All of this has happened before

My undergrad youth was spent studying journalism at the University of Technology Sydney, and from our brutalist tower on Broadway we watched new technology upend an entire industry. Next door to us was the old office of John Fairfax, publisher of The Sydney Morning Herald, where typesetters and graphic designers were under threat from a confluence of technologies from the west coast of the United States.

From Apple came the Macintosh computer and LaserWriter printer. From Aldus came its PageMaker layout software. Adobe, meanwhile, contributed its PostScript design language. Together, these four technologies ushered in the desktop publishing (DTP) revolution that would sweep away the old, laborious process of getting something printed on a page.

Suddenly, students in flannelette shirts were doing work that typesetters and designers had spent decades perfecting. True, they were doing it badly, and were making atrocious design decisions along the way, but that would all sort itself out as people with an eye for design and an appreciation of typography picked up the new tools and carved out a new industry. What was crucial in this transformation was the acquisition of new skills that made the most of these new tools.

We've heard this script before

Many of the fears expressed in the early 1990s about the death of traditional typesetting are very similar to the fears expressed today about artificial intelligence (AI). That is, technology will make creative roles redundant. It’s a valid fear, because technology has always made creative roles redundant. When it was introduced in the 15th century, the printing press itself had scribes updating their CVs because it was no longer necessary to laboriously copy texts by hand. And because it’s not a new phenomenon, it means we can look to the past for lessons.

And the key lesson is that the disrupting technology created new opportunities for those who grasped its value as an enabling tool.

In the AMC drama Halt and Catch Fire, set in the early days of the personal computer revolution, one of the main characters points out that computers themselves are not “the thing”, but are instead “the thing that gets us to the thing”. In seeing the PC as a tool that would let humans achieve something far greater, Joe MacMillan may as well have been talking about AI.

Because just like computers, AI is at its best when is allows people to get on with the work they’re really there to do. When it takes care of the mundane, time-consuming tasks that get in the way of adding real value.

“There’s opportunity for companies to stand out in this sea of banal dross that is AI-generated web content and cookie cutter designs by publishing quality content and valuing their brand.”

Newsquest in the UK sees it this way, having hired “AI-assisted” reporters to work in its newsrooms. These reporters aren’t out at the scene of a crime or talking to sources for an exclusive. Instead, they’re using notes from their colleagues to generate news reports on what we would often call the “worthy but dull” stuff, such as the proceedings of local council meetings. This frees up the reporter who was at the council meeting to go and pursue other, shall we say, more interesting content for their readers.

Yes, I hear you say, but what about companies that are laying off staff and replacing them with AI? They aren’t augmenting their workforce, they’re outright replacing them and throwing people on the scrapheap.

True. But there are a number of things to unpack in this fear. The first is that a company that puts such little value on its labour force likely already had them pegged for redundancy at the first opportunity. As soon as their roles could be offshored or done by someone for less, they’d have retrenched their staff. In this case, AI just got there first. Are we upset at AI, or the company that doesn’t give a crap about its workforce?

Garbage in = garbage out

In a similar vein are companies that use AI to churn out “content” for free. Whether it’s website copy, a marketing campaign or perhaps even an op-ed for the chief executive. Whatever they’re pumping out, their goal is words on a page for as little cost as possible and damn the quality. And let’s face it, if they don’t care about quality content, they’re highly unlikely to pay for in the first place. Canva has built an empire on the back of businesses that don’t give a shit about design and would never have employed the services of a graphic designer. So, once again, we’re fretting about the loss of non-jobs.

As an aside, there’s opportunity for companies to stand out in this sea of banal dross that is AI-generated web content and cookie cutter designs by publishing quality content and valuing their brand; but that’s a whole other blog post.

What will really matter in this transformation is the acquisition of skills. Just as DTP (and the printing press before it) required the acquisition of new skills, so does the effective use of AI models. In other words, we’re seeing a new skill set develop and its up to us to skill up.

So, instead of seeing AI as the death of an industry, I like to see it as the thing that’s letting us do the other things. Or, as the editor of the Worcester News — one of Newsquest’s titles — told the Guardian: “Instead of shying away from it, or being scared of it, we are saying AI is here to stay — so how can we harness it?”