[Discuss] The Domesticated AI

[grg-webvisible+blu at ai.mit.edu (grg)]

On Thu, May 07, 2026 at 11:14:12AM -0400, Rich Pieri wrote:
> On Wed, 06 May 2026 21:57:09 -0400 "Dale R. Worley" <Dale.Worley at 
> comcast.net> wrote:
> > The difficulty is that the actual market for "creativity" is fairly
> > small; most "creative types" are employed as "illustrators", that is,
> 
> I don't know about that. I do know plenty of actors, musicians,
> artists, writers, etc., who are in demand for their work.

having heard how hard it is for actors/musicians/artists to find enough
paid work to get by, I just looked up numbers on this and was surprised:

~2.5M creative professionals in the usa (2020)
        ("architects; art directors, fine artists, and animators; designers;
         actors; producers, and directors; dancers and choreographers;
         musicians; announcers; writers and authors; photographers; and
         other artists and entertainers.")
        
https://www.americansforthearts.org/by-program/reports-and-data/legislation-policy/naappd/artists-in-the-us-workforce-2006-2020

which is about the same as the number of programmers in the usa!
(if we average the 2023 from wikipedia & jetbrains and then add in growth
to today, you get about 2.6M now:)
        1.6M 2023 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_demographics
        2.5M 2023 https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-data-playground/
        3.2M 2025 https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-data-playground/

though given the subject of this thread, maybe I should have asked an LLM
to give me a report on this instead of looking anything up myself.

--grg