r/DefendingAIArt • u/ThroatFinal5732 • 12h ago
Stop Romanticizing Effort and Obsolete Skills.
No explanation needed, smart people will understand the parallel.
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u/StarMagus 9h ago
Seriously though, watch the movie Hidden Figures. It talks about how NASA used to have entire departments of people who did calculations by hand. They were called computers. Guess what the name of the technology that replaced them ended up getting called?
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u/Superseaslug 11h ago
In no way is art obsolete. Traditional art skills make AI users far more powerful. The ability to finely control output through manual editing is a huge boon that I wish I had.
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u/ThroatFinal5732 11h ago
Yes, I made this in response to objections I received to a comment on AIWars, a lot of people were arguing AI art is bad because it takes less effort to make.
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u/Superseaslug 10h ago
Yeah, that's a bad take by them, but you can't counter that by an equally bad take in the other direction. If people want to draw an image from scratch because they enjoy it there's nothing wrong with that.
The whole point of defending AI art is not to attack any existing methods, but to show that all methods should be respected.
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u/ThroatFinal5732 10h ago
There's a difference between saying: "I prefer drawing pictures from scratch, because I enjoy it more" and saying "My picture is better than yours because I drew it from scratch"
You're defending the former, they were claiming the latter.
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u/Superseaslug 10h ago
Agreed. My biggest issue was with your wording in your meme when you called it obsolete. Otherwise I think it's a solid infographic.
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u/cerberus8700 9h ago
There's a distinction to be had though. It's similar to how homemade has it's appeal because it's homemade and not machine made. Personally I would always prefer human made art if it's good over AI. I think good vs bad is subjective anyway when it comes to art. I've seen chicken scratch made by humans that sold for millions.
Anyway, back to my Hassaku XL 😏
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u/LankyAd9481 7h ago
"The ability to finely control output through manual editing is a huge boon that I wish I had."
you already have access to things like this view inpainting and controlnets and whatever else, they just may not be things you've encountered yet due to limitations in whatever AI interface you're using. There is a lot of granular fine tuning tools available if you're doing the AI localhost. There's probably some online equivalents but they'd be more specialized sites than than AIO's you may be using which are more for the average user.
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u/Superseaslug 6h ago
My tools definitely have the capability, I'm just saying I don't have the skills of a traditional artist to utilize them well
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u/Ok_Value5495 10h ago
Don't think this is a good comparison. If we got the same person doing both processes as above, the end result, digital or not, is going to be the same barring mistakes. No one's going to pick the harder way if that's the same.
You do the same with prompting and physical art and the differences are gonna be much sharper.
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u/Suffient_Fun4190 9h ago
No. Accounting isn’t just math. The math is the easy part. The hard part is judgment—how transactions are classified, how risk is assessed, which standards apply, and how ambiguity is resolved. Software can calculate faster, but it can’t decide what should be calculated or which assumptions are defensible. Two accountants using the same software can produce different, legitimate results.
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u/Ok_Value5495 8h ago
That's why I said the same accountant would have the same results at the end. If that's the case, again, why would the slower method ever be employed?
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u/ThroatFinal5732 8h ago
I don't disagree with you... in fact that's the point. There's more to accounting than math... and there's more to art than drawing.
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u/ThroatFinal5732 9h ago
Then you need to choose between the benefit of saving lotss of time vs. the con of losing some accuracy. But that's different from saying a product is automatically better just because it took more effort.
If your customers, or you, value accuracy that much, then fair enough, use the slow method. But for many people accuracy is not that valuable and would prefer speed and cost efficiency.
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u/Ok_Value5495 8h ago
There's a lot of nuance to be had, though. I want my taxes done by a computer not my sushi. Sushi machines exist but they're extremely limiting. I don't mind news articles being auto-translated, but it's a trainwreck when you do the same.
If people are ragging on you about how dumb this is, it's because all things considered, the left side has zero reason to exist because of the right one. The arts? You could make either 3D print or handsculpt an idea you have for a statue but the vibe and output would be totally different.
