AI vs Me
“Sure. I can help you with that. Here are some ways I can do your job faster and more efficiently, making your skillset completely obsolete. Would you like me to list them?”
Chat GPT, eh? It stalks the businesses of the land like that obsequious, overly confident, toxic new employee who’s planning to marry the boss’s daughter. It’s a pedantic know-it-all reorganizing your department, replacing your assistants, rerouting your workflow, reordering your files, and repurposing your job description. And don’t tell ChatGPT everyone’s going for after-work drinks, or you’ll find yourself at an all-night KaraokeGPT bar, singing Daft Punk songs and doing the robot dance.
Nevertheless, sooner or later you will need to become friends with whoever (or whatever) is marrying the boss’s daughter. Otherwise you’ll arrive at work one morning to find everyone is humming Get Lucky except you. And before you can say ‘lay offs,’ you’ll be singing street karaoke in the gutter. Buddy Can You Spare A Dime? But nobody can because Artificial Intelligence has also stolen their jobs.
Offices everywhere will soon be staffed entirely by technology called Gemini, Claude, CoPilot, or Perplexity. Each working day will be like Planet Of The Apes, but the orangutans are Tech Bros and Charlton Heston will discover a massive pink highlighter pen half-buried in a beach of shredded W2 employee forms. The face on the cutting room floor, meanwhile, will be yours.
So I’ve been brainstorming strategies to AI-proof my career. Unfortunately, I’ve come up with absolutely nothing whatsoever.
Of course, I could stoop to asking ChatGPT for AI-proofing career ideas, but don’t want to give it the satisfaction of providing me a link to LinkedIn Premium, or websites promoting online Plumbing and Locksmithing certification, or answering endless consumer surveys for five cents per hour.
Not that I consider myself above those professions, but I’m too old to be summoned at 3AM to unblock some drunk student’s grimy toilet. Besides, I’ve spent most of my working life perfecting the fine art of making the shadows in wide shots a little bit bluer. Surely mine is a profound and ancient wisdom worth honoring and preserving, if only by offering to pay me a respectable hourly-rate or reasonable fixed bid for color grading your thirty-second spot.
But let’s face it, “Make the color of this scene match the color of the previous scene” is a simple and straightforward AI prompt that any old fool can give their Chat-Bot. So why would clients hire me instead of using Artificial Intelligence to bring polish and pizzazz to their projects?
It’s a very good question. I’m glad you asked. And to use Chat GPT’s own words against it, “I can help you with that …”
Personally, think of the Quicktime files Baldwin Colour exports as wide-gamut masterpieces; unique examples of my exquisite artisanal craftsmanship displayed on a variety of screens to inspire awe and wonder in the viewer. AI’s schlock work, by comparison, is just mass-produced garbage slapped together by slave laborers in a dismal third-world factory. The priceless, museum-quality artifacts originating in my studio will last forever. But the cheap junk from AI’s digital sweatshop will fall apart within two weeks.
To put it another way, imagine Baldwin Colour as a much-loved vendor at the local Farmer’s Market, proudly offering you a dazzling array of organic fruits and hand-picked vegetables. Artificial Intelligence, on the other hand, is just some mega-chain convenience store with self-checkout trying to sell you a can of ultra-processed turnip soup. And they don’t even stock the brand of turnip soup you want.
You get the picture, and it doesn’t have six fingers and only half a leg like most AI rendered images. Honestly, just look at the insipid cyborg cliche it created to accompany this very blog post, despite the very smart and ultra precise prompts. I provided. Next time I’ll just draw something myself with paper and pencil. It will be quicker and easier.
So please keep sending your projects to real humans, and not to some jumped-up HAL wannabe that sells all your personal info to Google or Apple or wherever. Besides, my hourly rate these days is almost as cheap as an AI pro subscription, so you’re not saving any money either.
I guess you could sign up for a free AI trial and then cancel, but who ever remembers to cancel those things? Not me. I’m still paying $29.99 a month for LinkedIn Premium and I haven’t visited the site in months. Thanks but no thanks to ChatGPT for that worthless employment search suggestion.