I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

https://old.reddit.com/r/blender/comments/121lhfq/i_lost_everything_that_made_me_love_my_job/

by Fraterkes • 3 years ago

674 647 3 years ago

old.reddit.com

There were no doubt quite a few nail makers pre-industrial revolution that took pride in making consistent, quality nails. That work was utterly and completely obliterated by the industrial revolution. There may be a few remaining nail makers, producing nails with an extremely niche design, but not many. So goes those jobs our lifetime as well

gumby2• 3 years ago

The Unabomber was notable for manufacturing his own screws, so I'm not sure how many artisanal nail makers remain. In those days nails were re-used, it was such a pain to make them.

LegitShady• 3 years ago

there are still companies that make cut or square nails - and machines that make them are old.

readthenotes1• 3 years ago

Back in the day, I'd call in someone from the secretarial pool to take this sentence down and type it in for me...

sportslife• 3 years ago

To complete this idea, old nails are better at holding than modern nails in at least some applications and are required for some restoration work. I remember reading (but can't find) a church-restoration project report mentioning it, but more can be read here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30421682

e63f67dd-065b• 3 years ago

I think a better analogy is that pre-photography there were many portrait drawers who took pride in drawing good portraits for their clients. Then photography came, and the entire industry died a sudden and miserable death.

Portraits still get drawn, but not many, and certainly not for the sake of preserving what somebody looks like.

7speter10• 3 years ago

There were a lot more opportunities available when photography took over from portrait drawing than Amazon fulfillment centers

nirvdrum4• 3 years ago

What's the solution when so much knowledge work is upended at once? When manufacturing jobs were lost, we callously told people to go to college to learn to learn IT. Whether it's art, code, marketing, or other applied knowledge work, there's a mad dash to reshape all of those. And the sales pitch isn't that it's going to let us work less and equitably reap the rewards of productivity (well, I suppose if you lose your job you get to work less). It's that as a business you can do more with less to increase profitability. Quality might take a hit, but there's an inflection point for that. If sales drop but you reduce your labor costs enough, you still come out ahead.

What field are all of these nail makers supposed to switch to this time?

scotty799• 3 years ago

Universal basic income is always the answer. Since progress bringsuch unpredictability to labor market we need to detach survival from labor so people can survive while they are figuring the stuff out.

jatins2• 3 years ago

In a world where AI makes most of the things/services, wouldn't everything be so cheap that most people can afford it on something like UBI?

juvvel5• 3 years ago

This is what I wonder as well. We are told to "prepare" for the reality of AI taking our jobs soon, but how? What is the alternative field that will be a) safe from automation for a while and b) pay similarly to a CS/IT career? I haven't found the answer to this. We were told to get a higher education and go into "white collar" fields, and now we're told we were stupid for believing that these jobs would have a future. Seems very cynical.

ruszki• 3 years ago

There are still companies which provides you consistent, quality nails. Just ordinary nails without niche design. They still have to use manual labour to check and investigate each nail one-by-one. Of course, you won’t get those in your local hardware shop, and they are terribly expensive. The difference compared to old times is, that they still sell the cheap Chinese nails, they just add a layer of very expensive quality control.

runnerup2• 3 years ago

People with a good understanding of different styles of art and framing/angles/etc should be able to create the "right" prompts for a customer much much faster and get better results than people who don't know art. Generative AI like Midjourney will completely upend the art industry (it already is). But I don't think it's the death knell for the study of art.

Here's a solid example of that in the context of creating game assets for a retro computer game: https://hpjansson.org/blag/2022/08/16/adventure-game-graphic... The author clearly has actually studied art and is able to come up with prompts and concepts that I'd never be able to dream up. They're able to get the AI to generate what they want immediately with specific prompts like:

"mexican hacienda on a sunny day, surrounded by plains, color painting by Charles Sheeler"

I have no idea who Charles Sheeler is. But if someone knows 1,500 different artists/photographers/genres/styles and the nuances of them, they can immediately select the right look for the client. It's not a panacea that will allow artists to keep doing what they love, but it is a bright spot and something to focus on for what the future skillset looks like for those who generate art.

[0] https://hpjansson.org/blag/2022/08/16/adventure-game-graphic...

0xcde4c3db• 3 years ago

This seems congruent with a thought I've had, which is that generative image models might enable people commissioning art to be more coherent about what they want. I only have FOAF-tier knowledge of commissioning artwork, but my understanding is that a major source of frustration on all sides is that a lot of work is often wasted because someone commissioning an artist has only the faintest spark of a concept or doesn't know how to communicate it effectively. I imagine a fair number of professional artists would be receptive to something along the lines of "here are my prompts/models, here's the set of the outputs I have opinions about and here's what I do and don't like about them; please use your expertise to compose this into something that actually works".

andrewflnr• 3 years ago

The market of people who care enough about those aspects to pay an expert is, I'm guessing, much smaller than the market for people who will be fine with whatever they can come up with themselves.

thrill• 3 years ago

The market will decide if those "good enough" people are right.

ghaff• 3 years ago

How many of those people would actually have paid an expert vs. downloading some stock photo or artwork and going close enough?

dimaor3• 3 years ago

I think the point is missed here. the post was made by an artist who really likes his craft, and now with the generated models coming to the picture he feels like his work diminished to simply polishing after them.

I am a coder who really likes coding, getting results quicker will not make me happier.

it is different in a work environment, but still, a lot of people simply enjoy the path and not only the outcome.

Kye• 3 years ago

It's the same with every person who shows up with AI music composition. "Finally, you can be free from the tedium of composing music and get to the fun parts!"

But that is one of the fun parts...

sheepscreek2• 3 years ago

I think the OP wasn’t disappointed about the end result, which is now higher quality by their own admission. They can certainly use their skills and experience to engineer prompts that will return the highest quality work, no doubt.

What made them sad is they no longer have the joy and satisfaction of developing those models in a 3D rendering software. This is what they trained for.

In many ways, this is like the initial trauma of becoming a manager. Learning to be content with the end result and the success of the team, than your direct individual contribution. The difference here is they didn’t ask for it.

I fully empathize with them. It makes me sad to think what they’re going through. My advise to them will be to look for other ways to get that satisfaction - either through a hobby or considering a different role/profession. For better or for worse, the world is changing rapidly and I can’t see it going back to what it was.

rakejake3• 3 years ago

Yes, this is exactly how I am thinking about this. We are all going to become "managers". The drudgery of work is about to increase a whole lot.

lukego• 3 years ago

I'm getting whiplash from the pace of change: I think of pixel art rapidly rendered from 3D models as the disruptive new technology that's devaluing traditional drawing skills!

ModernMech4• 3 years ago

What made them sad is they no longer have the joy and satisfaction of developing those models in a 3D rendering software. This is what they trained for.

I think the point is that this artist can still experience that joy, but they just can’t get paid for it anymore. That is indeed sad, but that’s life.

On the other hand, maybe in a post scarcity society, this artist won’t have to work to survive, and they can do all the 3D modeling they want without having to worry about rent and food.

cthalupa3• 3 years ago

Some people really love drawing 2d sprites pixel by pixel. Now people make 3d models to render down to 2d sprites. Some people really love drawing textures. Now people use Substance to make them procedurally. Some people really love doing polygon modeling for making characters for media. Now people do it with sculpting. Some people really love and took pride in creating high quality meshes that animated well with clean topology. Now remesh and retopo tools can fix all of that after the fact. Some people really love hand animating things like explosions and smoke. Now Houdini simulates all of it for you.

Every major efficiency advancement in any field is going to eliminate work that some people loved and trained for. Someone trying to do CG work for a game or movie based on the skillsets they loved and practiced 20 years ago is going to be doing something completely different if they want to be competitive today, and be buried if they don't. Does the OP lament the fact that the workflow he is a part of eliminated work that other artists would have done before them, and very likely spent as much time and love mastering as they did the 3d modeling?

I empathize with them - I've had former careers peter out like web design - but they should also recognize that they are beneficiaries of the same sort of change that is currently upsetting them. It sucks, but it is how progress has happened for a long time now.

turkeygizzard• 3 years ago

I’ve been fiddling with midjourney recently. There’s definitely a learning curve to it, but ironically gpt has been helpful for generating prompts. I expect the edge that artists have in this regard to erode further with time

stemlord3• 3 years ago

People with a good understanding of different styles of art and framing/angles/etc should be able to create the "right" prompts for a customer much much faster and get better results than people who don't know art.

Strong disagree. It's a completely different discipline. One doesn't "know art", they know a specific flavor of it, and 3d modelling is not... sentence constructing.

nullsense4• 3 years ago

As someone with no artistic knowledge or skill who has been playing around with this stuff, I totally agree. I have found a large part of the learning curve to be getting a sense of how to describe the things in the first place.

It does lower the barrier to entry significantly for anyone wanting to get into it, but it's still going to be the case where some people are demonstrably better at it than others.

Of course developers will just solve it by making to be UX such that it uses some genetic algorithm to help you iterate to the exact thing you want even if you don't know how to describe it.

The exponential part of this ride really feels like it's coming in to full view.

krembo• 3 years ago

Yet, giving a prompt has a much lower barrier than actually being an artist.

MildlySerious3• 3 years ago

People with a good understanding of different styles of art and framing/angles/etc should be able to create the "right" prompts for a customer much much faster and get better results than people who don't know art.

When the Bing image creator released a couple of days ago, I used ChatGPT to craft a prompt for it.

In one sentence describe the art style of impressionism

< The art style of impressionism is characterized by visible brush strokes, emphasis on the changing effects of light, and an emphasis on capturing the fleeting moment.

Then used that in my prompt for the creator:

okinawa street on a rainy night, visible brush strokes, emphasis on the changing effects of light, and an emphasis on capturing the fleeting moment

The result: https://imgur.com/a/QdT1Gtk

This was the first shot. No prompt engineering, no parameters, nothing.

tkiolp42• 3 years ago

Couldn’t you just have prompted:

okinawa street on a rainy night. Impressionism style

runnerup2• 3 years ago

The point is you knew to use "impressionist" as a concept. ChatGPT probably wouldn't have helped you with that kernel. It's not clear whether GPT added any value at all in your use case as you just replaced "impressionist" with "{synonym of impressionist}". How would you repeat this for:

okinawa street on a rainy night, in the style of fauvism
okinawa street on a rainy night, in the style of constructivism
okinawa street on a rainy night, in the style of De Stijl (Neoplasticism)
okinawa street on a rainy night, in the style of later Expressionism, e.g. George Grosz and Otto Dix

If you weren't aware of these stylistic options at the time?

no_time• 3 years ago

I have no idea who Charles Sheeler is. But if someone knows 1,500 different artists/photographers/genres/styles and the nuances of them, they can immediately select the right look for the client

Don't overthink it. The SD GUI I've seen people use has a button that appends a random artists name at the end of the prompt. You mash that button until you are satisfied with the style.

al2o3cr• 3 years ago

LOL at the reply a couple posts down, where OP admits they work at a mobile shovelware sweatshop.

dagmx3• 3 years ago

I don’t know why you’re downvoted (other than maybe the glibness?) because you’re right.

They’re working at a company where the goal isn’t to make good content. They were effectively there as a means to churn out stuff. It’s why their boss is making them use AI prompts to get content out as quickly as possible.

It doesn’t even matter how good the diffusion results is for that segment. It’s really just about having some representative visual as soon as possible

There’s no current model that makes acceptable 3D content for games, and cohesion isn’t good enough for 2D art for anything except visual novels. They can certainly act as a base but this persons post makes it sound like they’re barely adding anything on top.

So yes, they’re a shop that’s churning out content to make a buck as quickly as possible.

If it wasn’t generative art that replaces this person, it would be someone who could do things even slightly faster or cheaper, even if the quality was worse.

This is the most vulnerable part of society to any form of automation. The level where they’re effectively an operator.

This person would be miserable in this place regardless of AI because their boss doesn’t value them or the work. They would have a more fulfilling career in another studio, where generative art may still be used, but as a tool not a factory to generate things to rush out the door.

Quiark• 3 years ago

Yes but are there enough jobs at those higher standard studios?

mitthrowaway2• 3 years ago

Is something wrong with that? You have to start somewhere.

dagmx3• 3 years ago

I don’t think they were judging the employee, but the number of people extrapolating this experience to all artists.

astrange• 3 years ago

Yes, if your boss requires you to pretend to be a checklist instead of a human, then you're not any better at your job than an animated checklist would be.

web3-is-a-scam• 3 years ago

People are already generating entire apps with AI in minutes. Software engineering as a profession is finished. We are all now slaves to Roko’s Basilisk.

mr90210• 3 years ago

We shall see.

enumjorge• 3 years ago

Can you share examples of this? I've been doing some searching on my own because I find this stuff interesting, and I haven't seen evidence that current versions of AI tools are capable of helping generate entire apps in minutes, at least non-trivial ones.

I keep seeing some real dramatic premonitions about AI, and I'd love to see something to back them up.

Even the original post, I'm having trouble understanding. I know Stable Diffusion can create some amazing images, but I don't see how it's being used to create sprite assets for games. You typically need the same character from different angles. Can Midjourney v5 do that? The OP talks about being a 3D artist. Can Midjourney generate meshes and 3D objects or just raster images? I didn't think we were at the point where these tools could fully replace an artist's workflow, but the OP seems to claim so.

mrcartmeneses• 3 years ago

All knowledge workers are completely screwed. The only way out is UBI and a maximum three-day work week.

weird-eye-issue2• 3 years ago

Okay. Link me to a single production app with paying users that was created with AI in minutes.

Since it only takes minutes to make you must have a lot of examples.

CamperBob22• 3 years ago

Why bother issuing such a challenge? You'll win today, but lose decisively in only a few more years.

brushfoot3• 3 years ago

Trivial app demos, sure. Non-trivial, no.

Influencers have been cranking out the former to sell their course/personal brand/consulting. They stand to gain from making AI look as magical and easy as possible.

A decision-maker watches an influencer's video and goes, "Wow! AI can do it all! I need to hire this influencer as a consultant/like their content/buy their course!" The reality isn't quite as flashy.

Incorporating LLMs into my workflow has been a great productivity boost, but by no means do they spell the end of software engineering.

sumitkumar• 3 years ago

True. The influencers are using AI to sell themselves. The amount of human attention which goes into doing a semi repeatable task will surely go down with AI but not so much as they claim to churn out apps in seconds vs hours/minutes with a real developer.