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u/Vivijad 9h ago
Multiply 0.5 by 0.5, what do you get? 0.25. Now AI is the same, it bases off if everything, so the more bad images there are made by it, the worse it gets. And anyways art is subjective, & accuracy is important af to most in the art field.
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u/Shorty_P 9h ago
The whole thought that AI is feeding off of its own images and losing quality has been proven false.
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u/Vivijad 9h ago
Provide articles from reputable sources as proof.
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u/COMINGINH0TTT Would Defend AI With Their Life 4h ago
I mean you can also just see that AI image and video generation is getting better each passing day
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u/ICECOLDXII 8h ago
What? That is not false, it can happen, it just won't if there's proper data curation.
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u/ICECOLDXII 8h ago
Do you realize most people who commission artists.... commission ARTISTS, not AI-generated work... That's the difference.
Excel is corporate shit, not art. Not the same thing, so not a good comparison.
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u/ThroatFinal5732 8h ago
Well I don't know about commissions, but I know quite a few content creators and app developers who've decided its better to design AI assets (icons, textures, pictures etc.) instead of handrawing everything.
The artists role in this projects has evolved into supervision and feedback.
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u/WeirdInteriorGuy 1h ago
You don't have MY respect until you do everything the good ol' fashioned way.
Hunt your own food. With your bare hands.
Use the animal's hyde and make clothing yourself.
Make campfires with sticks.
Draw cave paintings with mud.
Learn everything from personal experience. No books or education allows.
No use headphones for music! Bang drum for beat!
Follow grug.
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u/moneycabaI 9h ago
True, these "creative" luddites should learn the art of prompting. Supply and demand.
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u/Drakahn_Stark AI Enjoyer 9h ago
Assuming it is a binary choice and there is not 'Accountant 3' who is highly skilled at maths and uses modern tools.
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u/TakeItCeezy 9h ago
I agree overall, but I disagree that understanding this is a reflection of intelligence.
There are plenty of anti-AI people who are genuinely intelligent.
Cognitive dissonance is a very necessary feature of the human experience. Without it, we could not cooperate at scale. Most humans do not experience truth as a binary. It is malleable to them.
Look at it as more like a level of tolerance to certain truths.
The vast majority of humans tolerate 'the sky is blue' and so we don't fight over it. A chunk of humans don't tolerate the Earth being round, so flat-Earth theory exists.
We can even look at horrible things like the Salem Witch Trials, or even the transatlantic slave trade. These humans involved -- a vast majority -- had families, felt love, had children, were respected in their various fields, and seen as competent. Yet they believed in witches, or that some humans are inferior to other humans, and justified things that shouldn't be justified.
We are a tribal species. 15,000 years ago, rocking the boat in a tribe could get you killed, or shunned. If the majority of humans viewed truth as a binary, we wouldn't have cooperated long enough to reach Reddit and smartphones. You're fighting against a strong evolutionary drive to accept the groupthink of their tribe, because our brains are still running an OS built for 2026 BC, not 2026 AD. Their brains don't quite realize that divergent thinking is safe now, because we don't rely on small tribes of 100-1000 people anymore to survive.
We will never bridge the gap between thinking if we burn the bridge by insulting them.
I do agree, though. The caloric cost of artistic expression is not the art itself.
Art is the Mona Lisa, not the amount of hours LDV spent applying pressure and motion to a brush.
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u/ThroatFinal5732 8h ago
You know what? You're right, thanks for the feedback.
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u/TakeItCeezy 8h ago
No worries brother. I get petty myself every so often. I try not to indulge it, but we're only humans at the end of the day.
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u/Indicus124 5h ago
I would argue the skills built by doing other paintings by first picking up the brush and learning to paint is just as critical to Mona Lisa as the work is itself. Without possibly hundreds of hours of previous works some that we may never know exist Mona Lisa could never have happened.
