First Semester Reflections

Now that I've finished my first semester at art school, I've taken the time to reflect on what I went through. I definitely got destroyed mentally this semester. I feel I escaped as a better artist but I still need to get a lot better compared to my peers. Definitely having a lot of self-doubt however over my work. This leads to my mind thinking about…

Dropping out. I haven't gotten close to tapping out yet, but I do wonder what I would do even if I did drop out. This leads to my main topic of this blog post:

Our society is changing in ways we can't predict and its not making me mentally sane.

With AI theres so many chances for jobs to be cut out. Now I am of the belief that companies are currently using AI as an excuse to fire lots of people to juice up their stock numbers. That AI is not the sole reason for the job loss. However it does leave a troubling view that no job is safe from ai. What field should I go into? Who even knows if that field will exist in 5 years?

I don't even want to work. I'm making a neocities site with anime girls. I want to be an unemployed sheltered neet nepo baby who doesn't have to work a day in her life. But AI won't create this utopia, just most likely the unemployed part.

My current plan is to keep working in school so my art gets good. I'm currently not viewing it as a path in the industry in a desperate attempt to keep my sanity sane as I see no jobs in the future. Maybe the whole industry will shut down and I'll work at a standard 9-5 and do indie projects for low pay on the side.

The problem with AI is I'm definitely going to have to use it. I know most people, especially around me, shut AI out. With the way things are moving, I see this as no longer an option. While I do not use AI, I pay attention to the tech industry and the economy, which is unfortunately all about AI. Thus I've learnt a lot about the topic, and have actually seen really helpful ways people have used it. Problem is this doesn't generate a billion dollars so all we see is slop. The money put in doesn't give us any significant returns in investment, and companies are craming it everywhere in a desprete attempt to find something that makes money. This makes the employees forced to use it hate it, and this is exactly why I know I have to use it. So some big shot can find a way to make returns on a terrible investment.

I don't even feel generative AI will be the main revolution AI will bring. There's so much more research and development we could be doing but we invested everything in this one thing. The disappointment of GPT 5 was so funny as it completely trashed the company. Open AI is so behind even AI bros don't like GPT.

Like its obviously gonna crash when you ask for 500 billion dollars for trillion dollars in return. When they have so far generated ZERO DOLLARS IN PROFIT. Like it's humanly impossible. At this point I don't attack AI even from a moral standard anymore, it's just a “this flat out doesn't make any sense economically speaking.”

As well as health, even if AI studying cancer does it better than a human, the use has been trashed so much AI can no longer be better than a human. It must be perfect. I can see how this news isn't exciting to anyone. How can we even use health benefits that will even be given to us? Why not never use it so you can charge more? What if the AI is wrong? Who's responsible? It's impossible for the average person to be excited or even know about these advancements from how our society currently functions, to all AI publicity being the plagiarism slop machine. AI has genuiene uses but its impossible to see all the good it can do and be excited at how it could speed up my workflow when all anyone wants to do it make a plagarism machiene to enrich a few guys. Like make it more expensive for me to get any piece of technology for the lamest use of the tech I've ever seen. Every once in a while I'll see someone show how they've implemented AI into their workflow that makes me go "holy shit! This is actually revolutionary! This changes the game." But then I see 100 god awful uses for it that its impossible to have any optimism.

A lot of the downside with AI is how our society is built in a way where it will remove a ton of jobs with no repayment for the stolen work. A lot of suffering will happen so a few people will get richer. I am predicting a lot of pain next year. Financially mainly, right now we're in the "slowly" phase. A lot of bad things are piling up, but we have reached "suddenly" yet.

We also are trapped in the current system with no way to escape. You want to move somewhere to find a house? Where? Everyone is having a housing crisis. Unemployment is everywhere, prices going up are everywhere. I definitely want everyone to be smart with money right now, as I feel it will get uglier.

The main point is even if I wanted to change, the future is so uncertain I have no idea what to do. Will my job be there? Will I even be good enough to get a job?

I'm not going to tune out all this misery however. As bad as reading the stuff is right now, it does broaden my horizons and make me smarter. Yeah "a new century of American humiliation statistics just dropped" does get depressing (as if this entry isn't proof enough,) but I need to know this stuff to make smart financial decisions. While my problems with the tech industry are from their lack of appreciation for art, I still need to broaden my horizons and learn about it. This crap is annoyingly interesting and unfortunately does have real benefits to knowing.

The only thing left is to do something to stand out in my class right now, a website.