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AI has disrupted a lot of industries, and maybe one of the only silver linings is that it gives the people it’s displaced tend to find a strange kind of solidarity with each other. However, that’s not what happened in this story.
One man was reeling from a job lost due to AI last year, spending months dealing with the depression that followed, knowing his career experience was suddenly worthless in a changed market.
So when he texted his artist friend to commission new artwork, the conversation turned to how AI had affected them both.
But instead of supporting him, his artist friend seemed to dismiss his experience entirely. Neither the commission nor the friendship survived the ensuing conversation.
Keep reading for the full story.
I have a friend who works as an artist. I like to roleplay online and I’ve commissioned her a few times to draw my characters.
There’s obviously a big uptick in people online using AI generated images for their characters and profiles. I still prefer to pay my friend for art.
AI is a bit of a sore subject for this artist.
I don’t really like AI. I lost my job due to AI basically making me obsolete in the eyes of my company.
It hurt. I liked my job and coworkers. It happened last year and I got pretty depressed over it, feeling like I’m useless.
My friends know how hard it all was on me. Including this artist friend I’ll call AF.
So she hit AF up for another commission, which she was very grateful for.
I was texting AF and during our conversation I mentioned wanting to commission her to draw my newest character I was making.
She and I had a brief conversation where she thanked me for still coming to her for art because AI art has gotten so popular she noticed a big decrease in people commissioning her.
I shared my experience more in detail about how AI took my job too, so I get it.
But instead of commiserating, AF made her feel worse about the whole thing.
She wasn’t really sympathetic though.
Instead, AF basically told me that “it’s different” because my job is one that it makes more sense for AI to do. But AI art is a bigger deal because it’s stealing art and being an artist takes a lot of skill that AI could never be able to replicate.
In her eyes, AF just didn’t seem to understand her situation.
The whole conversation was rubbing me the wrong way, so I told AF that I disagree on it being a bigger deal with her job than it was with mine.
I was actually laid off. Not just a slow down on commissions. I was jobless in a market where my only career experience was for a now useless field. It was awful.
She now feels quite negatively towards AF and her attitude.
I didn’t like how she was acting like her experience with AI was more serious than mine.
AF was, in my opinion, being rude by not hearing me out and insisting that her experience was more valid than mine because my job in her eyes was easy to do and pointless.
Which is exactly why I was so depressed at the start of the year.
So she decided to pull back on the commission.
I got mad and told her nevermind on the commission, that I’ll just use AI to make my art from now on if she’s going to act like that.
I also said that she’s probably lost more work due to being a jerk than because of AI.
Now the whole friend group is turning against her.
AF blocked me and told some mutual friends about what I said.
I feel bad and embarrassed but also pretty justified because I don’t know why she had to act like that.
Well that escalated quickly.
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If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a woman who was stunned when her friends finally admitted the reason for their falling out.
What did Reddit have to say?
Some people can be a little performative about their stance on AI.
This creates a lot of opportunities for hypocrisy.
So this friend expects people to support her career but doesn’t care about when other people lose theirs? That’s pretty rich.
Just because two things aren’t exactly the same doesn’t mean they aren’t both bad in their own way.
He kept commissioning her work through a period when most people had switched to AI generators. He did it consciously and deliberately because he knew what displacement felt like from the inside.
So when he told her his experience, he was hoping to speak with someone else who understood, but instead she decided to leave him high and dry.
Sure, what he said was harsh, but she was being pretty harsh too, especially when he had already gone out of his way to support her and her livelihood.
For someone so against AI, she was acting pretty dang robotic.
