The Future of Digital Labour in the Age of Digital Mass Production

Chairs. I’d like to start talking about chairs. Curvy, sleek-looking, good old chairs. Comfy, sturdy, full of details, those that existed before IKEA.

Look at now chairs. Boring, soulless, uninspiring, not a single curve in sight. Merely… functional. They were designed with one metric in mind: cheap mass production.

This represents the force of capitalism at play. What was once considered the artwork of a craft turned into a cheap commodity. Capitalism ultimate goal is to make everything as cheap as possible, and what’s cheap becomes, by extension, worthless.

So what do these chairs tell us about the current jobscape?

The new manual labourers

Every time a new technology disrupts the job market, there’s a tendency to think “this time is different”. But if history teaches us anything, is that it rarely is. The relationship between technology and labour is always the same: automation. Things feel different each time because of the different language we use and because the technology IS different. That’s why at first sight web developers seem to have nothing in common with wood carpenters. But things become crystal clear if we consider digital creators — musicians, web developers, programmers, graphic designers — as manual labour.

The digital creator, may not be constructing something in the physical world, and may not be employing his hands in the way we would call manual, but the point is he IS creating something (in fact using his hands too), and this creation process may and can be automated in the same manner wood carpentry can be automated.

In this new light, we can start to appreciate that the web designer finds himself in the same situation in the face of AI as the wood carpenter found himself with the advent of the machine. He is, as it were, a “Digital Luddite.” His production process — writing code, creating a website, or whatever it is — is about to be heavily automated, and the products of his labour, much like wood carpentry, are about to go from a skilful art to a mass-produced cheap commodity. The newly available means of mass production is about to cheapen the products of his labour, and as a result, songs, websites, graphic designs, will become less valuable — they’ll be worth less in both senses of the word.

Equally impacted will be the price of their labour itself due to the unleashed productivity. Where a web designer was expected to produce or maintain a website a week, he’ll not only be capable, but forced to produce or maintain five or six websites if he’s to keep the same wage. And so provided demand for digital products remains the same, the end result will forcibly be a reduction of the number of creators, as suddenly there will be “more hands” to compete for the same piece of the pie, or a reduction of their wages, reality likely falling between these two scenarios.

This, if they are not dispensed with altogether. Digital creators will only be able to survive in the new environment if they’re capable to add anything of value to that already provided by the machine.

But here’s where the analogy between the digital and the physical breaks down.

Physical vs digital goods

While considering digital creators as another form of manual labour allows us to understand how their job is going to be upended by the new machine, there is a crucial distinction between physical and digital goods. You see, the work of a skilful craftsman can still be appreciated if it can produce unique pieces which are hard and expensive to mass-produce. The machine rendered most but not all handiwork redundant, because handcraftsmanship can still be appreciated after the advent of the machine, because an artist can still imbue a piece with its essence, with its curves and imperfections that decorates that piece with the human aura we all so much appreciate. If you come to me with a clay mug and you told me it was “made by hand”, I would immediately recognise it as more valuable than any mug I could get at IKEA. Instead, the same is not true for digital creations.

Digital creators will have a much harder time differentiating from the (AI) competition, because no one will care how those lyrics, code or novel were ultimately written. The means of production in the digital space are much less relevant than in the physical, because in many ways, a big part of the human element has been removed, supplanted by the computer and the capacity to “ctrl + Z”. That is, the expectation in the digital space is nearly always perfection. Every song, book or even this article are revisited to perfection, because the tool (the computer) allows for it. No one wants to read a text with typos, a song that feels improvised, or a book that has scribbles and partial pieces of text crossed out. Instead, we do appreciate an imperfectly hand-painted mug with a slight cant.

This does not mean that we will stop appreciating the human element in digital art, it’s just that digital creators will have a much harder time infusing his creation with something uniquely novel than what an AI with a few prompts can produce.

Consider that as we speak, it is likely that most of what you read, listen to and see on the Internet is produced by AI. It is likely that your latest artist’s album already made heavy use of ChatGPT to write his/her lyrics, but did you care? Did you stop for a second to think how much of it was written or assisted by ChatGPT? It is likely that in the future we will care less and less, that songs will entirely be produced by AI and the only thing that will matter is whether they’re good or not, not whether this song or that book was written “by hand”. Consider that in say five years, if an author swears his book was written entirely without AI assistance as a way to promote it, or to somehow make it more appealing to read, we would think him crazy. It would be as if IKEA tries to sell you a handmade chair; it just wouldn’t make any sense.

This brings us to the second distinction between the digital and the physical, which is the impossibility of proving that something was done by “hand”. I felt this most strongly after writing my first post after the advent of ChatGPT. The reaction of some of my readers was immediately to ask whether ChatGPT had written it, which underscores a fundamental shift in the perception of digital goods. Anything remarkable produced before the advent of the AI has suddenly become intrinsically more valuable, because there’s zero doubt human creativity at its finest produced it. This also hit me when I handed a copy of my PhD thesis to one of my friends. As he was diving into the Introduction, I claimed to be very happy of the way it had turned out, but on top of that, now I could confidently claim: “And this was before ChatGPT!”. Instead, anything produced after the advent of widespread AI has been inexorably tagged as “AI-assisted”. And this, inexorably too, lowers its value.

So even if an artist claims to have written this or that without AI intervention, no one will care, because the possibility will be so remote and hard to prove that there will be no point. Good, is the only metric that will matter in the digital space, so the best thing digital creators can do is to embrace these tools, and make sure they can still infuse their craft with their own, distinctive, personal spirit.

So we can almost certainly expect the number of digital creators, their wages, or both, to decline over the coming years as part of their “production” process is overhauled by AI. Provided the AI capacity to produce anything digital is equal across the board, those that may suffer the hit more strongly are those where the nature of the work makes distinction from the AI the hardest. For instance, coding as opposed to e.g. songwriting, where the human creativity may still have an edge if it can surprise us with out-of-the-ordinary stuff.

You’ll also love this: On The Problem of Telling Humans from Bots