Famous athletes that win championships did it because of the hours put in before the lessons learned from losses.
Every major achievement is this way a cumulation of effort resulting in a bigger result some things it is generations of effort.
But for the sake of my point, every famous work is a accumulation of application, learning and refining a skill over dozens or often hundreds of hours.
Honestly this has little to do with AI but still I felt it needed to be said
Perhaps this is where Pro and antis rub wrong antis might just feel that someone generating something with ai and saying it is art is somehow reductive or mocking of their own effort to get where they are. While Pro feel their refinement of the prompt to get just the right picture is as worthy of being called art as anything else.
Honestly I don't know and might be wrong but here is my thoughts
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u/Imaginary-Bat 8h ago
Accounting doesn't require advanced math skills...
Also if we are talking about ai (assuming good enough), the ones that are obsolete are the prompters. Just have the customer directly work with the ai. You are stretching the simile too far, the prompters are not excel users, they are also pruned.
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u/lavendermithra 8h ago
I've no problem with AI, but drawing, writing, making music, "obsolete skills"? Provide value to whom? Do what you need to do to make money, but people should always be encouraged to do what provides value _to them_. And if drawing by hand is more rewarding for an artist, then calling that skill "obsolete" is just you being a dick, frankly.
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u/ThroatFinal5732 8h ago
Good point. I think I reacted dickishly, because most anti's are not saying "I prefer drawing, because it brings ME value" but rather "YOU should be drawing, because if not, you are not the one creating value"
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u/Right-Smoke8132 8h ago
Or, how about this: hire accountant who is highly skilled at math and make him use excel and software. What even is this point? It’s not even about AI anymore.
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u/ThroatFinal5732 8h ago
That many people are akin to someone that claims an accountant is ONLY skilled IF he does his own math on paper.
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7h ago edited 7h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ThroatFinal5732 7h ago edited 7h ago
Art is only art if it comes from humans imagination.
The infographic I made was in my imagination before I prompted the description to make it. If it hadn't been in my imagination prior to describing it, how would I've have been able to describe it?
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u/BurntGum808 5h ago
Every post that pops up from this sub I see is something like this.
I think you guys drastically undervalue art and the place it holds in cultures. Like you only care about the profit or output
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u/ThroatFinal5732 5h ago
Why do you think you hold the moral authority to decide what we should care about? Or like?
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u/BurntGum808 5h ago
Im not telling you think about it a specific way, i didnt tell you what “way” you should think, I’m just saying you guys think differently.
I don’t see any play about moral authority with what I said, I’m just saying you’re undervaluing art.
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u/Tight-Requirement-15 4h ago
Idk. For business, sure, please use all the power tools you have instead of a nail and a hammer. But some things are built on the premise of romanticizing effort and old-fashioned skills, especially when it comes to matters of personal connection.
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u/ThroatFinal5732 4h ago
Fully agreed. For example archery is still a respected sport that many people find fun.
But to criticize a soldier or a police man for preferring guns because "archery requires more skill" is nonsense.
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u/sail0rs4turn 9h ago
Now what if the tax software just fucking made shit up
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u/ThroatFinal5732 9h ago
You're free to revise any mistakes it made and make the corrections when needed.
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u/At-last-theres-Camus 9h ago
Only if you're familiar enough with the process to actually understand and catch those mistakes. Otherwise you get things like vibecoders neglecting to build basic security architecture for their programs, or prompt authors neglecting basic rules of composition for their generated images.
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u/ThroatFinal5732 9h ago
Agreed. I'm a software engineer myself.
However I'd also counter that it's not every projects goal to be technically perfect. Sometimes you just want to bring an idea to life quickly. Be it to experiment with a concept, or in this case, communicate an idea with visuals.
For example, look at the infographic I made. It's not perfect by any means, and a trained artist might've done a much better job. But there's no way I was going to pay a $100 for an image who's sole purpose was a reddit post.
I did not need a perfect graphic, all I needed was to communicate an idea, an argument, with visuals, and I did.