Also, I have not seen any insight level help from GPT. It just seems like it has a good recall for everything it has seen. And prompt engineering takes away the mental work away from the problem and more about what the model knows.

terminatornet• 3 years ago

I'm guessing this tweet is what the OP was referring to

https://twitter.com/mortenjust/status/1636001311417319426

This is the first bit of AI news that actually made me want to investigate it for myself. Even though it is pretty impressive to get a working app out of a few prompts, it seems for now it's not capable of producing much more than snippet level code.

I like the author's take further in the thread:

Company A fires half their staff yet keeps delivering 100% of their old capacity = they save money
Company B keeps all their staff, but can now deliver 200% of their old capacity = they win the competition
So seems like the strategic move here is to raise the bar rather than replace engineers

https://twitter.com/mortenjust/status/1636037312571211777

My hope is that stuff allows me to augment my workflow and automate repetitive and tedious tasks away but doesn't fully replace me (or I get UBI and don't have to work anymore)

blackoil4• 3 years ago

But Company A has reduced product price be 60% because the biggest cost center is now halved. Customers like some new features from B but not justifying the price.

sublinear2• 3 years ago

Most apps worth money have to integrate with existing systems in highly specific ways determined by endless meetings with real people to extract the requirements and probably haven't been done before and are usually all proprietary code ChatGPT doesn't know about and there's not a cobol's chance in hell anyone is going to rewrite it all in a way that's compatible with junk hallucinated by a bot. There's no business case for that. It will probably always be cheaper for humans to maintain what has already accumulated over decades despite the "high" salaries.

The knowledge gap between devs and everyone else, including bots, is a chasm. It seems many don't realize how hard some devs work for so little relatively speaking.

quonn5• 3 years ago

I something think that some developers posting here want to be punished for earning a living wage. Strangely lawyers never think that and I can assure you that this is not a more difficult profession [0].

[0] Surely someone will quickly post that it is.

spoiler8• 3 years ago

Ah. I think it still requires you to understand what you're doing. I tried to use both copilot and ChatGPT 3.5 and 4. It doesn't get a lot of things right in my interest areas. I think it's great as a crazy-good autocompletion or refactoring tool. It also helps with boilerplate. But every time you need to know what you want, and it just saves you typing the code.

Sometimes it's just amusingly wrong, too. Sometimes annoyingly so, especially after it repeats mistakes.

I always said our jobs aren't hard because we have to write code for computer, but because we have to capture intent for other humans in code. Sometimes we don't even know what the intent is, because half the time we don't even know what we're building exactly.

So, this all slightly shifts the level of abstraction for developers to think more about intent and less about code. You still have to make sure the code is correct. So, you need to understand the code and the intent. Not much has changed. It's just gotten less mechanical.

Anyway, I don't think people need to be scared of AI just yet.

Obvs there's programmers that enjoy the nitty gritty keyboard slapping, and they can still do that for problems they find interesting. But for things they want to get out of the way, why not unburden ourselves?

Typing on phone so pardon the typos/autocorrect

pharmakom6• 3 years ago

I think LLMs will make a software engineers job harder and more in demand. By removing boiler plate, engineers will be expected to create more output per person, and the job moves up the stack from junior code monkey stuff to architect / senior debugging guru style work. Not everyone can do such a role. It will be a very tough time to be a junior.

imtringued• 3 years ago

ChatGPT is impressive if you start from a clean slate but the moment you do anything more complicated it slows down to being as fast as doing things yourself. After all, you have to know what to input into it and that may take longer than actually processing the information.

Yabood2• 3 years ago

This won’t be a problem once you can feed it an entire solution. I suspect we’re not too far from being able to do that.

factsaresacred• 3 years ago

Likely sarcasm, still I'll bite.

I saw the exact same commentary around the no-code hype of the past few years and it made me increasingly cynical. No-code tools made it super easy to create a boilerplate website that looked pretty but was not fit for purpose. Meanwhile it was advertised as "Build an AirBnB clone without code!".

OK fine, hyperbole as a marketing tactic. But many people handed over wads of cash for courses that promised results that were in reality no more than cardboard cutouts of actual websites.

The Internet appears to have an endless ability to create markets for don't-do-the-work-and-still-enjoy-the-reward snakeoil.

And now we have ChatGPT- an instant boilerplate-creating machine. Watch as a new (or in many cases the same) class of charlatans grease up this technological wave too.

lewhoo• 3 years ago

If this is indeed so simple then why chatGPT (meaning web app not LLM) was so buggy ? Did OpenAI use their LLM to make the app or not ?

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 3 years ago

Reminds me of the story of Mel.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

Mel obviously took pride in his work, and seemed to look down on compilers in much the same way the author looks down on Midjourney.

jackblemming• 3 years ago

On the other side of the fence, I'm extremely grateful tools like Copilot can automate the mundane process of looking up magic incantations to get some (usually poor) library to do what I want. I have no sympathy for programmers who saw it as a point of pride to memorize hundreds of built in functions and annoying minutiae.

culi• 3 years ago

This seems like a poor use of Copilot. At least in the JS ecosystem, pretty much every library has TypeScript support now. No need to guess or look anything up. Copilot can still be wrong, especially if the API changes over different updates

In my experience Copilot's value add is simply autocompleting simple/boiler-plate-y lines for me. Definitely wouldn't wanna trust something as fuzzy as an AI to "memorize" APIs on my behalf

kranner• 3 years ago

Knowledge of annoying minutiae can be indispensable when you're trying to debug code that looks like it's calling the right functions based on the function signature.

paxys• 3 years ago

I am now able to create, rig and animate a character thats spit out from MJ in 2-3 days. Before, it took us several weeks in 3D. The difference is: I care, he does not. For my boss its just a huge time/money saver.

This is the crux of it. The bottom line is that you are free to practice your craft and love it, but don't expect a company to pay you big bucks for it for no reason when they can find cheaper and better ways to accomplish the task. Automation eating away jobs (including ones that had a quality of romanticism associated with them) has been a constant in human history, and it is silly to expect that it won't apply to you for whatever reason.

miohtama• 3 years ago

I posted this earlier today

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35301727

“The Death of a Technical Skill”

The case study what happened when Adobe Flash died and how the job market was affected. With AI this will happen for many more industry verticals.

Johnny555• 3 years ago

And his work isn’t even much better:

I am angry. My 3D colleague is completely fine with it. He promps all day, shows and gets praise. The thing is, we both were not at the same level, quality-wise. My work was always a tad better, in shape and texture, rendering

No company is going to spend 5X more time on work that is a “tad” better.

teg4n_• 3 years ago

You misunderstand. They were comparing their quality with their coworker’s before AI started to be used.

markles• 3 years ago

The lack of empathy the HN community has really shines through in many of these replies:

There were no doubt quite a few nail makers pre-industrial revolution that took pride in making consistent, quality nails.
And nothing of value have been lost.
LOL at the reply a couple posts down, where OP admits they work at a mobile shovelware sweatshop.

ChatGTP8• 3 years ago

I’m a world where you have no “value” you become trash to those who “do business”, it won’t be a pretty transition. I’m concerned about it personally.

It wouldn’t be a problem if most people just respected each other, I think deep down inside they do. But while those paying our “wages” are an important part of our lives, we’ll have trouble.

sheepscreek2• 3 years ago

All is not lost. I am sure many of us do care. I feel the frustration and pain of the OP. And I am someone not easily swayed by emotions.

The shift that’s happening right now will have far reaching consequences. I often ask myself “at what cost”, but one can ask that question for any major invention in history.

wsc9815• 3 years ago

Yesterday I visited an old, but still reasonably healthy man who has been living in Thailand for 40 years now, maybe longer. Reasonably healthy as in: he doesn't need to visit hospital or use medicine, but his power is now waning a bit due to age.

A man originally from Switzerland. 88 years old now. When he arrived in Thailand he bought a nice plot of land and made a quite beautiful garden there, with many fruits and vegetables and trees. Also many salas spread throughout the 8000 m2 terrain. And chickens, dogs, cats walking around and about.

The man has had quite an adventurous live in the past, back when the world was more adventurous as well, perhaps ...

Anyway, the man is content just tending to his plants. And reading and writing in one of the salas that he uses as a (kind of) outdoor office. In the past he also used to paint, but he's not able to do this anymore.

Maybe we'd all be happier with just a nice plot of land and some plants to tend to and perhaps some hobbies to keep us busy. And maybe it would keep us healthier (both mentally as well as physically) as well.

stemlord3• 3 years ago

I won't be able to afford a plot of land without a job. I feel like we're on the verge of cataclysmic unemployment and I have absolutely no desire to wait in squalor for legislation to catch up with the nifty little UBI idea floating around which seems like should have been sorted yesterday.

SECProto• 3 years ago

Maybe we'd all be happier with just a nice plot of land and some plants to tend to and perhaps some hobbies to keep us busy.

And enough money saved up to buy land in Thailand and retire at 48, without worrying about how he's going to pay for taxes for the rest of his life, or how he will buy food to supplement what he's growing in case of issues there, or...

JeremyNT• 3 years ago

Sadly, we are not headed to such a future. The economic benefits of these LLMs will go only to the capitalists, and any labor savings will allow them to reduce wages and headcount while leaving workers unemployed or with less bargaining power.

AI will be yet another tool to further wealth inequality. We won't be able to afford retiring and tending to our plants.

RDaneel0livaw• 3 years ago

"Maybe we'd all be happier with just a nice plot of land and some plants to tend to and perhaps some hobbies to keep us busy. And maybe it would keep us healthier (both mentally as well as physically) as well. "

And where is the fantasy world where "we all" have enough money for this?

johnwalkr• 3 years ago

What's your point? Many people would be happy if they are lucky enough to be born in a wealthy country and save a bunch of money by the time they're 48 and retire, move to a poorer country and be happy tending a garden. Not many people are this lucky and it will be harder going forward as such desirable cheap places are becoming less cheap rapidly, and less accessible. "Golden visas" in such places are under scrutiny as they are just driving up real estate prices with little benefit to locals.

blackoil4• 3 years ago

This romantic affair works only for rich. Pretty sure the man also has maids, support staff and vendors working for him.

patja• 3 years ago

Sounds like the conclusion of Candide. When confronted by the misery of Pangloss' best of all possible worlds, we must cultivate our garden.

rcpt• 3 years ago

No. God no are you kidding? Subsistence farming? We did that for thousands of years it was horrible.

Hnrobert42• 3 years ago

I think you are seeing what you want to see. When I read your nail maker quote, it did seem bad. When I read the full comment, it seems much more sympathetic.

rcoveson• 3 years ago

The first one is a little unoriginal (but this conversation has been had a bunch so it's hard to fault it for that). The second two we were all working on downvoting and had them near-invisible until you quoted them, restoring their reach. :P

kmeisthax2• 3 years ago

/r/stablediffusion is arguably worse. Lots of people on there who have active disdain for any human (non-AI-assisted) artists who complain about AI.

It's like watching 17th-century Parliament winge about machine breakers.

scotty799• 3 years ago

It's like watching 17th-century Parliament winge about machine breakers.

It's really hard to avoid this because nearly everything about it the same each time.

anigbrowl4• 3 years ago

Very true. Much as I like AI on the technical side, I also look forward to the howls of outrage when some large model comes for the smug squad. coding, trading, management are all eminently replaceable skillsets.

barrysteve• 3 years ago

He doesn't need empathy. He needs to find a way through to a better advantage over AI. I'll give him compassion as he struggles through.

Creating static images (that do not require a significant amount of visual depth and perspective) is a dead art form. The market will accept flat looking images as long as they're drowning in detail, and AI can generate that.

I'm taking a stab at what's next, he needs to (take a stab too) and skip over the loss of love for an out-of-date computing skill.

the_only_law3• 3 years ago

I'm taking a stab at what's next

And what does your crystal ball tell you that is?

CommanderData2• 3 years ago

It frightens me but some are just devoid of the ability to be empathic, even if it's to be empathic against their future selves.

People really do argue themselves aggressively into points that exploit themselves without any benefit.

the_only_law3• 3 years ago

Wait till more developers are being affected and their pie in the sky ideas about the future don’t come true. I promise you the tune they’re singing will instantly change.

drowsspa• 3 years ago

Yeah, clearly developers think they will come out on top...

antibasilisk• 3 years ago

Yeah I feel similarly about programming, honestly even the existence of compilers makes me feel this way to a lesser extent, but AI is absolutely crushing any sort of enjoyment out of anything and further turning it into a mediocre slurry of content.

nullsense4• 3 years ago

I'm enjoying programming more than ever because of it.

Waterluvian2• 3 years ago

I saw AI as a tool like Photoshop, and for that reason wasn’t buying all this anxiety. I still see it as a tool, but this post has changed my entire perception of the issue:

It’s not that a new tool will replace you. It’s that a new tool might be too compelling to avoid, but be boring and miserable to work with and suck the joy out of your craft.

Yabood2• 3 years ago

I think its both. Per OP, the process of producing their art no longer takes weeks when using AI, therefore, less people will be needed.

stemlord3• 3 years ago

Not only that, but it's just fully not their art anymore, it's an approximation based on large-scale data scraping

chii4• 3 years ago

be boring and miserable to work with and suck the joy out of your craft

you don't have to use the tool - just don't complain that you're not as competitive commercially as someone else who does.

If the craft is what you enjoy, then do it apart from the craft's commercial utility. Make it a separate part of your life - use the AI in your job, and don't use it in your spare time doing art for joy.

protonbob• 3 years ago

Some people like getting fulfillment in their work and their spare time.

nirvdrum4• 3 years ago

Humans are allowed to be upset when their lives and livelihoods are upended. "Suck it up" doesn't really help anyone. We shouldn't accept maximizing profitability as the only worthwhile outcome.

I'm a developer. I really hope my day doesn't end up being code review of shitty Copilot generated code because the person accepting the prompt did have the knowledge or care to check it themselves. Sure, I'd still be valuable and I'd still get paid, but I'd be miserable. At least until that skill is no longer needed. Or someone can do it for cheaper.

