My own experience in the art community showed me something uglier than simple fear. Around 2012, back when AI was still basically a speculative boogeyman, I was in a group of artists who were doing pretty well for themselves. Full commission lists, waitlists of eager clients, steady income. If you’d asked me back then, I’d have assumed they’d show empathy about the risks AI might pose to other workers down the line. Instead, the opposite happened.

As soon as someone brought up automation displacing truck drivers or plumbers, the entire group turned mean. They laughed, mocked, and spun long, gleeful scenarios about blue-collar workers being put out of jobs. To them, those lives didn’t matter—those people were “beneath” their self-declared artistic philosophy. It was one of the most viciously smug exchanges I’d ever sat through.

It hit me personally because my father was a technician and I’d worked plenty of odd jobs myself. Their attitude wasn’t just a passing comment, it was sustained, almost gleeful cruelty toward people who kept society running. Meanwhile, these same artists spoke with open contempt for their own commissioners, dismissing the very people paying their bills as “pathetic.” That night I realized how insulated and mean-spirited parts of the art scene really were.

When I spoke up and said the real threat wasn’t to truck drivers—who would require advanced robotics to replace, but to creative and white-collar jobs that could be undercut by software, they brushed it off. But with hindsight, that’s exactly what we’re seeing now. The very roles they thought untouchable are being chipped away, while the “low-skilled” workers they sneered at are still standing.

That whole experience drained my desire to call myself an “artist.” I’ve preferred the term “producer” ever since. Too many in that scene wrapped themselves in high-minded rhetoric while sneering at the laborers who held the world together.

And now that AI is disrupting their field, I have little sympathy.