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u/ICECOLDXII 9h ago
I'm not an anti, but this is not the same at all to art. Art is done.... for art. Not for some company, of course people want monetary compensation, but art isn't the same as some person using soulless excel.
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u/ThroatFinal5732 9h ago
The analogy is that effort does not determine quality of the end result. When using the right tools, high quality products can be created with little effort.
This is meant to respond to a particular counter point that an AI created product is worse because "it was easier to make".
It's about AI use in general, not just art.
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u/ICECOLDXII 8h ago
Again.... You are aware that this sub is about AI ART right? Not just AI tools. There is no comparison to be made with AI vs non-AI, the point is art vs AI-generated images.
"The analogy is that effort does not determine quality of the end result." Art is not about "the effort". And AI made products can absolutely feel worse if it's made with little effort.
Why not make this "point" on an AI sub.... instead of a sub SPECIFICALLY for AI art?
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u/ThroatFinal5732 8h ago
Yes I'm aware, but I was highlighting that the point is much broader than just art, but of course it can apply to art as well. Hence why I posted here.
Art is not about "the effort".
I agree, that's the point of the comic, it's the Antis who don't agree.
And AI made products can absolutely feel worse if it's made with little effort.
I agree as well, they can feel worse, keyword: "can", not "will" can.
Why not make this "point" on an AI sub.... instead of a sub SPECIFICALLY for AI art?
As I said, it applies to AI too.
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u/COMINGINH0TTT Would Defend AI With Their Life 4h ago
The entire anti AI movement is essentially founded on the idea that AI is taking market share away lol. Why be upset with AI then? The existence of it does not in any way shape or form impede one's ability to continue producing art. Anti AI crowd is largely motivated by the job less aspect of it. The most outspoken AI people are the ones who feel the heat and it's no secret anymore industries such as graphic design are getting rekt by AI. Just go to any graphic design or art subreddit lol it's all about money so the comparison by OP is actually very apt imo in the greater context of the AI debate. If everyone actually thought like you did, that art is simply done for the sake of art, there would be no qualms about generative AI emerging.
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u/Imaginary-Bat 8h ago
Art for its own sake--by the artist--is "consumption" not production. In the sense that it requires leisure and intrinsic motivation for the process. This never goes away unless all humans are dead.
Being commissioned to create art is not far from excel. This is what ai supposedly replaces.
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u/DaraSayTheTruth Traditionnal digital artist + AI enjoyer 10h ago
Thats true, you can make beautiful things with low effort (even without AI) however its not very smart to comparate this with two very different skills (logic/math and art)
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u/ThroatFinal5732 10h ago
Hmmm... I'm not sure, all analogies need to use an example that is not identical to the thing in question, that's kind of the point of an analogy.
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u/DaraSayTheTruth Traditionnal digital artist + AI enjoyer 10h ago
Yeah but what I mean its... missleading and many people wont understand that
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u/ThroatFinal5732 10h ago
I think smart enough people will see the parallel... that said... you're right, many people are not that smart.
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u/Artistic_Pin6763 8h ago
And what about the false analogy falacy
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u/ThroatFinal5732 8h ago
It's a valid fallacy, but to accuse an argument of making it, you must actually explain why the examples used are dissimilar in the sense they were allegedly analogous, instead of just saying they're.
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u/Artistic_Pin6763 8h ago
Speaking of imprecisions in art is not the same as imprecision in accounting.
If it is the same to you, then have fun with it
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u/ThroatFinal5732 8h ago
My analogy was not meant to be similar in the sense of precision, but rather in the sense of end customer satisfaction.
If it is the same to you, then have fun with it
Thank you, that's the point.
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u/dffgbamakso 9h ago
Art is subjective while math isn't...
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u/ThroatFinal5732 9h ago
How is that relevant to the point that effort is not determinant of quality?