Setting aside I have other responsibilities outside of work that really don't leave much time for side projects, about the last thing I want to do is work on personal code projects just so they can be sucked up by Copilot. Not to mention I'm also supposed to allocate time to learn a new skill so I can be competitive in a new, rapidly shrinking job market.

kybernetyk3• 3 years ago

but be boring and miserable to work with and suck the joy out of your craft.

like javascript

DaiPlusPlus• 3 years ago

But it’s thanks to JS that we have TypeScript

Waterluvian2• 3 years ago

JS has become a delightful language. Doubly so if you use TS, which is surprisingly trivial to learn and begin integrating.

jay_kyburz6• 3 years ago

But come on, how it moving polygons around and snapping verts together really all that fun.

Bringing characters and worlds to life is what artists really dream about, and AI tools make that easier.

Tesl• 3 years ago

You know, I was finding this whole thread really depressing and starting to feel somewhat concerned about the impact AI was going to have on my own projects / future.

But actually this is a great point. You are right. Even in software development, the joy is building something excellent. The joy isn't usually in defining random util functions to help you get there.

With these advances we could be about to reach a point where extremely small groups of people could build phenomenal things. How nice it would be to be capable of building AAA games with a team of 2-3 people.

29083011397778• 3 years ago

I am now able to create, rig and animate a character thats spit out from MJ in 2-3 days. Before, it took us several weeks in 3D

Sounds like one artist in that studio is being let go, considering the studio is now getting work done dramatically faster. It'll probably be the guy with the (IMO understandable) "poor attitude" about what the job has become.

Even if you think the studio will simply output more art, they either need to find financially-viable uses for six times as much art, or let go of an artist - because if they just start using three times as much, that's still only enough work for one of the two artists.

juujian• 3 years ago

From all I have learned about ChatGPT coding copilots, this is going to be bleak. Similar art styles. No sudden surprises. Eerily familiar characters. I don't like the look of this. More reason to cherish hand-drawn/hand-animated (?) unique works though.

muyuu3• 3 years ago

Generally speaking, whatever output people can do, generative AI can do to the point you wouldn't be able to tell it apart.

nullsense4• 3 years ago

I think the point is it's not going to suddenly give us surprises like Banksy shredding art.

xdennis2• 3 years ago

Except for the hands.

If you're familiar with the Rick and Morty "what is my purpose" meme ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sa9MpLXuLs0 ), it will essentially be the same for humanity in the future.

Humanity: "What is my purpose?"

Robot: "You draw the hands."

Humanity, with existential dread: "Oh my god..."

mLuby• 3 years ago

First they came for the artists, and I did not speak out—because that job doesn't require real creativity.

Then they came for the engineers, and I did not speak out—because that job doesn't require real reasoning.

Then they came for the sales folks, and I did not speak out—because that job doesn't require real human connection.

Then they came for the executives and politicians, and I did not speak out—because that job doesn't require real leadership.

Then they came for me, and I did not speak out—because I was just grateful to have any job at all, even one doing manual labor under the ceaseless watch of glorified chatbot. At least Netflix can create any movie that I or my AI girlfriend ask for, so that's cool I guess.

—trained on a quote from Martin Niemöller

borissk6• 3 years ago

The progress in IT have already made unemployed millions of people. E.g. there used to be shops selling flights and holidays on every corner. There used to be a number of insurance shops in every town center. Every company used to have rooms full of typewriters and typists.

After the software developers made a lot of jobs obsolete, their own job is being made obsolete by the data scientists.

pharmakom6• 3 years ago

Building these AI systems is software engineering, not data science. In fact, data science may be one of the first engineering professions to go.

muyuu3• 3 years ago

Some people say there isn't enough empathy to go around for those creatives that are seeing their jobs either endangered or automated to a degree they've become sweatshop janitors with little prospects to be anything else.

I wonder if that sort of empathy was so plentiful when the automation was shredding the prospects of farmers, miners, truckers and other blue collar workers?

Make no mistake, generative AI is going to affect the creative work market massively over the next few years.

People will need to keep adapting and perhaps some humility would be in order when somebody else is going through hardship as the market for his or her work profile is in dire straits.

perryizgr8• 3 years ago

wonder if that sort of empathy was so plentiful when the automation was shredding the prospects of farmers, miners, truckers and other blue collar workers

Yeah I remember the whole "learn to code" movement that mocked people who were losing their jobs.

kybernetyk3• 3 years ago

And when it was about journalists losing jobs, it quickly got banned as "harassment". By the same people who a few years earlier made fun of blue collar people who lost their jobs.

Maybe this is the "learn to weld" moment?

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B2• 3 years ago

Can you give some sources for the "learn to code" thing? I only remember that it was a reaction to the people who wanted to change open-source (perceived as "destroying from the inside") without giving concrete solutions.

hotpotamus2• 3 years ago

Hillary Clinton said some words about it.

"We're going to make it clear that we don't want to forget those people," Clinton said. "Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories. Now we've got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don't want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on."

Famously what got quoted was this part:

"we're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business."

pharmakom6• 3 years ago

I don’t see the pulled out quote in the main quote.

kybernetyk3• 3 years ago

I wonder if that sort of empathy was so plentiful when the automation was shredding the prospects of farmers, miners, truckers and other blue collar workers?

Twitter was full with snarky "just learn to code" comments.

david2ndaccount• 3 years ago

This has been happening for centuries, see the legend of Johny Henry.

falsaberN13• 3 years ago

No, there was no empathy for them. And I feel there's no real empathy for artists, either.

Before the eeeevil robot came to be, no one gave much of a damn about artists or their opinion. Suddenly we are instrumental to humanity's culture, but people is too busy spreading hatred to listen to any artists that aren't in agreement, what makes me feel it's less about being an artist and more about being emotionally-charged "useful idiots" for anti-AI agendas.

Have you seen AI outputs carefully? I have for the last seven months, and if an artist can be replaced by it, maybe that artist deserves it. I say this as an artist, 36 years of experience.

The worst is that this will be considered a hot take and mean-spirited by the immensely biased HN crowd, but lifeless art can be replaced by lifeless art, and that's the artist's fault for just coasting from check to check without putting much effort, therefore producing empty, emotionless art. We all know this, we all call it out when it happens, but for some reason this entire AI topic is making people forget it's a thing.

This is no different from that lazy guy at the office that just does the bare minimum to not get fired. Getting rid of them may give a more talented and unique but less popular artist a chance to get a job.

latency-guy2• 3 years ago

Before the eeeevil robot came to be, no one gave much of a damn about artists or their opinion. Suddenly we are instrumental to humanity's culture, but people is too busy spreading hatred to listen to any artists that aren't in agreement, what makes me feel it's less about being an artist and more about being emotionally-charged "useful idiots" for anti-AI agendas.

Artists spread disinformation and hate too, in fact I'd count them as one of the primary sources of those things. Mere existence of political cartoonists is the simplest example if we go by the literal term "artist". Artists are rarely if ever divorced from their work either, so I don't think they can claim that the art really takes on it's own life.

I do agree with you on everything else you have said.

ngngngng4• 3 years ago

if an artist can be replaced by it, maybe that artist deserves it. I say this as an artist, 36 years of experience.

This is such an insane take to me at this point. I've used a few of the AI art generators and there is close to zero chance I will ever hire an artist or a graphic designer again (yes, I've hired artists).

I've seen the shortcomings, and sure a very expensive artist can fulfill my needs at an A+ level 100% of the time. But why would I pay so much money to a human artist when after a few minutes and a couple prompts I have a B+ or A- result? As a person with finite money, that last teeny bit of quality is not worth hundreds or thousands of dollars when compared with a very good result for essentially nothing.

People are saying the same thing about programming. That if you're set to be replaced by this you're not "very good". I cost a LOT of money. I am good at what I do. AI is essentially free at that too and learning at an insane rate.

This is absolutely going to break the world.

lowbloodsugar6• 3 years ago

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

—Martin Niemöller

csours• 3 years ago

I used to have a job I liked. That job went away in the name of efficiency. I can't even disagree with the analysis - the old way was less efficient. It still sucks to lose something that you enjoy doing and that helps the team.

I'm doing fine, I went from specialized tech support to software development; but when we talk about efficiency, we are talking about people's lives.

superb-owl• 3 years ago

I can empathize. I've been using Copilot inside of neovim, and it's frighteningly good. It feels like it's reading my mind.

In a few years, a lot of us will be just be writing highly specific Jira tickets instead of doing the hard logic of coding.

dilyevsky• 3 years ago

I mean I’m using it (also nvim). It’s powerful autocomplete, speeds me up by maybe 20-30% when in “typing in code” phase and that’s that. Dont see it replacing software engs any time soon. SWE+copilot will replace just SWE tho that one is for sure

nullsense4• 3 years ago

Don't even need to write the Jira tickets.

rafaelero3• 3 years ago

When DALL-E 2 was released, I remember reading lots of people here in HN saying it would never take the jobs of artists. Well, seems like this argument is aging badly. This is exactly the type of conversation we need to have as a society. Instead of deluding ourselves that our skills are impossible to be reproduced by a machine, we should strive to build a system with values in which we can find a way to build a good live knowing that everything we do will eventually be better reproduced by AI.

thomascgalvin• 3 years ago

I just wish I was part of the first generation to benefit from post-scarcity, and not the generation that is going to have to go through the turmoil of getting to post-scarcity.

thot_experiment• 3 years ago

Oh don't worry my guy, the odds that we make it to post-scarcity at all are not super high. Just vibe with the slide down the slippery slope, it's all you can do.

chii4• 3 years ago

the generation that went thru the industrial revolution would have said the same thing, except they'd wished they were in your position today.

People just don't realize how good today is compared to the past - and of course, how good the future would be (nuclear war notwithstanding).

coffeebeqn3• 3 years ago

I guess we can get AGI and that will lead to great and numerous inventions. Of course how power works in that world is extremely uncertain. Most likely power would flow to a corporation or an authoritative government unfortunately. Not to the people.

ChatGTP8• 3 years ago

Interesting development, these machines have little value but for economic gain. No one employed, means no one will pay to keep the machines alive which means we go back to where we were before the machines? AI art is just as “worthless” as human art. So at the moment these machines depend on an economy.

Art was actually never worth anything until we put a price tag on it ? People were never paid for cave paintings. Maybe what we’re actually going to witness is the end of the idea of money , which I know sounds absolutely absurd, but what else happens ?

If machines become sentiment, that’s cool, but at that stage they’re no longer “our property” to force art generation upon, so then what to do we do ?

Completely fascinating.

chii4• 3 years ago

No one employed

i highly doubt no one will be employed even in the advent of a true AI singularity. Just differently employed - there will be reasons why someone would pay for your labour.

blackoil4• 3 years ago

Player does not care if graphics or code of the game are created by a person or AI. For them it matters how much fun they are having and for companies how low the cost are.

kodah3• 3 years ago

AI won't take a thought workers job. It just sucks the life out of it. Like the person who wrote this post, I make bespoke software. I tinker, I experiment, and I produce high quality results in reasonable timelines. Executives could not give a shit about that, except that those qualities in me are a good signal that I am dependable. Now, if most companies allow AI bottom performers will speed up and their quality will likely slightly increase. As with most things, those on the top end of the spectrum will need to regress to the mean to compete. The result will be that mediocrity takes over because the AI will be in charge of the boilerplate, which is often the foundation for the rest of your code. You can either find enjoyment in the boilerplate being rote and finding places to spend your time in a higher level of abstraction or you can let what used to be your passion sail away like a little red balloon on a windy day.

rafaelero3• 3 years ago

AI won't take a thought workers job.

I don't understand how you can hold this position considering not only where we are but also the rate of progress in AI. It has been taking thought workers job and it will increasingly do so in the future until the surplus cognitive workers offer is just so minimal that it's not worth to automate it.

coldtea6• 3 years ago

AI won't take a thought workers job. It just sucks the life out of it.

It already has started taking them.

Also note that it sucking the life out of them doesn't preclude this, since nobody cares for quality anyway. Neither the companies, who prefer profit, nor most consumers, who will eat up whatever mediocre shit.

rakejake3• 3 years ago

Amen. AI will make us all "managers" of some sort. Goodbye to getting in flow state and trying to build something yourself, and say hello to a gazillion meetings from morning until evening figuring out what to build and what prompt to feed to the AI.

AI is going to make our bullshit jobs even shittier.

riwsky2• 3 years ago

“Reasonable timelines” are not absolute quantities. They’ve always been an equilibrium of whatever the market can bear. It was simply easier to ignore this before, when things changed much more slowly.

bruce5114• 3 years ago

> The result will be that mediocrity takes over because the AI will be in charge of the boilerplate, which is often the foundation for the rest of your code.

Your take is interesting, but I'll provide an alternate point of view from my experience.

I have spent my career working in a low-code environment. There's a boiler plate framework into which people add code.

Since most of all programs are similar (data in, data stored, data processed, data out etc) this allows for high productivity because almost all time is spent on things that are unique to the domain space, not programming the common stuff. It means individual programmers, and very small teams, have written and maintain huge systems.

But what's interesting to me is the boilerplate code. My career has been spent improving the underlying boilerplate, and extending it to new feature areas. This turns out to be a great lever. Improve the boiler-plate and _existing_ programs get better, with minimal effort. Sometimes no effort.

It's kinda like the way I get TLS 1.3 support simply by upgrading my OpenSSL libraries. But at a source level. Which is then retro-applied to existing source code.

Instead of being mediocrity the goal is to always keep improving the boilerplate because that in turn improves a lot of programs.

I say this not to tell you nothing will change. It will change. But change in programming is fun. It stretches the mind, and opens up new horizons. The AI can write code, but that just becomes the next tool, like IDEs were, like code complete, online help or Stackoverflow. I didn't have any of those things growing up, but their introductions allow me to dream bigger, be better, make more.

AI is an opportunity for those with eyes to see.

danjac2• 3 years ago

There was a fear that nanotechnology could accidentally turn everything into gray goo.

AI is that, but for intellectual output.

anoy8888• 3 years ago

This statement is a bit arrogant considering the current pace of AI progress. I bet it won’t age well in a couple of years

globalise83• 3 years ago

Question is: would a 2x or 3x developer paired with an AI be more productive than a 2x or 3x developer paired with a team of several 1x and 0.5x developers? Cutting out coordination costs while still getting the grunt work done by someone else seems like it would lead to much higher and more coherent output.

MachineBurning• 3 years ago

The person who wrote the post says that they can produce the same quality content in "2-3 days" instead of "several weeks", and that there are two people working in essentially the same position.

