste, judgment, knowing what's actually good and why, knowing what to make in the first place. The craft was never really the point. It just felt like it because it was the hard part. Now the hard part is having something to say, and the taste to know when it's right. Learn that. And honestly? Learn how to learn, because whatever's true today probably won't be in a year.
The bigger question, what happens to our jobs, I genuinely don't have an answer for. I think it's going to change. And you have to be ready for that. Not because I'm trying to threaten you, but because it's a bitter truth, and it's better to know it early than late.
I don't know where we go from here. I don't think most people do. I'm not sure anybody does. I don't even fully know what this piece is supposed to mean. Take from it whatever you take from it.