The ArtBot

     I wish I could be a paid artist. Really, I wish that I could be a paid anything. That's not going to happen, unless you're one of the people working on high value AIs, you don't get paid to do anything these days, you just get enough money to allow the government to pretend we have something close to an economy. Or so my father tells me. 

     Art jobs were the first to go. I'm told that back in the twenty-first century, the last time everybody was able to find work, everyone thought that Art Jobs would be the last jobs to go. First would be manual labor, then the skilled jobs, then the artists. It turns out that Artist aren't as original as they thought they were, and the AIs of the time learned how to mimic them flawlessly. By the '30s, no artist could find meaningful employment, not when so many "Bots", as they were called, could do a better job for free. 

   Not that they didn't try. They innovated, spoke out, tried to get politicians to regulate things so they could do what they loved. Nobody listened to them. "Get A Job." was the only response they got. That worked until stores started replacing workers with robots. Then everyone knew they were in trouble. 

     All mainstream art is produced by AIs. It's good enough, but I personally feel like it's lacking in soul. I prefer the art that people post on the KarmOs art service. None of it is good, but all of it is real. At least, it's made by real people. My favorite art is art based on the art attempts of twenty-first century AI, before the days when art AI was made with the idea that people expected art to change. It looks horribly outdated, but people use it to try and express how it feels to live in a world where humans no longer have a place, because they need food and water and shelter. So many of these pieces are built off the question, "What are we going to do now?"

    I know that I can't be a paid artist, but that won't stop me from making art. Maybe it's just because we all have money from the government these days, but I'm not sure why the people of the twenty-first century thought that artists would just stop working if they couldn't make money. KarmOs history states that there's never been a time when art could be counted on as a source of income, but people made art anyway, even before they were able to sell it to anyone. I won't deny that I wish there were better ways to feel useful then just posting doodles on KarmOs and hoping that someone, anyone, will see them, but I'm told that's how the internet always was, and plenty of people in the twenty-first century felt just as hopeless as we do today, but they had jobs. Maybe it's not work that makes you happy, maybe it's believing that people want you.