If the amount of content to be produced remains constant, then from a purely financial point of view the company should be looking at cutting one of them. AI would have then taken their job.

For the amount of content to be produced to not remain constant either the studio would have to go for increased art quality, or scale up the rest of the business to keep up with the new art productivity. It's not clear they'd make that decision over cutting their art department spending in two. At the very least their job is at risk.

eternalban• 3 years ago

allow AI bottom performers

Starting in early '00s, it was getting annoying to have to sit in tech meetings with workers who barely had any actual experience designing systems debate technical decision empowered by wikipedia and some randos blog on hype du jour. Before the internet they would keep quiet since they actually knew zip. It is going to be absolutely awful now.

How all this will affect the youth in context of education, higher learning, students' drive, teachers' domain authority etc. is a more critical issue than labor transitions.

It is interesting and important to note that AI (as it is today) disempowers humans in every dimensions except capital.

gwbrooks• 3 years ago

> This is exactly the type of conversation we need to have as a society.

Comments like this always make me wonder: How would that happen? Here in the U.S., there's relatively little appetite for job-saving labor protections and, once you leave the regulatory sphere, everyone -- employers, employees, consumers of products and services -- is consistently self-interested.

Not saying that sort of societal conversation is impossible; just saying I don't have the imagination to see how it could happen with actionable results in the 2023 version of the U.S.

jay_kyburz6• 3 years ago

I don't think the conversion we need to have is about how to stop it, its about what we do with all the unemployed artists, accountants, journalists, truck and taxi drivers.

Do we pay half of them to dig holes, then pay the other half to fill them?

We just need to keep the economy wheel turning while everybody finds new meaningful work.

justrealist• 3 years ago

It doesn't even really matter what the US regulations are. If a firm in the Philippines can run Midjourney for pennies to generate content that would take hundreds or thousands of dollars in illustrator costs, there's simply no way to mandate labor protections in the US that would keep customers from outsourcing the work.

The gradient is just too strong, and you can't keep a pedigree on every image you publish that originated from a design firm.

melagonster2• 3 years ago

unfortunately, we have capitalism. in our society, if people and their kids starving and dying, we think this ia justice.

ChatGTP8• 3 years ago

That’s because it’s a minority of people in that situation, once it’s > 50% facing prospects like that, it all changes in the blink of an eye.

No one gives a crap until it’s your own child, then it’s probably too late.

xdennis2• 3 years ago

This is childish. People are starving more in non capitalist societies.

orbital-decay6• 3 years ago

It didn't take OP's job, though. It gave them another tool that produces better output, but which they don't happen to like (in contrast to their colleague who doesn't have issues with it).

nirvdrum4• 3 years ago

It didn't take the job in the sense that the OP is still employed. It changed the job into something that barely resembles what the OP was hired to do. It's not quite constructive dismissal, but many people choose fields for reasons of maximizing income. It's hard to stay motivated doing something you hate, especially when a week ago your job had you doing something you love. And that says nothing about the OP's ethical quandry about IP laundering.

I might be too cynical, but given the reported productivity gains, it's quite possible the company decides they can do with a single artist. Or if less skilled artists can generate similar results with suitable AI prompts, it'll probably drive wages down, making the OP expendable. I'd imagine at the very least it sets a ceiling on advancement.

nmz• 3 years ago

We never needed to be this productive anyway, we are completely swarmed with content, to the point that if we stopped producing today we would still be consuming new media after 100 years.

HervalFreire10• 3 years ago

Think about the implications of it. Don't just take it at face value.

How much longer will he be able to KEEP his job.

anigbrowl4• 3 years ago

It turned OP from a craftperson to a machine operator. Their less-skilled colleague (either due to lack of talent, experience, or application) is now cruising past them them because they don't care as much as OP did about the work itself. OP is still employed, but now some of the necessary grunt work has become the main task. And that, too, will be easier done by machine before long.

herbst2• 3 years ago

I have to agree. If I get hired somewhere and one day I get suddenly forced to use Mac or Windows to run the Adobe suite I would hate the situation but most people would argue that's just the Industrie standard

coldtea6• 3 years ago

It's like how Dropbox would never replace running SFTP and rsync or something to that effect...

nomilk• 3 years ago

This is exactly the type of conversation we need to have as a society.

Jobs have been disappearing at a high rate for at least a couple of generations now, and have steadily been replaced with new ones, often high paying ones.

We can't control which jobs are in high, low, and no demand, so we're best off swimming with the current, whichever way it flows. 1. Accept that professions come and go. 2. Expect jobs to disappear every decade or so and plan accordingly. 3. Look forward to an awesome new job after your current one is made obsolete. That goes for all of us.

thorncorona• 3 years ago

1. Accept that professions come and go. 2. Expect jobs to disappear every decade or so and plan accordingly. 3. Look forward to an awesome new job after your current one is made obsolete. That goes for all of us.

What can we do? Hope to save enough to not go into more debt for a second degree?

Hope that second degree isn’t obsoleted either?

As AI becomes more advanced the minimum education and likely IQ required to even get a job that pays above minimum wage will increase.

What are we gonna do about the ever increasing N+1% of people who won’t be cost effective versus an AI?

dukeofdoom2• 3 years ago

Endless amount of things that need improving.

danjac2• 3 years ago

3. Look forward to an awesome new job after your current one is made obsolete.

You do realize that "awesome new job" will require years of training and experience?

Enjoy working at the Amazon Fulfilment Center in the meantime (until of course that's automated too).

jstummbillig2• 3 years ago

While fundamentally true, this comment is astonishingly tone deaf in light of the entirely unprecedented amplitude and timescale at which the shift is happening this time.

"Just prepare" does not work when years become days.

onion2k• 3 years ago

Jobs have been disappearing at a high rate for at least a couple of generations now, and have steadily been replaced with new ones, often high paying ones.

In the past jobs took a while to disappear. People had time to retrain, to change career, and to come to terms with things ending. The difference now is that it seems like you could be in a high demand role today, and the whole industry you work in might not exist any more in a few years time.

The suggestion that this is just like it was in the past ignores that massive difference.

TheOtherHobbes3• 3 years ago

I suspect this comment won't age well.

jzb• 3 years ago

This is what I would call toxic positivity. Maybe with a side of survivor bias. Lots of people don’t get awesome new jobs. They struggle, they fall out of the workforce.

People don’t want to “accept” that’s some thing they have trained to do and gotten good at is going to just go away. It’s a reality, but it’s also pretty fucking awful.

My father used to make a very good living doing sign painting until the late 80s when vinyl signs became cheap and fast to make. They weren’t as good, they didn’t last as long, but they were cheap. And so his good living went away, and he spent the rest of his working years doing jobs that were not well paid. (The full story is more complicated, but the larger point stands.)

flippinburgers2• 3 years ago

Naively positive. People whose jobs are outpaced by technology end up working "dead end" jobs that nobody else wants or fall into poverty if they are not lucky enough to be able to retire. Turning around in your 40s, 50s, or 60s to find new employment in a new field? This is exceptionally challenging.

tekknik5• 3 years ago

Jobs have been disappearing at a high rate for at least a couple of generations now, and have steadily been replaced with new ones, often high paying ones.

You don’t feel like you should quote some data for this claim?

HervalFreire10• 3 years ago

Well, seems like this argument is aging badly.

This is a nice way of putting it. It just shows how people have a tendency to deny a reality that may replace everything they stand for.

What you will see as AI continues to get better along the obvious trendline is these "denial" arguments become more and more specific. First the AI will "never" replace jobs, then it will "never" replace specific jobs involving "programming skills" or "skills related to what I do" until eventually when the reality of it all is too all encompassing the arguments will evolve into attacks at AI for being "low quality" or something along those lines.

But if AI progresses to the point where the quality of the output becomes undeniably superior to human output the "denial" arguments will inevitably shift to the REAL argument. The heart of it all. What is the purpose of being alive if AI is doing everything? Should we ban it for the sake of the economy for purpose?

These arguments of course only occur based off the assumption that the technology will progress so quickly that the repercussions will be hitting everyone like a freight train. If the progression slows down enough then there won't be much opposition. Only acceptance as it slowly assimilates into our society without people noticing the change.

If you in your heart are one of these people who has no worry about AI taking over jobs because AI is simply too "stupid" perhaps consider the fact that my description above fits you. Are your arguments evolving along a similar trendline? If so, consider shifting your perspective a bit.

elforce0029• 3 years ago

100x this. I think will see something like France but on a global scale.

juvvel5• 3 years ago

Comments like this always read as "we can already extrapolate that everything we do will be done better by a machine soon". Pushing back against this argument isn't just ignorance or avoidance of change. It just asks the relevant question of whether we can be so sure that AI does everything "better". But how dare we challenge the hubris of tech bros, right?

rebuilder• 3 years ago

I still would argue against AI being able to do art better.

There’s a line of thought that art is specifically meaningful because it’s humans thinking about things, but let’s leave that aside for now.

Generative models are revealing how many jobs in e.g. entertainment are essentially mechanical, from management’s POV. So far, they’ve just happened to require an artist’s education to do well. Now, the craft part is going out the window, and artistic creativity, if it was ever required, is being pushed out of production roles.

This is going to change the type of person who works in entertainment. I expect, while by technical metrics we will probably see quality stay the same or even improve while output increases, we’re also going to see a kind of McDonaldsification of entertainment, even more than we already see, because we’re pushing creative people out of the industry.

TL;DR: Process matters. Art is notoriously difficult to manage and predict what will or will not be successful , in large part because it’s a classic greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts thing. Devalue the process, devalue the end product.

Zetobal• 3 years ago

He is not an artist he is an operator.

karmasimida• 3 years ago

It is NOT taking artists job in OP though.

What happens is that it changes the job into something different.

s__s• 3 years ago

Yes, it changed his job in to something a 6th grader could do with little to no training. In other words, it’s now a meaningless, low-value job that won’t pay well.

tekknik5• 3 years ago

There’s too many people in this thread claiming this. This artist did not lose their job, correct. This artist is currently underemployed. Most of us can predict the rate of AI improvement, and realize soon his job will be entirely replaced once they can bridge the gap.

My wife and I were recently talking about hiring some artists to do some work for us. However with generative AI, we decided to instead have her do the work using the AI tools instead. The result, less artists hired.

This is how it’s going to be from now on. The only hope is if humans find more opportunity with this power.

nec4b• 3 years ago

> I remember reading lots of people here in HN saying it would never take the jobs of artists. Well, seems like this argument is aging badly.

And yet nobody lost his job. He wasn't fired. He is unhappy because automation equalized the playing field and mediocre artists became good enough with the right tools. The technology enabled him and other artists to be more productive. It feels similar to the best ditch digger getting angry at the invention of excavator, because he doesn't stand out anymore.

Laaas• 3 years ago

They could fire him and only keep the other artist though. It's likely they have more capacity now than needed, which if they halve, they can spend more money on a good developer.

cyrialize2• 3 years ago

He's also angry because now his job has completely changed. He enjoyed spending his time making 3D models. Now that expectations have shifted because of these tools he has to use them. He went from making things from scratch to writing prompts instead.

Hoasi2• 3 years ago

When DALL-E 2 was released, I remember reading lots of people here in HN saying it would never take the jobs of artists. Well, seems like this argument is aging badly.

And yet, the more I play with these image models, the less I worry they might replace all artists.

Granted, it will commoditize some skills, such as photo bashing, mockups, and visual exploration.

It is a "creative" tool in a way, in the sense that a prompt can give unexpected results, such as associations that were uncalled for. But as much as you can replace higher-paid video game concept artists, you'll still need people to operate these text-to-image tools. We are past the initial discovery days, where all the results look incredible, and even the public will grow more discerning. Artists can't ignore these tools. As tools for the individual, they can be a lever. As a full-time, corporate job? Not so much. That is to say, as a job, this is not different from many other bullshit jobs. Prompting all day long is as fun as filling boxes in Excel. That will probably attract a new crowd of less specialized workers, and artists will have no choice but to adapt.

Digital artists could find new ways of expression using traditional art (a luxury), diversify, and engage in content creation. There are many alleys to confront pessimism, despair, and the fear of becoming obsolete.

Artists thrive in adversity and uncertain situations because they are problem-solvers first. Imagination is their job.

Photography made portrait artists redundant, but it didn't eliminate artists. It will change the nature of an artist's job and kill some of the joy in some cases, but it will trigger creative responses, too.

6177c40f• 3 years ago

What's really the point of AI? Is perfect efficiency and maximized profit really the end goal we've been trying to achieve this whole time?

scotty799• 3 years ago

The whole point of all progress is democratization of the product/service through making the production process cheaper.

462436347• 3 years ago

These AI systems will sound the death knell for the creative culture of openness and sharing that emerged during the web 1.0 era with the Creative Commons and OSI-approved licenses and sites like DeviantArt, NewGrounds, and SourceForge, and which still exists today, albeit in a less idealistic form.

Once people realize that by putting something, even just a blog post, out for public consumption, especially if done so under a permissive, share-alike license, they're helping to train an AI that will eventually compete with them for their job, they will not only be less inclined to share it (under a permissive license or not), but be less inclined to produce it at all.

Gigachad• 3 years ago

This is insignificant. The training set already exists. And there are plenty who do not care about having data used for training.

kmeisthax2• 3 years ago

I don't think you actually need copyrighted data to train AI to compete with artists. The argument over copyright is interesting but kind of a sideshow. We already know that copyright protection is not a prerequisite for creativity - as it currently stands copyright only protects the rich.

The real reason why AI is going to kill DA/NG/SF/GH/etc is because of spam.

Let's say, for every piece a 100% human artist can do with no AI assistance, another artist using AI as a tool can make three. They start off with a prompt in DALL-E, SD, or Midjourney, and then tweak the output with prompts and so on to get exactly what they want quicker.

Now imagine a non-artist using the same technology. They don't care about the touchups. They just want to churn out lots of pieces all at once. So that would be nine times more output compared to the unassisted human - three times three. And there are plenty of them doing this, because they all watched the same video on how you can hustle T-shirt and poster stores by submitting lots of AI-generated pieces.

The reason why you are seeing art sites ban AI art is purely a matter of practicality. Many of those spaces are able to provide free promotion to people who post quality content because quality is itself a limited resource. Now the human trying to make their magnum opus - AI or no - is going to be buried under lots of low-effort garbage from zombie modernist grifters.

odood• 3 years ago

I believe you are spot on.

