What Will AI Permanently Disrupt?

Beware, attention merchants

I still do not know what’s going to happen with artificial intelligence. I’m skeptical of its greatest promise—a revolution of consciousness, a full-scale alteration of the human species—and wary of what it is already doing, like undercutting the entire graphic design field. When I wrote, not long ago, that AI was mostly disrupting the work of those who aren’t very wealthy—freelance technical writers, freelance artists—one astute reader wrote back to tell me Big Law will soon be AI-optimized. “Many lawyers write extensively, and LLM’s [large language models] can help streamline that process by producing first drafts, assisting with cite checks, etc. Perhaps more importantly, LLM’s are very good at analyzing and summarizing large quantities of data,” he wrote. “Big Law firms are extremely lucrative, and their business model is built in part on armies of junior associates spending hundreds or thousands of hours a year doing document review. If that task--basically, reading the client's and the adversaries emails, attachments, and other documents--can be done wholly or partially by AI, it would save clients millions (billions?) of dollars a year, which they could put to more productive uses.”

Fair enough! I’m curious to see where this all goes. I’m deeply wary of ever using AI to assist in my own work because I don’t want machine-generated mistakes—AI writing and research can get quite sloppy—but perhaps, one day, I’ll change my tune. I’m not convinced AI will ever disrupt meaningfully creative endeavors. But will the drudgery of legal research be changed for good? Anything is possible.

This got me thinking, further, on what else AI might do. If I don’t particularly like AI, I need to be aware of where it’s headed. And that’s when I came across a fascinating piece from the writer Justin Hanagan that suddenly made a lot of sense to me.

MrBeast, the king of YouTube and the microculture—and people like him—could very well be threatened in the next decade.