Oliver Fiegel, a 47-year-old Munich-based photographer, was reading a newspaper on Germany’s National Sunday when he saw a strange look on the top page image. The images showed the boy chasing soccer on the pitch. However, some of the wild flowers on the grass floated without stems. Half of the goal net was missing. The boy’s hands were shaped.
Photographer Oliver Fiegel, 47, said he would no longer be able to make a living from his trading alone in the industry in 18 years. Photo: Oliver Fiegel/Guardian Community
Over the past few years, many of Fiegel’s photography clients have been newspapers and magazines. However, the job has recently dried up. The image he felt showed one reason for “generic illustrations,” the provided caption said.
Fiegel was irritated. The use of artificial intelligence rather than human creatively represented the crafts that he spent years training and was tainted and erased by the emergence of cheaper and faster generative AI tools.
“AI has had the most devastating impact on the industry.” observer How is the rise of generative AI tools changing their working lives, for better or worse, amidst the economic changes of earthquakes? “It’s happening very quickly.”
Fiegel, a photographer for almost 18 years, said he was no longer able to make a living and was forced to fundamentally diversify his income streams. Now he is considering opening a natural wine bar instead.
In advanced economies such as the UK, Germany and the US, about 60% of jobs are exposed to AI, according to AI, a survey conducted by the International Monetary Fund last year, with about half of them potentially negatively affected. In the UK alone, AI can drive down private sector jobs up to 3M, according to the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, but some unemployment could be offset by a new role in economic change.
“I still only know a few photographers who can live out of this deal,” Fiegel said. “It’s not easy. I’ve identified it as being creative for the rest of my life.”
Longtime translator Karl Kerner said the AI tools had a negative impact on him. Photo: Karl Kerner/Guardian Community
Since 1994, Karl Kerner has focused on non-fiction scientific texts as a translator among English, German and Norwegians. This type of translation requires expert knowledge and careful terminology, he said.
“I’m basically out of business now,” Kerner said. “This AI has become like a tsunami.” In the past few years of AI-driven translation and editing tools, the number of “[work] Requests have just diminished,” he added.
His loss of identity had a major impact, said Kerner, who is born in New York and now lives in Tonsburg, Norway. “All night, everything about this linguistic culture is worthless. It does something for you, because you were professional. [It’s like] Someone takes the rug from under you.”
Kerner, 64, began working for an agricultural consultant. “It’s not a good age to join the job market. It wasn’t easy,” he said.
But technology is also helping him with some translation work he still gets. Instead of translating words by word, he can send the text to automated translation software, and use his knowledge to eliminate inaccuracies and mistranslations, significantly reducing working hours. “I’m not a Techno Forbe, I think it’s attractive,” he said.
Other workers have more positive experiences as they integrate AI into their daily work.
Alexander Calvey, a self-employed Locum GP in Surrey, said he used AI Scribe to write down his notes, saving him time and improving quality. The results mean he can “focus more on the patient than on the notes.”
Calvey, who also works for a private GP provider, added that he managed to increase The number of patients he sees is sometimes 4-5 per hour. In the future, as technology improves, Calvey feels that AI will have more use to guide questions and treatments.
ChatGpt Chatbot has become the sounding album of Paul, a 44-year-old university researcher on mathematics and philosophy based in Stockholm. He said the tool would help summarize the literature and brainstorm research questions.
“It knows a lot, I know other things that I don’t want to be challenging,” he said, allowing me to study those topics more deeply.
However, Paul’s use ChatGpt is not just his professional job. He also uses it for personal tasks, such as providing analysis if he experiences strange dreams.
A mother’s pencil portrait by freelance illustrator Jenny Turner. Illustrations: Jenny Turner/Jeturnarath/Guardian Community
Despite this feature, he is concerned about the amount of information that companies that control generative AI tools learn about their users. He said he is “very worried” about the “power of a small number of companies’ high-tech giants.”
Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Kiel Starmer said he hopes that AI will be “mainlined to the vein” of the nation to promote productivity and economic growth. But this month, the TUC is calling for urgent government action to protect workers in the creative industry amidst the risk of disruption and unemployment.
For Jenny Turner, a 33-year-old freelance illustrator in the northeastern England, the decline in fee demand was “very sudden” and coincided with the spread of AI imaging tools. Turner previously sold his work on Etsy. For example, she charges about £100 for a portrait drawn by a colored pencil. However, in the last few years she has begun to see AI-generated images beneath her work in the “You Like too” section.
“I can’t compete any more…it’s on sale at a price I could never drop,” she said. “It really hit me hard and made me feel empty like you were wasting everything. It just gets upset and makes you mad.”
Turner said after drawing from a young age and studying at university, she was now forced to abolish her illustrations on Etsy and consider other jobs. “If that’s what happens in everything,” she said, “How many people aren’t going to do their job?”
Source: www.theguardian.com