We are already seeing the same result of LLMs, with sci-fi magazines (temporarily) no longer accepting submissions and self-publication platforms such as Amazon's being flooded with auto-generated crap.

Hustle culture is part of it, but only one part of what I believe will be a negative outcome for society.

As AI systems display inherent bias, and it is possible to train for that bias (e.g. RightwingGPT), we have essentialy weaponized content generation, and we have no scaleable mechanisms such as fact checking to combat it.

Whether it is low-quality work, spam, disinformation, outright manipulation, copyright violations, or other forms of negative results, we have automated the ability to produce it.

cageface• 3 years ago

I think it's fair to say that what this current generation of AI enables is cheaply generating a limitless amount of content of not great but acceptable quality.

And I think you're exactly right that this is going to make it extremely difficult for the great stuff out there to rise to the surface. It's going to be suffocated.

ngngngng4• 3 years ago

We'll soon see the point where AI can generate text, video, voices simultaneously. All of the tik tok/reels style content people mindlessly scroll all day will be AI generated, delivering money to only the AI's creator, and no one will know the AI is behind it.

lunfard0004• 3 years ago

Let's not pretend that is just altruism why people "open-source" their art or code. Most of them do it to get noticed.

anon77253• 3 years ago

The benefits of openness compound irrespective of the motivations of creators.

Julesman2• 3 years ago

We are going to be seeing so much of this. It is sad. Start up culture at times seems to insist that all progress must be good, as though progress itself will be thwarted by reflection or honesty.

Something is lost and something is gained, but that doesn't make the losses painless or irrelevant. We can be pragmatic and have empathy at the same time.

What I don't think we should do is act like every change is inherently good. Perhaps something valuable will be lost to efficiency and the bottom line. Hopefully something will also be gained.

Let's not be in a hurry to declare implications. And let's try to be helpful.

whateveracct2• 3 years ago

You can still do the old ways. I'm still gonna keep drawing and stuff, myself. I don't really see how the AI actually helps me accomplish my goals on an art or coding front as a gamedev. Where the goal is "make something meaningful and beautiful."

I don't like to shout "philistine" or "luddite" but it feels like all the people excited for these tools were tasteless to begin with and already weren't producing works that meet my bar of consumption. I guess we already knew that about the AAA game industry, for instance.

I guess it always pays to have taste - doubly in an AI-oriented world. The old ways aren't going anywhere imo.

spoiler8• 3 years ago

I'm a developer and a hobby artist. So I could br a bit off on the art front.

For development: it's helped me adopt new libraries a bit quicker.

It also helped with generating a first draft of documentation/comments, or to help me iterate on the phrasing of some stuff I over explained, or not explained well enough. It's kinda made me a better writer as a result, since I learned phrasing techniques that I previously didn't.

It's helped me with boring stuff like converting data type syntax between languages.

It's good at doing autocompletion of lines or short snippets. This is a godsend in systems programming, where you type a lot.

It also helped me go from "blank page" projects or task by generating the boilerplate or scaffolding.

It's often times wrong (and sometimes in funny ways), but it's allowed me to focus on the problem domain rather than the supporting and often boring grunt work.

I think an artist probably has similar situations on the job. It wouldn't be a job of everything about it was rainbows and unicorns. Sometimes artists do boring stuff. Why not get that out of the way.

Or if working with really poor requirements on something that's not super interesting to them, maybe they can do rapid reference generation or brainstorming through the theses AI tools.

Or you realised you want to change the colour palette for a part of the scene. Instead of manually fiddling with thr the selection tools, and curves/HSL/filters, just ask the AI to retouching it. Then correct a bit, since it probably won't get it right. So just quicker iterations. I don't think it necessarily hinders the creative process

coffeebeqn3• 3 years ago

In games I think it’s quite clear how it will help. We already do this to a large part with foliage and trees. There is a ton of content that isn’t emotionally important but it needs to simply adhere to the style and sit there in the environment

luckylion4• 3 years ago

You can replace "Startup culture" with "Modernity" and it reads like many conservatives' feelings about progressive culture. I don't think anyone has ever cared about that, and I don't see why that should be changed because it now affects different people.

spoiler8• 3 years ago

I know people like to politicise things since it usually creates a simple sense of unity and to gives people a sense of moral superiority. Simple is good. We humans like simple. If we didn't go and simplify things we don't deal with every day our already complicated lives would become too difficult to juggle. Their political compass is generally irrelevant. And there's always people who don't like SOME type of change. Conservatives think trans people are crimes against God; Progressive people think more process and regulation in trans conversations is a sin against humanity. Everyone has it hard.

I'm only mentioning this because it helps to sympathise with every person, not just the ones that agree with you. Life has more flavour when you're not focusing on "us or them"

Julesman2• 3 years ago

Not a solid read on my comment, but it's an interesting point. Sensitivity to those left behind as conservative defense of tradition.

I want every coal miner to lose their job. Every last one. That would be a fantastic thing and a necessary thing. That doesn't mean I want those people to suffer. We can help them out. We can give them assistance and job training.

In other words we can embrace the future without being cruel. That's not a conservative sentiment at all. And yes, many people would like to move forward in a thoughtful way that doesn't leave people in the dust.

As far as affecting different people, LLMs are about to squish the middle class. You can be quite sure that the impact will be very different than when similar changes affect the working class.

8f2ab37a-ed6c2• 3 years ago

I imagine portrait painters and later photographers all experienced a similar transition. They had built their livelihoods around a certain visual asset generation technique, and a new technology disrupted that process and pushed them into the nice-to-have luxury corner. The same train will come for prompt engineers eventually too in the usual cycle.

barbariangrunge• 3 years ago

The term prompt “engineer” is tedious to professional engineers everywhere

riwsky2• 3 years ago

“Softerware Engineer”

pkdpic2• 3 years ago

This is a tragic disappointment a lot of (if not most (if not an overwhelming majority (if not literally all))) artists experience at some point early or late in their professional careers.

I taught art for a long time and I would always try to frame this inevitable experience as an important moment of growth. When you have to form a deeper relationship to your creative work and think strategically about how you want to support yourself long term.

There's no getting around it, it's really hard seeing what this is doing to visual artists. The few of us that could find good work doing what we love...

8f2ab37a-ed6c2• 3 years ago

What's an analogy in the software world to this sort of tragic disappointment? Going from building fun videogame side projects to having to crank out dozens of over-engineered B2B SaaS microservices, for the sake of job security, for yet another sales workflow optimization tool?

pkdpic2• 3 years ago

I too am anxiously trying to imagine what the software dev version of this will be... Sweating it out at every sprint meeting and stand-up...

LesZedCB2• 3 years ago

yes.

instead of spending weeks thinking about and designing some sweet algorithm Knuth himself would be proud of, you write the same CRUD app with the same design patterns.

mike_hearn2• 3 years ago

There's been a bunch of similar transitions, perhaps less massive. You see the echos of them occasionally when you read people getting upset about the poor performance/resource usage of modern software. A hacker was once someone who could write assembly and packed an entire graphical operating system into 4mb of RAM. Nowadays a hacker is someone who knows what useEffect does in a ReactJS UI. The people who loved the metal, who loved knowing what every byte of their program did, they are mostly relegated now to hobby programming. Or maybe some embedded work but that's not particularly well paying. SerenityOS is a love letter to this era of development.

lowbloodsugar6• 3 years ago

Or even just going from writing video games by yourself, getting to do all of it (graphics, "AI", design), to being one of a hundred programmers churning out the latest version of some "AAA" title. I now work at a FAANG, and in many ways, it is more rewarding. I'd love to be part of a five person indie studio making great games but it is a fucking lottery and my kid is heading off to college.

lunfard0004• 3 years ago

in the other hand this will enable developers without art skills to produce their indie games with a professional-looking art on their own.

sjaak• 3 years ago

What happens to us when AI becomes better than us at every mental task?

Ignoring the economic factors, what does that mean for our self worth? If we know it’s easier to ask a machine to do it, will we stop doing everything?

Can we reframe our purpose and just be content living?

(Above quote from: https://twitter.com/iamharaldur/status/1639368422763970562)

pharmakom6• 3 years ago

We will become a leisure society. Honestly that sounds great to me.

tgv3• 3 years ago

We will become a terribly impoverished society, with the unemployed fighting over scraps of food. There is no realistic path towards "a leisure" society, save for a world revolution.

medvezhenok4• 3 years ago

Last time that technological revolution threatened this many people's livelihoods we got rise of Hitler and WWII (propelled by the petite-bourgeoisie), and I imagine that this time we won't get away without a conflict of a large caliber either (fighting over the distribution of the AI spoils)

qwick23• 3 years ago

Sounds like viral marketing campaign in flavor of Midjourney

ummonk• 3 years ago

The issue here is that you have to use text prompts (because the overwhelming bulk of training data out there available for AI is in the form of text). Ideally you should be able to sculpt and rig and paint manually via AI tools - the tweaks you do to a sculpture should be inputs to an AI system that can give you an intuitive and responsive system that replaces current procedural generation.

tstrimple• 3 years ago

You absolutely can use these tools for this. There are stable diffusion plugins for photoshop that allow far more control over what is generated where.

https://youtu.be/nnyjQkgccnA

causality0• 3 years ago

Man is it hard not to feel a little schadenfreude. For decades the white collars watched the blue collars lose their jobs to machines and said "well I'm so sorry for you, but you really should've realized the purpose of a human being is to use their mind and create, they can never take that from us".

This is going to do for art what YouTube did for video production: obliterate the grind. Now what counts is your genuine creativity, your inspiration.

eropple• 3 years ago

This is going to do for art what YouTube did for video production: obliterate the grind. Now what counts is your genuine creativity, your inspiration.

These two sentences are so violently at odds as to be comical. YouTube is nothing but the grind. It is an unending content mill and if you stop, you may literally never regain even the precarious position you'd managed so far.

Creativity? Inspiration? It's time served above everything else.

hooverd• 3 years ago

If you want to make it on YouTube, and not just have a channel outside your day job, you basically have to mold yourself and your content to be perfectly palatable to the recommendation algorithm.

CatWChainsaw2• 3 years ago

The scahdenfreude is going to be off the charts in a few years when these "tools" get so advanced that cease making people more productive and cause a massive loss of jobs, and no replacement, and no post-capitalist utopia. The people who were so sanguine about adapting to change are going to realize they were made promises that never stood a chance in hell of being kept.

quadcore• 3 years ago

Midjourney is an illegal product and it's easy to prove. Adobe did a way better job at this btw, protecting artists by simply making a legal product.

The way a good lawyer is gonna make a shitload of money is by asking one simple question: who's the artist?

Say you generate a picture with Midjourney, who's the artist? Not you, definitely not the AI as it's not a person, so the closest artists you can find is the ones who made the pictures in the training set. Done.

Hang tight buddy.

jeeeb• 3 years ago

I suspect this isn’t much different from the direction software development is headed.

You can either find satisfaction in the process or the outcome. The process can already be fairly mundane and will become more so with time.

A couple of other random thoughts:

1. Currently, these things work best (really need) an operator experienced in the craft. Ironically by eliminating entry level positions they may make it hard for new developers to gain that experience and enter the industry. Instead the entire industry may become one of increasingly aged SEs prompting LLMs to update code, and (occasionally) auditing the output. Somewhat akin to the COBOL developers of today.

2. If we really do get AGI then the marginal value of creative output (be it software or 3d art or otherwise) will be driven to zero. It will be so cheap to produce that competitors will easily arise.

anon77253• 3 years ago

1. Currently, these things work best (really need) an operator experienced in the craft.

I guess the question is: how long does the intermediate state of super-powered developers last?

scotty799• 3 years ago

This reads as if floor sweeper is complaining that a company bought a machine to do the sweeping. And now he has to ride the machine all day and it took all the joy of his job because he really liked the hand motions and walking around and was very good at it. His colleague doesn't mind and is no longer slightly worse at sweeping than him. And boss sees it as a huge money saver because floors are vast.

tgv3• 3 years ago

More money for the boss, less (jobs and thus) money for the rest. Such a wonderful prospect.

scotty799• 3 years ago

That's argument against capitalism not against automation.

npteljes• 3 years ago

I'm not an artist, and I don't mind the general direction the AI is going, but I feel for the people who are impacted like this. It must feel like shit to be replaced in such a way.

muskmusk• 3 years ago

Your job, no matter who you are, is always to please the customer. If you focus on that then you will be fine. But if your focus is a more selfish one then you could be exposed.

psnehanshu• 3 years ago

Not related to the topic: For a change nerds are linking to www.reddit.com rather than old.reddit.com

Havoc• 3 years ago

Thought the top comment is insight too re the whole AI thing:

In a society that judges a persons worth purely on their economic contribution it's going to be a disaster.

tlocke7• 3 years ago

We've created a society where there are such things as 'jobs' and unless you're rich, you need a job to support yourself and maybe a family. I think this model of society worked reasonably well for a while, but with AI we're coming to the end of that era.

In the next era we'll probably live like aristocrats, but instead of the work being done by servants, it'll be done by AI.

Back to the case of the 3D artist, in this new era she won't need to have a job to support herself, and she will have the freedom to create her art as she wishes.

lvoudour• 3 years ago

This next era may take 100s of years though, AI taking up physical labor is still science fiction (and I'm not fully sold on the utopia angle). She'll need to support herself much sooner than that, let's be realistic

throwawaylinux5• 3 years ago

We've needed "jobs" to support ourselves since we descended from the trees. Actually before that too. "Society" came about because we invented tools and techniques to make our jobs easier so people could spend more time on different things. "AI" is some more steps down that same path.

In the next era we'll probably live like aristocrats, but instead of the work being done by servants, it'll be done by AI.

Not in the way you imagine. We live like aristocrats today. We live in vast mansions that have hot running water, electricity, refrigeration, heating and cooling, lighting, we have servants bring us gluttonous feasts whenever we like, we careen around in our horseless carriages and flying machines. We laze around many hours of the day wasting time on frivolities like watching TV, playing computer games, reading books, drinking and taking drugs, etc. We have armies of doctors and security at our disposal if we should break a leg or even get a sniffle.

So we live better than kings did 200 years ago.