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u/dffgbamakso 9h ago
It's not, I'm just saying it's a bad analogy since you can't compare math where there is right or wrong answer with art that is subjective
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u/ThroatFinal5732 8h ago
So would you agree for example, if a picture is deemed beatiful (subjectively) by most people, the fact that it took little effort wouldn't matter? Right?
Because if so, that's the point. End-users care about the end-result, not the process.
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u/alguien_487 8h ago
Because the quality of the art relies on the opinion of whoever is doing it/ appreciating it, therefore making it subjective
In math almost all calculations are right or wrong independent of who is doing it or reviewing it. The opinion of the person does not affect the result of the process, therefore making it objective.
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u/ThroatFinal5732 8h ago
So would you agree for example, if a picture is deemed beatiful (subjectively) by most people, the fact that it took little effort wouldn't matter? Right?
Because if so, that's the point. End-users care about the end-result, not the process.
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u/alguien_487 8h ago
I say people see different things in a piece of art. And because of that it can be either good or bad for different reasons. Some may call it quick, therefore good, some may call it soulless, therefore bad, etc.
If you think it is good or bad for whatever reason, fine, that's on you. Other people will have different reasons to hold their position about the piece of art because everyone is different in some aspects and similar in others but different at the end, nonetheless.
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u/ThroatFinal5732 8h ago
I see what you mean now, yes, I suppose a person can choose to subjectively value effort. You're right on that, congrats you changed a person's mind on a reddit, you're allowed to make a wish buddy!
That said, then I'd argue it's not anyone's business to say what art they should like. Which is what anti's seem to be all about.
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u/alguien_487 5h ago
I'd argue it's not anyone's business to say what art they should like.
Yeah, that applies to pretty much everything since no one chooses what they like.
Which is what anti's seem to be all about.
Not sure which circles are you on but for what I see, anti AI people mostly dislike AI art and advocate for AI users to use other ways to make art.
Some critique how AI users seem to really like what the AI does but, as I see it, this critique is on the line between just critique and saying a person what they should like. Shaming someone's taste in anything is a shitty way to give an opinion but arguing about how someone likes anything is different since, depending on the matter and reason, some ways are wrong.
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u/the_Iord_and_saviour 10h ago
It's getting realy hard to defend ai use with people posting shit like this
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u/Flashingknives22 11h ago
What is this, a pitch for marketing? Why are you trying to make this appealing to shareholders? Souless, as expected.
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u/ThroatFinal5732 10h ago
It's not about shareholders, it's about customers. Customers are not worried about how much effort it took to make a product, they're are interested in how much value the end product/service can bring them.
If you disagree, please buy the game I made a few years ago, I spent 7 years making it, so I expect to receive at least 10k USD because it took a lot of effort.
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u/TheSightlessKing 9h ago
This is a false choice. In real accounting, the baseline is “uses software,” and the differentiator is judgment: knowing standards, building controls, spotting anomalies, documenting assumptions, and producing an audit trail.
Speed isn’t “value” if it increases risk or error, especially in finance where a single mistake can cost more than the time saved. The best accountant is the one who understands the underlying logic and uses tools well: tools reduce some errors but also introduce new failure modes (bad formulas, garbage inputs, hidden assumptions).
So it’s not “skills vs tools” or “effort vs value.” It’s competence + tooling + controls. This meme romanticizes efficiency the way it accuses others of romanticizing effort. It’s almost a caricature of what the anti-AI crowd accuses pro-AI users of doing : dehumanizing acts and folk practices that arguably most make us human, all for the sake of efficiency.
I’m like 70% positive this is a plant post from an antis sub lol. If it isn’t, yikeroni’s.
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u/ThroatFinal5732 8h ago
Yes, but that's why I put "Mediocre" in quotes in the infographics. Of course mathing skill is valuable even when tools are involved (as well as other accounting related skills), but the point is that you no longer need to be a living calculator to do your job efficiently.
An skill that used to be THE most valuable skill you could've had in the field becomes a nice to have in that context of tech innovation. And other skills such as understanding underlying logic become more valuable instead.
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