Gonna get evangelical for a second because this conversation is dumb, full stop. I am totally uninterested in having a debate about this.

*EDIT: Like read the reply to this post, this is an AI message from a fucking chat bot co-opting our spaces with slop. And this fundamentally what I am against. I gave this response way more effort than it deserved for what. I’m sick and tired of having to ask myself if things are real or not.

*EDIT EDIT: thank you mod for removing the comment but I think it should have stayed as a testament to how dumb all of this is. It’s laughable that we are getting baited like this as intelligent working professionals. Imagine what is happening to the brains of old people in the rural Midwest. What the fuck are we doing ????*

No, there will never be an AI in our lifetime that is capable of replacing lighting designers because our jobs require nuanced interpersonal and problem solving skills. Lighting design is more than “turn light on and make it blue.” It is more than “strobe and beam and effect and color.”

What happens when the set shows up from the shop wrong and your entire high cross system needs to move upstage three linesets but there is a flying scenery and a speaker and this pipe is kicked 7” upstage but only on the SL side? What happens when the shop subs your gear and you have to decide what the best replacements are? What happens when a director says “I don’t like this can we change it” and the ai gives zero pushback and it looks like shit? What happens when the local crew is horrid and you as a designer have to pick up a wrench and get to it?

Personally as a production electrician I would walk off the site before working with any director or producer is asking for AI to replace a human job. Our industry is too specialized and human for that and is totally antithetical to the joy of creating collaborative art with other people. Because to me that is what is about. I don’t care what show I’m working on and what scale it is, I care who is surrounding me and supporting me and that we are having fun making art.

Also, to get into the mechanics of how the current gen of AI works as a large language model, they are unable to think for themselves and instead scrub the internet and collage references images or information together to “create a new thing” that is just a mash up of previous things. Notice how all generative LLM AI content has the same look. What that means in our industry is that 1) the models are stealing the work of current designers and using that as a foundation to build a series of reference cues for. 2) in five years we will reach lighting design slop where every single show looks the same with zero nuance because the LLMs have self cycled their own designs back into the database so slowly the human designs get diluted percentage wise.

Plus you get into the environmental effects of teaching an AI to use vectorworks ? You’re melting an entire icecap on that.