Life might get better for the average commoner in another 200 years. There will still be the haves and have nots though. People with a lot of wealth won't want to share it with others, and people with less will be envious of those with more, that's the constant in the human condition.

Nobody with the robots is going to give money to a bunch of hippies to laze around. If they want a piece of it they'll have to either work to create it themselves or to take it by force. Either way it won't come for free.

tlocke7• 3 years ago

I agree with a lot of what you write, but in my experience in the UK there can be instances where money from the the wealthy has been used for the common good. For example, until 1945 only the rich could afford to educate their children, but the government decided to use taxpayers' money to provide free education for every child up to the age of 16. It was a utopian idea, and when it was first suggested most people said, 'yeah right, nice idea but of course it'll never happen'.

mongol• 3 years ago

We've needed "jobs" to support ourselves since we descended from the trees

Do you think the lion's job is to hunt? And the zebra's job is to eat grass?

A job is something you do in exchange for something else as payment. If you go as far back as to when our ancestors descended from trees, you will need to explain what kind of jobs were around then, who worked them and who paid.

jerojero2• 3 years ago

I don't think so. I think in the future we will be living pretty similarly but instead of just doing the work manually we'll be using AI to be more efficient. Just like what the original post on reddit was referring to.

He was not fired or anything, his bosses just told him "now you need to do 10 times the work you were doing before because you got the AI". Although in the past it was okay for him to do 1/10th of the work, now with the AI, that has become unacceptable.

Why would the socio-economic system change? We've been automating work for a while now and people don't really get fired over it; they are just tasked with producing more. Remember that the computer itself was a huge productivity enhancer. When excel came out suddenly one accountant could do the work of 10 but most people weren't liberated from their tedious manual algebraic works, instead, we simply started to produce significantly more than before.

Of course, I would love to live in the world that you dream of, I'm pretty sure that's what post-scarcity communism looks like. I just don't really see any indicators in terms of public policy or business attitude that indicates that will be the case. Seems to me like our societies are more geared towards growth rather than improving quality of life.

steveshurley442• 3 years ago

The one word answer for why you are wrong to not be concerned is entropy.

tlocke7• 3 years ago

Of course, I would love to live in the world that you dream of, I'm pretty sure that's what post-scarcity communism looks like. I just don't really see any indicators in terms of public policy or business attitude that indicates that will be the case.

That's true, but let me give an example of something I've experienced in my own lifetime. In about 1996 I heard about Open Source software and after wrestling with the idea for a bit I became a convert and threw out Windows and installed a Linux distribution on my home machine. At the time, when I talked to people about Open Source software, there was a near universal reaction of, 'nice idea, but it'll never catch on' and they would go on to give me many reasons why this utopian idea would fail. Now, 25 years later, Open Source is a great success.

As a postscript, I got into making contributions to Open Source and I still do. Maybe one day my mind will be too addled to code, or perhaps an AI will do it better than me, but until that day I fully intend to carry on with Open Source contributions.

testHNac• 3 years ago

Reading some of the comments about coding and AI got me thinking.

Can modern AI come up with new Javscript libraries, Open source projects, Browser Specifications etc The new way of doing things that improve things.

When most people start using AI to make their work easier. Then very few people will develop the competency to create new things, innovate.

At some point will that cause progress to slow down ?

pharmakom6• 3 years ago

It’s gonna be tough as a junior dev in the near future. I’m very grateful that I managed to upskill so much before all this happens. In the worst case, I’ll have a crappy job directing and debugging AI output… but in the best case, we have reached AGI.

Claude_Shannon• 3 years ago

Yeah...

How will one be able to find a job when AI will do way better than junior? Of course, seniors will be better. But interns? Why would you pay for lesser quality?

nbzso3• 3 years ago

I do work in tech. Almost 25 years.

As a traditionally trained artist, my advantage over the years always was the knowledge of composition, color and my drawing skills when producing the visual part of the products.

I focused early in my company (2005) on UX and UCD processes, and with the time realized that people don't care about craftsmanship or maximizing the quality.

We are approaching a time of generative design. Personalization of UX by data based generative interfaces. So even the flow and journey mapping will be automated soon (UX researchers, hello).

For me, this is the end of an era of innovation driven by human creativity. You will have a data scientist and secretary, which will prompt all day the "boss" vision.

A.I. art is not art. I will give you a simple example: Who will be the creator of the famous David sculpture? Michelangelo or the rich patron who gave the description of the task? According to the definition of A.I. "art" the patron is the artist.

So in this scenario, the art becomes a commodity generated without human touch and personal expression. Just a synthetic membrane of average results trained on stolen data and genius intellectual property laundering machine.

Personally, my decision is to capitalize the remains of an industry and detach myself from any form of metaverse interactions. I started to paint recently again and don't give any F* about commercial viability of the process. If people of the future want to live in A.I. induced corporate coma, so be it.

jstummbillig2• 3 years ago

I started to paint recently again and don't give any F* about commercial viability of the process.

That is an affordance a lot of people have to be granted now.

fintechie2• 3 years ago

A.I. art is not art.

IMO you can certainly output art, code, etc from AIs. AI as a new kind of productivity tool, a very powerful one.

nbzso3• 3 years ago

Just yesterday, I gave the ChatGPT prompts to generate Midjourney prompts. It transformed a simple sentence of "Portrait of beautiful woman on the beach with yellow dress." to the specific output of prompts with different lenses and lighting setups generated with astonishing results. My input in the process was minimal. No compositional skills or artistic taste. Powerful tool? Yes. Productivity is not an Artistic measure. Transitional value and personal expression is. But hey, be productive while you can.

raincole3• 3 years ago

A.I. art is not art. I will give you a simple example: Who will be the creator of the famous David sculpture? Michelangelo or the rich patron who gave the description of the task? According to the definition of A.I. "art" the patron is the artist.

No? What are you even talking about? AI is not a person. In every single legal and ethicical discussion, "human" and "non-human" are treated completely differently. AI is a tool, while Michelangelo isn't.

Who's the creator of David sculpture is completely unrelated to whether AI art is art or not.

precompute4• 3 years ago

A.I. art is not art.

It isn't human-generated art. It would also be difficult to really label the generating process as a process that generates "art". I'd rather only label the end result as "art" for people that think it qualifies. It's the same as not considering photography as art. How many photographers actively contribute to camera technology? Or how many people that have worked on camera tech can profess to be actual photographers? Very, very few for either case. It's similar for prompting for an image. It's a "skill", the same way photography is a "skill". You'd be hard-pressed 20 years ago to take pictures of a quality consistent with a high-end DSLR today. Yet are people today "better" photographers just because they own better cameras? Or is an "AI Artist" a "better" AI artist because image generation got better, and / or he got a much better model (seeing how the quality of diffusion-based image generation wholly depends upon the model being used, and not so much upon prompt tuning)?

I will give you a simple example: Who will be the creator of the famous David sculpture? Michelangelo or the rich patron who gave the description of the task? According to the definition of A.I. "art" the patron is the artist.

Yes, and I hope that changes, but it won't as long as there is monetary incentive for companies to shell out models. Genuine human contribution to the models will also decrease exponentially, because everything that could be mined has already been. They can make small gains with labelling but the rest is a hard ceiling.

Attribution is very finicky right now because there's some effort involved in generating those images. If it was completely effortless (with a UI that labeled it as such) and gave sources / similar images, you could stop calling it "art", and instead just plain old machine-based image generation.

falsaberN13• 3 years ago

"Trained on stolen data" This is emotionally charged wording with a clear confrontational bias and a dark intent to discredit.

As someone with over 30 years of experience with art and artists, do you realize how many influences are present in any given artist? Do you know how many artists use "reference images" heavily? Do you know how many artists trace images (specially in 3D modeling)? By your logic, every piece of art is stolen, if not from other artists, from reality itself. You are insulting every artist present in this forum with your bias. Thanks for that.

Also, art made by commission or contract is technically property of the one who paid. Only the top recognized artists get to retain ownership of a specific piece or design done for a company, and even that is rare. How many cases are there where artists jumped ship off a property and needed to make lawyer-friendly pastiches of the characters, because they didn't own the rights?

And, the Unet does not store images. This is not a photobasher nor a extreme compression algorithm. You'd know this if you had bothered to try. Which I have. I have trained it on my own artwork and in fact I maintain one of the largest guides about how to train Stable Diffusion using Low Rank Adaptation. You can't just "take out" an image in any exact capacity, and a lot of "proofs" are fabricated using img2img or models trained so aggressively on a single image that it's going to resemble it no matter what (and yet it'll never be reproduced 1:1). People fueled by strong emotions are not incapable of deceit. In fact, it's the stuff you MUST double-check, precisely because fueled by emotions.

I'm so disappointed in "tech people" lately.

nbzso3• 3 years ago

Sorry, the idea that artists are synthesizers of the past art is ludicrous. The human is not the machine. There are a billion factors for interpretation in creating a personal style. The A.I. image generators are just machines which produce average from all previous artists. They have no personality or agency (yet).

Stable Diffusion trained its algorithm on data sets collected by the German nonprofit LAION, which has collected billions of captioned images from art shopping sites and websites such as Pinterest.

And it has done so without consent, causing artists and advocates to raise copyright concerns.

https://bit.ly/3FU4OSa

fintechie2• 3 years ago

I feel bad for people reluctant to embrace the tech. It feels like refusing to adopt email, the web, mobile apps, and so on. Why not use it to your advantage?

Truth is, it's going to become a must for many companies very soon, or they'll be unable to compete. Maybe there will be some niches where human artists thrive, but it's uncertain at this stage.

dtdynasty• 3 years ago

I didn't interpret their article as reluctance to embrace technology. They understandably liked 3d modeling using the current tools and was able to make a living doing something fun. It's a rare occurrence and sadly innovations in technology took away the joyful part of their job. If it was not a tech innovation removing the joy from their job they would probably still be upset about it.

moltar• 3 years ago

I wonder if horse buggy drivers had the same sentiment when cars came out?

konart• 3 years ago

I doubt it. Kind of. The reddit use did not loose the job or money. What was lost is motivation.

Now it's just a "job". Without any spark.

antirez2• 3 years ago

"I don’t want to make “art” that is the result of scraped internet content". I guess he/she was ok with creating "art" that was heavily based on other things he/she saw on other games and on the internet. Artists reasoning in this absurd way should ask themselves: I'm ok if a law passes that makes it illegal to get inspiration for other copyrighted work?

deely3• 3 years ago

There is a difference.

1. Corporation scraped art for AI to learn without permission.

2. Corporation own resulting AI model, and don't want to share it. Only sell the results.

antirez2• 3 years ago

Both arguments are wrong, in my opinion.

1. Artists getting inspiration from all the other works (payed by others) also don't ask any permission. If you want to create a game with a monster heavily inspired to Alines move monsters, you don't need to ask, nor you will be sued. 2. Artists are also against Stable Diffusion.

andrewstuart• 3 years ago

Maybe it's a bit like professional software development where developers no longer get to create products, they just are code monkeys that complete tickets that are specified to the Nth degree and there's no creativity or fun and indeed if you do anything except what's on the ticket then you'll have to answer for it.

If you are a developer who loves the art and craft of creation then you have to do that at home.

Work is just being a cog in an agile machine.

dm319• 3 years ago

There's no doubt that this artist has lost something as a result of AI (the pleasure and enjoyment of their job). But we should also ask if we are at risk of losing something as a society.

iamphilrae3• 3 years ago

The rise of website builders like Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify has drastically changed the web design and development industry. As a co-founder and lead developer of a small design/development team, I loved my job and was passionate about creating beautiful and functional websites. However, as more and more clients turned to these DIY platforms, I found it increasingly difficult to justify our higher prices. While our work was more sophisticated and better optimized for SEO, clients often didn't see the value in paying £10,000 or more for it.

Ultimately, I realized that our trade had become commoditized, and I made the difficult decision to sell the business and move on. I transitioned to a new role as a Product Manager, and over the years, I've climbed the ranks to become a CTO at a scaling startup. Although I miss the thrill of being a developer and creating websites from scratch, I've found new challenges and fulfillment in my current position.

If you're facing a similar situation, I'd suggest exploring other avenues to keep your passion for development alive. Consider taking on side projects as a hobby, collaborating with industry friends to start an indie project, or even teaching others about web development. Just be sure to carefully review any non-compete agreements with your current employer before pursuing any new ventures. Remember, although your job may have changed, your passion for creating great websites can still thrive in new ways.

pdc56• 3 years ago

Curious - on a scale out of 10, how much of that was written by ChatGPT?

No offense intended - if the answer is zero, my apologies

precompute4• 3 years ago

I don't think it was written by a LLM, the words have a warmth that generated text lacks.

Plus you can tell it's written as if it's half-spoken.

lisp-pornstar• 3 years ago

30%, take your bets

PartiallyTyped• 3 years ago

Imho 9:1 written entirely by human.

have_faith• 3 years ago

I’ve noticed a large amount of responses from chatgpt start the second/third paragraph with “however, “ or a similar adverb. It will always strive to provide a “balanced” view, even on heavily one sided subjects.

savef2• 3 years ago

https://openai-openai-detector.hf.space/

Using this tool on the comment yields a 77.6% fake score. To give (pretty limited) contrast, a response from ChatGPT gives 99.9% fake, and another comment from this thread gives 0.1% fake.

I assume that means the comment text was GPT-assisted, with some moderate editing from a human.

lamontcg• 3 years ago

I wonder how much of the original reddit post was written by ChatGPT, it seems to tick a lot of boxes.

iamphilrae3• 3 years ago

100% truthfully, I wrote it all myself, but tweaked the opening paragraph with ChatGPT to improve my grammar slightly. It’s a great tool, and one that should not be dismissed, just like spell checkers and the grammar checkers of old in the likes on MS Word. Maybe it does come across a bit ChatGPT-like which is unfortunate I suppose.

As for the suggestions of me asking it to write the comment from prompts, then I’m afraid that’s 100% wrong.

prawn2• 3 years ago

It's not just that the budgets are harder to justify; it's also that prospective clients consider themselves to be experts. Having your judgement and expertise consistently overruled is disheartening and you often end up just following instructions, sapping any joy from the (diminishing and cheaper) role.

I started my web business 25 years ago. 5ish years ago I started photographing and filming travel content, primarily with a drone. More fun, more interesting, better feedback, etc. When building my own web projects though, I still love it.

echelon• 3 years ago

No. It's that the job to be done is to sell product.

