Someone decided that marketing is now a tech problem. Artists have been replaced by software engineers. The net result is creepy AI emails.
I fell for oldschool marketing yesterday. Im moving into a new appartment in a couple months. The local ISP who runs fiber in my new building cold-called me. I agreed over the phone to setup the service. That was proper target marketing. The person who called me knew the situation and identified me as a very likely customer with a need for service (the building has a relationship with the ISP). I would never have responded to an email or any wiff of AI chatbot. They only made the sale because of expensive human effort.
There was no tech here. My new landlord contacted the local ISP, the one they liked to work with, to say they had a new tenant arriving soon. I'd bet that my connection will have been setup long before I arrive, at a time convenient to the landlord and local provider. A landlord recommending a favored local vendor to a tenant, or a tenant to a vendor, is the sort of human relationship that predates electricity.
cold calling isn't an art, but smooth talking/networking is. There's no exact science to making people feel good and wanting to form a relationship with you (despite centuries of literature claiming that there is).
Programming and just about every other job is an art as well with that argument. If we aren't allowed to automate away that then we aren't allowed to automate anything.
It'll all vary based on what and who is automated. I'm sure there'd be less(but non-zero) fuss if we were trying to automate plumbing. I'm sure there'd be entire riots over trying to automate professional sports leagues.
I'd say the art industry is somewhere in-between because of
1. Being a traditionally disrespected but non-trivial skill to acquire
2. A skill valuable for advertisement (good art -> pretty ads -> more money
3. A valuable skill, but not one many industries need full time work from
4. Due to #1, a "vulnerable" industry. There won't be too many millionaire artists to fight back against the AI Overlords compared to, say, Politicians or businessesmen.
But it's not like I have any say on who or what gets affected.
Based on the response upstream, I assume they were talking about the latter. There's no art to door to door sales reading a boilerplate. There is an art to researching a customer and curating a proper response to make them feel good.
They said artists. Artists means people who make art commonly. Not everyone with a non scientific skill. The word was incorrect no matter what they meant.
I fell for oldschool marketing yesterday. Im moving into a new appartment in a couple months. The local ISP who runs fiber in my new building cold-called me. I agreed over the phone to setup the service. That was proper target marketing. The person who called me knew the situation and identified me as a very likely customer with a need for service (the building has a relationship with the ISP). I would never have responded to an email or any wiff of AI chatbot. They only made the sale because of expensive human effort.