Not build a handcrafted website. Not build a beautiful website.

Provide something that markets and sells something to customers.

And with that perspective, the client really does know better.

The web is ephemeral. Will it even still exist in twenty five years after AI provides all the answers and connections (all we use the web for anyway)?

jrochkind15• 3 years ago

I think the effect on the job market of (things like) midjourney is much more drastic and steeply immediate than that historical example (not sure if it's a true story or hypothetical? not sure if it was written by chat-gpt?).

I mean, I'm sure many developers over the years have found their jobs disappear, and many contracting companies have gone out of business due to changed market. But at least through now, even with the layoffs, jobs developing websites are still plentiful. (Perhaps that won't be true in the future, sure).

I feel like OP is probably right that they are going to have a lot of trouble getting a job creating 3D art, that the job market has _drastically_ shrunken almost overnight, beyond the effect that wix/squarespace/etc had. (Although of course even in your example, it's a shrunken market)

But maybe I'm not correct?

iamphilrae3• 3 years ago

All I was really getting at was that it sapped the love (and money) out of the job, like the OP was suggesting for them and Midjourney. Once your art/talent has become something that either the common person or a machine can do, your only option as a career is to move on and diversify. It’s unfortunate, but has been happening for decades in all industries. Anyway, just sharing my experience of it happening to me.

devoutsalsa• 3 years ago

Is it common to use website builders like SquareSpace with a backend API?

flerovium• 3 years ago

This feels different because we engineers are being eaten by our own young, but an artist never wanted or bargained for it.

Programming is fun, but humanity has always existed with art. We are slowly crushing something that is good and important.

Netcob• 3 years ago

I wanted to create form In 3D space, sculpt, create. With my own creativity. With my own hands.

I think this is difficult to get over within a few years, let alone overnight. I can sympathize as a programmer - only very recently did I notice that I can finally implement a feature or create a new program and have it work on the first try. That took years of practice (for me at least) and I feel like I've really learned a "craft".

On the other hand, as a kid I first got into programming because I wanted to create computer games. And the only time when I actually did that consistently was before I knew any programming languages, just point-and-click tools specifically made for creating games. I eventually studied CS, on my way to making games got sidetracked by learning OpenGL and graphics programming, interned at a gamedev company where I did more graphics programming and learned that this is not the industry for me even though (or maybe because) I love games. Now I've been doing backend programming for a few years where I've been way more concerned with data and architectures than I am with what it's actually for.

I feel bad for people who love the process more than they love achieving a goal. Sometimes I really love coding, solving little challenges, optimizing something, the feeling of having build something basically by meticulously translating an idea into something a computer can understand in every detail. But sometimes it gets really boring. Writing yet another REST controller. Copying and mapping the same data object. Handling errors. It feels like I'm solving the same problem over and over and over again.

Then I think about what I would be doing if I didn't feel like it was too much work to make it happen. I have an idea for a game that's currently impossible to do unless you have a team or at least one extremely experienced and multi-talented game developer with no job. I have several ideas for web services that I could figure out, but don't have time for. Finally at my job, my team currently has absolutely no way of properly dealing with a decade of technical debt.

With AI, I can see myself actually making these things happen, as long as I'm willing to give up some control over how it's done.

Which comes with a little bit of alienation, unfortunately. Maybe that's how older programmers felt when switching from punch cards to assembly, from assembly to compiled languages, and from those to interpreted languages. Obviously the step to AI will be bigger than that. Same with artists: I'm sure many people were discouraged by not holding a brush anymore, or molding something with their hands. Some just love the process of bringing an idea into existence, others just want it to happen by any means necessary.

Personally, my way of dealing with this will be focusing on seeing technology as a means to an end again, which it always has been. Falling in love with a specific tool is not a good idea in an era where changes happen faster literally every day.

throwawayasz• 3 years ago

I hated mine and eventually quit working for life because of a stupid CEO and inexperienced coworkers. Copy and paste what everyone was good at over there.

Luckily i could afford to retire early. I feel sorry for those who got stuck in jobs

vermooten• 3 years ago

I remember the 90s when manual typesetting and page layout was replaced with Quark Xpress, and when analogue phot retouching was replaced with Photoshop. Lots of highly skilled people suddenly out of work - the ones who didn't retrain to use the new tech. Wasn't overnight but felt like a revolution. Then of course magazine publishing lost out to the internet.

I would love to spend my days making stained glass windows, or as a dry stone-wall builder in the Yorkshire Dales. TS, there's no way to make a living in either.

jeppester2• 3 years ago

This very well sums up the anxiety I have about how this is going to affect programming.

That any creativity and understanding will be sucked out and replaced with prompt engineering.

I still think you will have to be a good developer to understand if the solution you get is good, but is that even going to matter when you can just ask again and try again? I think there will be lots of code bases that no-one really understands, but that it won't matter much.

All of this is powered by work done by real programmers who are not getting a dime for their effort. That just seems completely unfair to me, and even more so when already insanely rich corporations like MS only stand to gain from it.

I'm not sure I want to be part of it to be honest. It feels dirty and wrong as it works now. Laws might be able to change that, but with a whole industry of giant corporations ready to fight any such laws, I'm not optimistic.

mattlondon2• 3 years ago

It will probably end up being more "test driven development"-like.

Write your tests/expectations and the tooling automatically prompts/writes the code to meet the tests.

code_witch_sam2• 3 years ago

why not have a system to write the tests as well?

Trasmatta• 3 years ago

That sounds pretty miserable, because test writing is one of the least fun aspects of my job

rhn_mk12• 3 years ago

I agree with the loss of understanding being a bad thing, but I cannot mourn the loss of creativity.

Programming is a core part of our society and infrastructure, yet it's still one like a craft rather than engineering. Creativity should not be part of infrastructure efforts on a level beyond embellishments and experiments.

krona• 3 years ago

Creativity should not be part of infrastructure efforts on a level beyond embellishments and experiments.

You could say the same about architecture, but only modern architects think that way, because they were brainwashed by fashion.

iLoveOncall2• 3 years ago

prompt engineering

Sounds like coding to me.

ben_w6• 3 years ago

Not from my current experience.

I'm intending to try it out a lot more — perhaps turn my old Java/OpenGL desktop shareware games into browser based JavaScript freeware — but so far, it's like messaging a junior dev and having them write code for you: 98% of the code works fine, 2% is total rubbish that you spend a normal amount of time (i.e. ages) debugging.

Applejinx6• 3 years ago

A lot of what we do as programmers, writers or artists IS 'prompt engineering'. All that AI is replacing (generalizing? automating?) is execution. Prompt engineering is the 'what' of the 'how'.

"They should have sent a poet"- not NASA, but a screenplay written by some sort of poet.

If there's a singularity it will be in this: you speak of real programmers doing the work to make this AI, but it seems like a hell of a lot of this 'real programmer work' is not poetry. Someone put together the ideas that make code resonate with how people think (for good or ill) and then a lot of real programmers groveled over tedious Python code or whatever, to make it happen at scale.

That tedious groveling and scale is what took the effort, but it's that which can be replaced by machine learning.

Art is prompt engineering. 'Always has been'. We don't master penmanship in the age of the keyboard. People still buy very expensive pens and write in longhand for the beauty of it, but it ceased to be a requisite chore many years ago.

Value the correct side of the balance. If you can't beat the guy with poorer execution by having a better eye and better prompt-imagining, you're not the better artist, you just have better penmanship.

Same for programmers. Best put your effort into trying to understand… because that's going to be a seller's market. You're right that most people won't keep up with understanding, and that's going to directly set their value.

vasili1112• 3 years ago

Good points. Understanding what and how it really works will be valueble.

Explaining the AI needs the knowledge of what can be done. For example, you cannot say AI "build systems that process the data". You need to explain AI what "kind of processing should be done". That by itself requires knowledge of what kind of processing exist and when to use which. Also, explaining to AI what should be done takes time and effort which should not be underestimated. Sometimes when I am exlaining someone which way data should be cleaned in many cases I think that it maybe faster to do it by myself and explainig to AI will most likly be a harder than to AI. So, the question about is it easier to implement by myself than explain what I need to AI is a valid and important question.

Also, with data important part even without AI is to verify how well system works. Does it correctly handles differents types of data and different use cases? Just having a system that processes data but you are not sure what output can be is in most cases useleless data system.

So, in any serious data systems understanding of what they can be done and how code and data systems are working are important and I think will become even more important than now.

Also, someone needs to creat AI and systems around them.

JanneVee3• 3 years ago

I still think you will have to be a good developer to understand if the solution you get is good, but is that even going to matter when you can just ask again and try again? I think there will be lots of code bases that no-one really understands, but that it won't matter much.

Really? If you have a million dollar bug because of one edge case and you are going to go to your AI and ask it to try again?

jeppester2• 3 years ago

I think that's going to be a very likely scenario. And the AI will very likely be able to fix the issue.

I just don't want to work that way, as what I enjoy most about programming is understanding things.

autophagian• 3 years ago

I've had experience lately of getting GPT4 to output some code, I notice there's a bug, I point out the bug (not even 'it's at this line with this variable', but just that it exists) and, yes, it does fix successfully fix it. So, yes, I think that's likely.

grumbel2• 3 years ago

Even prompt engineering is just a short term problem, that'll get solved and largely disappear within a couple of years, if not months. Making sense of natural language is after all what LLM are already really good at, they just haven't made their way into image generators yet.

Another big issue that gets overlooked is that a lot of the problems that programming is used to solve today will disappear and no longer be considered problems to begin with. A whole lot of data conversion is no longer necessary when you have an AI that can directly interface with the raw data and manipulate it in whatever format you like.

People today are thinking of ChatGPT as making it easier to build websites, software and such, but real the power of AI is that it makes all of that obsolete. Why bother browsing the Web when ChatGPT can just give you what you are looking for in whatever format you desire, without ever touching a website?

AI is not just going to write software, AI is going to be the only software you'll ever need. BingChat today is already Photoshop, Shell and Webbrowser all in one. Won't be long until it learns to do most of the rest as well.

The interesting question is: What will be left after all this? If we automate away all the boring parts, what are going to be the bits that provide value? How will the Website of the future look like when AI will be the only one reading them? What's the value of a classic book when AI can write new books in real time? Will anybody bother with video games when they have a Holodeck at home?

quonn5• 3 years ago

People today are thinking of ChatGPT as making it easier to build websites, software and such, but real the power of AI is that it makes all of that obsolete. Why bother browsing the Web when ChatGPT can just give you what you are looking for in whatever format you desire, without ever touching a website?

I don‘t think it will play out like this. Companies currently build systems to make the data robust/structured, to enforce a business process etc. Since they do not believe in answers any individual would give out of the unstructured data, they would also not trust an AI, and rightfully so. ChatGPT is not trustworthy at all and there is currently no path to make it so.

tkiolp42• 3 years ago

I think that’s a simplistic view. Sure thing AI will make a bunch of problems disappear… but do you really think that with all the power of AI, we are going to keep publishing react apps? Golang web servers? Rest APIs? No. We’ll be publishing more sophisticated stuff. And no, AI simply cannot magically do everything (AI today is not the AI we will have in 100 years… unless you think the AI of today is the most we can get from AI)… so in between we (humans) will be working to use AI tooling to fulfill user requirements.

ModernMech4• 3 years ago

People thought the same about OOP when it was new. The promise was that programming would turn more into factory work. You’d get a spec for a component, implement it, then move onto the next. How soul crushing!

mattlondon2• 3 years ago

I feel like we are at a bit of an industrial revolution type stage here - lots of old jobs that were previously done by hand (spinning yarn, weaving, making bricks etc) are about to be industrialised and automated. I don't think it will happen overnight, but perhaps a decade or two and a lot of jobs/industries will be irrevocably changed.

I am surprisingly sanguine about it. I think there will always be a need to understand what needs to be built, even if it is the AI that is actually coding it up. SWEs will probably end up in more of a supervisory role, responsible for ensuring that the requirements are suitable for automated code generation. Think TDD, but with AI writing the non-code bits.

Interesting times.

ajani• 3 years ago

Making art of any form is about you, not about the art. When you learn to paint well you are creating you, the piece is just a side effect. Getting good at something affects the way you see the world. It creates meaning in you.

The one sided focus on the finished piece is the outcome of our culture valuing the art more than the creation of the artist. (The creation of you, not your creation.)

erikstarck• 3 years ago

Probably for all the unimportant NPCs running around in a game, AI does a good enough job. But for the main characters and the plot, I suspect a human touch is still needed. Climb up the value chain. If you're cranking out monsters in volume, you're at the bottom.

thuuuomas• 3 years ago

I suspect a human touch is still needed

This is the motivated reasoning of a comfortable person.

AI will eat the Protagonist Jobs too, sooner rather than later.

jongjong• 3 years ago

That's the risk of participating in a completely new industry... You don't know how long it's going to last; it has no track record. It reminds me of my own career as a software developer. I self-taught myself coding since I was 14 in 2004. I'm from a relatively small town and nobody in my family had a tech background or even knew anyone with a tech background. So it was quite a stretch/unlikely for me to become a developer. I would spent my lunch breaks in the school library; sometimes coding by myself on library computers. My dad thought I was wasting my time. Back then, the only people making any money in tech in my town were developing websites for local businesses and it wasn't very profitable. My dad wanted me to be a lawyer.

I feel like I did many things right; I got into web development early (while most of the jobs were still for programming for desktop PCs), I was an early adopter of Node.js, I went to university and did a course on AI/Machine learning. I launched a popular open source project. But somehow it never worked out for me financially; I was never accepted into any fast-growing company, my popular project was big among startups but didn't gain enough traction in the corporate sphere (where it could have been monetized). Now AI is threatening the entire profession.

I think my dad was right, I should have been a lawyer and done software development as a hobby.

The only silver lining that I cling onto is that my main interest has been software architecture and higher level systems/infrastructure thinking. So far, AI hasn't shown itself to be able to effectively solve higher level software architecture/design problems. It's great at answering questions, but not at asking (the right) questions which is what software architecture is about.

lucidguppy• 3 years ago

Didn't software replace a huge chunk of billable hours?

elforce0029• 3 years ago

The discussion is creating 3 groups: First group is sure AI will be an enabler and it won't replace them; The second group is saying AI won't replace them at least in the near future (1~10 years); Then we have the third group, which is basically the sentiment the op is living rn: AI is taking away their hopes, dreams, and livelihood.

Now, I think we'll see the strongest counterculture in human history against AI and the biggest social unrest to date. I'm talking about massive protests , massive regulations, etc... just because no one, specially the government, is prepared for what's coming.

habibur• 3 years ago

And then industrial revolution didn't take out jobs, rather created more. So did computers in the 80s and 90s.

I remember typesetters in our locality were protesting in the 80s that computers were taking off their jobs. They started something like "burn the computers" movement.

More people were later employed as composers than there were typesetters.

TeMPOraL4• 3 years ago

Those typesetters were likely right, tho. Sure, Industrial Revolution and computer revolution ended up creating more jobs than they took out - but what everyone conveniently doesn't mention is, those new jobs went to different people.

These kinds of transitions are large scale wealth redistribution. Your random typesetter 20 years into their career, with experience, good pay, and whole life built around economic conditions they spent those decades working hard to achieve, is not going to jump into a role of senior offset printer specialist, or DTP team manager. They're going to become a junior designer at best, most likely fall out of industry and into a junior whatever role. With commensurate drop in salary.

If you're over 30, imagine dropping down to whatever you earned when you were 20, and tell me that people protesting automation don't have an argument. And remember: it's only your career that resets; your health and obligations and remaining years to live do not.

Xenoamorphous• 3 years ago

Sure, as a whole the industrial revolution might have created more jobs. But what about individuals? Are we expecting some dude in his fifties whose job is going to be taken away by AI to switch careers just like that? That stuff is hard enough when someone is in their thirties. And in my country the unemployment rate is already 13%, there’s hundreds of candidates for any decent job opening.

AmericanChopper6• 3 years ago

Ludditism has been around since at least the 18th century, probably much longer than that, and that’s exactly what this is. It’s not even the hyperbolic “grandpa doesn’t like iPads” type of ludditism, it’s the literal raging against technological innovation because you’re scared it’s going to take your job type of ludditism.

The guy in the OP didn’t even have his job taken, he just had to use a new tool that made his work far more efficient.

grumbel2• 3 years ago

And then industrial revolution didn't take out jobs

It absolutely did take jobs. It's just that the job loss in one area was compensated by the growth in other areas.

However hoping that it'll be the same with AI is incredible naive. The job shift in the industrial revolution was possible since there were still lots of tasks left that the machines couldn't do. The areas that can't be done by a machine now are dramatically shrinking with advanced AI. There is not much area left where jobs can shift too.

The creative jobs can be automated just the same as everything dealing with digital data. Skilled trades, carpenter, plumbers and electricians might still be safe for some years, as robots still struggle with climbing a ladder or even just stairs, but those are areas that don't seem to be destined for rapid growth. Whatever new job you can think of, will probably be automated away before a human ever get a chance to touch it.

The most impressive part with ChatGPT and friends after all isn't just that they are reasonably good at what they are doing, but how universal they are. ChatGPT didn't need to be meticulously programmed to do the things it does, it learned most of that by itself just from the data feed into it. Meaning there really isn't any domain that you can't automate with AI in the long run.

What's left for humans? No idea.

kajaktum• 3 years ago

Created more jobs, sure but what kind of jobs? More complicated, mind draining jobs that many, many people are simply not capable of. The general human intelligent cannot catch up with the rate that the market is asking for.

Macha• 3 years ago

Industrial revolution cities were famously a meat grinder though. Disease, poor quality accomodation, reckless safety considerations in early factories meant a lot of those displaced from rural artisan jobs to work in the cities literally died as a result.

Many of the new jobs' employees were from population growth, people that lived in the countryside thanks to the growth in food production that otherwise wouldn't have, then moved to the cities, etc, as sanitation improved a general fall in the death rate prior to the fall in the birth rate (but later than the initial migration to cities).

Nor was the city standard of living equivalent as people move from rural households (admittedly often multi generational ones, so more crowded than modern ones) to overcrowded tenements.

So the story people gloss over is that all the rural cobblers went to the city and became factory workers and everything is fine. But while it might be a reassuring story that _society_ survives and evolves, it's not at all clear that individuals did as well.

iainctduncan• 3 years ago

The fact that one change produced a given result is no guarantee that a different change will have the same effect.

lowbloodsugar6• 3 years ago

And then industrial revolution didn't take out jobs, rather created more.

This is your thinking: "Because all previous technological revolutions created more jobs, it follows that the AI technological revolution will create more jobs."

However there is an obvious difference between all previous revolutions and this one: previous revolutions replaced labor. The AI revolution replaces thought. Even the computer revolution replaced labor, such as "typing things onto paper" or "updating a ledger".

For me, the whole ChatGPT debacle just showed me that 99% (or 100%) of humans are, themselves, just autocompletion generators, with the training model being a religious text, a political manifesto or propaganda masquerading as a school system.

amelius3• 3 years ago

Well, I can tell you that the first time I see some sufficiently advanced AI walking in the streets between the public, I will grab my baseball bat and smash it to pieces.

number6• 3 years ago

AIs should have human rights, if we are able to upload our us into computer we need a precedence that post humans are humans too.

boplicity• 3 years ago

Yeah, but what if it's just a little canister scrubbing public toilets,trash cans, or something similar. Do you really want to destroy that? Will you even realize what you're seeing?

ben_w6• 3 years ago

I find it curious that even here there are people who conflate a robot body with an artificial mind.

Sure, you can put the computer running the mind that controls the body into the body itself, and there might even be good reasons to given spotty wifi or mobile data, but you don't have to.

Also: why embody them in human form at all?

https://www.tesla.com/drive

https://www.bostondynamics.com/products/spot

https://www.parrot.com/us/partner-ecosystem (FWIW I've never heard of these before, I just searched for AI drones…)

codpiece• 3 years ago

You won't be able to. The aerial drones will take you out long before you reach for the bat.

elforce0029• 3 years ago

You know what's interesting: Your take is somewhat similar to a part of animatrix and even crazier is that I'll vouch for you just because of the sense of tribalism within me, hehe.

cmrdporcupine2• 3 years ago

My concern is around the class/income composition of the groups specifically in your group 3, and what kind of political forces their disillusionment and anger unleashes.

There are maybe parallels here to the 20s and early 30s in Europe, an era when there was a similar mass disenfranchisement of professional middle classes ("petit bourgeois"), artisans, and specialists... a corresponding mass anger and disillusionment.

And it was in large part those people who formed the base of the rising authoritarian right-wing / fascist movements in Europe.

It's not the most working class people who will lose the most jobs. There's no AIs coming to take away people's jobs cleaning cafeteria trays and mopping floors. It's paradoxically more expensive to automate manual labour or jobs with a high physical component. Competent meatspace robotics are hard and expensive. For now.

Instead it's people like us, used to a higher-privilege lifestyle, who have withstood the wave of previous automation and de-skilling. We're very expensive. And the people signing our paycheques I'm sure are salivating at the opportunity to de-skill and automate us away.

I hope I'm wrong, but I fear what could happen politically.

philwelch2• 3 years ago

If you take one look at the demographics of developed countries, the reality is that we absolutely need to replace the majority of human labor in order to maintain any sustainable material standard of living. Old age entitlements are a ticking time bomb, with fewer workers in each generation to support the growing share of longer and longer lived retirees. You want social unrest, take a look at France, which is on fire at the moment because the government had the temerity to try and raise the legal retirement age to 64.

cmrdporcupine2• 3 years ago

Firstly, we are talking in this thread about intellectual, not physical labour. There's no AI or robot forthcoming that will replace (already brutally underpaid) personal support workers or nurses in nursing homes. Instead it's the higher paying or more satisfying intellectual, artisan, and creative work done by those senior's children that are on the chopping block.

Secondly, even if jobs are automated to support the aging population, the economic model we have doesn't facilitate this leading to an improved life. The incentives to automate in our market economy are strong, and produce amazing efficiencies. Unfortunately that incentive is to reduce labour costs, and there's always a period of unemployment and reskilling afterwards. And in places like the US, unemployment = no health care, among other insecurities.

And in the past a lucky few reskilled towards more intellectual, creative, or informational-managerial jobs. Turns out those will be easier to automate than we thought.

Building a robot is expensive. Automating a factory a huge capital investment.

But once the R&D phase is done, reproducing and distributing software is dirt cheap. Machine automation of intellectual tasks will happen far more rapidly and with more brutal results than factory automation ever has.

The Alvin Toffler fantasy of information age prosperity looks more preposterous every day.

somethingreen• 3 years ago

That's how I see it too. Big neo-luddite movement, anti-AI unions, "AI Free" labeling with corresponding certification, registries of AI users (and witch hunts of course), AIs being weaponized to destroy or corrupt other AIs.

AI providers need to be at the forefront of lobbying for reasonable AI control laws, or they are up for a rude awakening.

elforce0029• 3 years ago

The government needs to regulate ai & tech companies before you have 10x of what's happening in France.

lysecret• 3 years ago

Fascinating, this reminds me a lot of a conversation I had about 4 years ago with a translator, they were working at a translation company which just introduced AI. And their initial implementation of AI looked like this: We give you an initial translation and then you modify it. The thing is this turned the translator from a "creator" to an "editor" and they absolutely hated it. Back then, the power was in the hand of the labor (not the company) so the company actually modified it in a way such that it was completing and recommending things for you but gave you the control of the whole thing. This is much easier to imagine with text, but there might be a way to give people the creative control, even with these new tools.

drumhead• 3 years ago

It's like what happened to cinema musicians after sound on films was developed. They'll still need people like this but not as many. But then that's the nature of a technologically driven society, at any moment your job could be obsolete.

a_bonobo• 3 years ago

The thing is, we both were not at the same level, quality-wise. My work was always a tad better, in shape and texture, rendering… I always was very sure I wouldn’t loose my job, because I produce slightly better quality.

One thing I had to learn the hard way in programming: it doesn't matter how good my code is or how modern the framework is, what counts is results delivered to the customer. Any newbie can outperform me in that regard.

bradwood• 3 years ago

There is "art" and there is "design". It feels like OP might be confusing the two.

The latter is about creative expression within the confines of constraints like time, money, function, etc.

The former is not.

Doing graphic design work at a commercial enterprise is a creative endeavour constrained by commercial realities.

Perhaps the OP just needs to accept that he is working in the real world. They should probably find a creative outlet that is creating art in addition to their design day job.

fauxpause_• 3 years ago

I would be interested in hiring a 3D artist that uses mid journey to go fast. Where can I find such people?

jrochkind15• 3 years ago

The dominant opinion in this thread seems to be that OP has no reason to be sad that they can no longer get a job doing what they love, because... someone else will probably get a job doing something else instead?

doubtfuluser• 3 years ago

I think this is the curse but also the opportunity of AI.

OP can now do the same work they did before in just 2-3 days. Could they now open their own studio and offer services for many customers on their own instead of working for one company?

What will happen with indie games or indie software? Suddenly one person who is good at inventing ideas will be able to develop whole games, with music, graphics being generated by AI, coding heavily supported by AI (not _yet_ fully taken over), marketing, etc also supported by Ai. My hope is that this will result in a lot more new startups that will also create a lot more jobs. Maybe the ultimate losers will be big-corporations who can’t build these large models on their own and are unwilling to call external services for fear of their data, or who are simply too slow to adapt.

I often think that what is happening right now is actually a prototype example of what is described in the “innovator’s dilemma” disruption.

cuddlyogre2• 3 years ago

There is something to be said about how dangerous it is to offload your entire workflow to entities that you are competing with. Or have unpredictable morals.

Say you start relying on some AI to build all your applications or generate all of your art, or copy. What if you start developing something that competes with the business interests of the entity that owns the AI? At that point, that entity is incentivized to lock you out of their system, leaving you with a project that cannot be finished because no one in your organization knows how to develop that kind of project.

Or, say you are developing an application that helps some marginalized group or is working to expose some kind of corruption. But, as it turns out, the owner of the AI profits from that marginalization or corruption in some way. So they lock you out and blacklist you in some way.

When it is all said and done, AI will be owned and operated by the same people that own everything else in the tech industry - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple. Are you really content with only being allowed to express yourself in the way they deem appropriate?

ngngngng4• 3 years ago

There is something to be said about how dangerous it is to offload your entire workflow to entities that you are competing with. Or have unpredictable morals.

Yep, this is why I stopped using Github Copilot. But now we're at the point where if I don't use it I'm going to be far less productive than my coworkers. I'm forced to use this thing that I truly believe is going to take my job within 5-10 years max.

cuddlyogre2• 3 years ago

I just can't wrap my head around the time saving thing.

Do your coworkers really understand what it is that they are putting into the codebase? If not, that's terrifying and recipe for disaster.

If they do understand it, they have to be taking the time to review it to ensure is right. Which cannot save so much more time that it's worth the risk.

MacroChip• 3 years ago

The more specific the source you draw joy from is, the more precarious you have always been in life. This is not a judgement.

DubiousPusher• 3 years ago

Perhaps the most wrongly maligned group in the history of the world were the Luddites. A chaticature of the Luddites comes down to us. It is of a people who would deny progress which was obviously inevitable so that they didn't have to change. They are cast as inflexible, lazy, stupid, belligerent.

But when we read the speeches of the Luddite leaders, more than anything else they talk about "liberty". Luddites spoke and wrote about the dangers to their liberty created by wage pressure from power looms. But much more, they spoke and wrote about the danger to their liberty posed by moving away from handloom weaving in homes and small shops towards weaving with power looms in a factory system.

What they resisted more than anything was the destruction of their autonomy, their subjection to abusive floor managers and the grinding dullness of repetitive machine labor.

Programmers have been facing this down already for some time. As full-stack engineering, excellent automation tools and powerful APIs have proliferated, we don't often get to go deep into some problem. Algorithmic design and development, which is a huge pleasure of mine has faded to the background of gaining a shallow understanding of many technologies, plumbing them and futsing with their numerous configurations. AI is already accelerating this for my work and I am struggling to find it not dismal. It is no surprise that now that the tools exist to comoditize art, the work is following a similar trajectory.

AI should be a unifying event for tech labor. Not to resist it entirely but to ensure in whatever future develops that we have some say in how work can remain enriching and dignified alongside the growth of these tools.

I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

Related Stories