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
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
universal basic income is not sustainable in the same way minimum wage was not sustainable, looking as how even $15/hr isn't enough to cover rent basically anywhere where they actually pay $15/hr.
> looking as how even $15/hr isn't enough to cover rent basically anywhere where they actually pay $15/hr
That's a bit different problem. What UBI could do is let people migrate away from very expensive places because they would no longer fear they'll become destitute if they risk not being able to get a job in cheaper place.
Minimum wage is sustainable because it is usually set based on economic reality of each country to a value that affects just a small percentage of laborers.
Which scenario are you referring to? The one where everything is cheap because of ai or because the acidic oceans?
Various sea organisms rely on calcium carbonate for the formation of their shells and bones. If the water is too acidic there less calcium carbonate in the water…
Oh and what Im getting at is that things like food don’t necessarily have to be cheap because “ai” produces goods. Ecological collapse can make essentials expensive regardless of who produces the goods.
In theory yes, in practice that'd require some way to channel the profits from the tech back to society, which has proven tough nut to crack. Notoriously Keynes predicted 15 hour workweeks due the productivity improvements of 20th century. Well, the improvements happened but work weeks didn't get shorter
They got shorter in practice. Especially post-lockdowns lots of people are phoning it in to well paid jobs whilst working from home with Netflix on, taking long lunches, playing with the kids and then doing unchallenging work like meetings with other people who are also phoning it in. Yes they "work" 40 hours a week in theory but this sort of work would have seemed completely alien to someone in Keynes' era.
Another thing to note is the length of retirement has increased significantly since Keynes' time. So if you look at a person's whole life, the amount of time at work certainly has decreased.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
If you don’t like the taste of the people who want to pay for art I suggest doing what is traditional and either (a) paying for it yourself, or (b) taking over or setting up the government funding for artists so that people who share your taste are in control.
They do if they lose their jobs. Art isn't something you must buy. I like to buy art, but if I lost my job, it's one of the first things I'll be cutting back on. And the less people are buying, the more the remaining artists have to charge to keep being able to afford to do art, which just spirals more people out of the buyers market.
If we can have an infinite variation of personalized stock photos, I'm betting that the "good enough" side will win.
I'm still not scared about my job since I provide specific solutions (C++ architectures) that an AI cannot produce (yet), but it's worrying for everyone and every kind of job at the same time.
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.
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!"
as a hobby music producer, this thing make me sick :)
actually I think this problem started earlier, with many _musicians_ using pre made beats and auto tune. right now it just takes it to a whole other level.
music should be a tool of expression, not one to gain fame & social acceptance
There are still masses of people making music without “pre made beats and auto tune” they just don’t get played in places like the radio because the radio is mostly for sanitized stuff that appeals to mainstream trends. I don’t expect most of the artists I listen to because an AI can produce a generic trap beat or something. Of course, there may be more garbage to sift through.
> music should be a tool of expression, not one to gain fame & social acceptance
I don’t get it then why you care, let alone care enough to make you feel sick. Nobody is stopping you from using music as a tool of expression. You do you, yam in your basement or wherever you want. I bet that you will find like minded people who appreciate what you do, but even if not you yourself are saying “music should not be a tool to gain fame and social acceptance”.
I guess I over exaggerated due to fast typing.
it does not _make me sick_ I just don't understand the reason.
a bit of context:
I've been producing music for ~15 years now, purely as a hobby (due to incompetence on my part to up a level).
I have friends which I helped and collaborated with for years on and off,
and some of them seem to me like they are stuck in a loop of wanting to succeed without actually expressing themselves. they seem to be stuck in the mode of _this is how it's done, and this is what I want and anything else is incorrect_.
even when there are many other options to make it sound better and make it richer.
so correction: what makes me _sick_ is the fact that some people try to copy other successful musicians without even considering doing something original, purely because they want the same level of _fame and success_.
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.
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!
> 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.
> 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.
The scary part to me is that there’s scant evidence that a post-scarcity society will be allowed to develop. It seems more likely that those at the top will reap the entirety of the fruits of productivity gains enabled by employing AI, much as they’ve been doing for the more incremental (but still massive) productivity gains of the past several decades. Very little of the pie will be shared with the working class.
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.
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
>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.
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.
> 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
If I just wanted results, I'm sure I could have. I just thought it was interesting to see if this more abstract description would map to results that would be considered impressionism.
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?
> The point is you knew to use "impressionist" as a concept.
I could have surfaced, or learned about it 20 seconds earlier from a different ChatGPT conversation (throwing vaguely related questions at GPT[1]), or something as old fashioned as a search engine. Maybe turning up the "novel" kernels of information that you won't get from LLMs without knowing to ask will be its own thing in the future. A few Pinterests for prompts are already out there if I'm not mistaken.
>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.
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.
I’m saying that people extrapolating this to the full spectrum of artists (both on HN and the Blender Reddit) are missing the context.
I already acknowledged that the people at this low end of the spectrum are vulnerable because they’re basically just used to churn stuff out, without any value for their work.
The point is, this persons job has always been one level of automation or efficiency away from being just an operator. If it’s not generative art, it’s other forms of automation or outsourcing or some new high school dropout who’s good enough.
Midjourney here is a symptom not a cause. Though it’ll be a symptom that’ll affect the most vulnerable roles: the people who are largely just a factory operator
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.
The tragedy of the author of the post is that they expected that the product of their work would be treated like art, but it turned out their boss had different vision.
Nothing of value have been lost, because the artistic value of author's work has never been actually appreciated in the first place - but they tricked themselves into thinking it has (because of paycheck I guess).
What do you mean by this? The author seems good at what they do, seems to love their craft and enjoys their work.
The tragedy here is that AI doesn't need to be better than humans (at least in many cases like art, writing etc). It just needs to be "good enough", maybe 80% as good as a human. Since humans can't compete with software on speed or cost, they are gonna lose.
How exactly can the author improve to a higher standard here, assuming they want to continue doing what they love, and not change careers?
They could learn a skill that complements their artistry, go 100% with their visions, and sell whatever product comes out of that. The world still desperately needs art and most of what is out there, even stuff made by humans, is usually incredibly uninspired. Just like how the first time getting fired is usually a blessing in disguise, so is this.
A person had a job they liked. It was turning a crank to make content but they enjoyed the act of turning the crank.
Now the parts of turning the crank they enjoyed are gone. And their job is a shitty, demoralizing drag.
Is that of no value in your world? Have you never weighed jobs based on whether one sounded like more fun than another, along with other considerations like how much money it would make? Has nobody you've known ever made an employment choice based in that?
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
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.
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.
For sure. I recommend anyone in business for themselves productize and build moats.
I still work about the same hours, though. AI has just raised the level of abstraction. Less time is spent on looking up specific syntax and more on reviewing, iterating, testing, architecting.
Today yeah, but tomorrow the clients can use GPT 7 consultant who has better context with access to all the mails/data of the client. It is fast/cheap and is a polymath.
I don’t understand why people see this future as guaranteed, just because GPT4 was a great improvement on 3.5 does not imply this approach will continue accelerating at this rate. I am not saying it definitely won’t happen but I find the confidence that it will pretty baffling.
It seems unlikely to me that this technology has plateaued. The gains have been exponential. It strikes me as prudent to at least consider its continued improvement a possibility and try to work out what that means for society. The best thing on the table so far is people lose jobs and business owners make more money. Some amount of that is unavoidable and maybe even beneficial, but too much of it is unsustainable. Better to have a plan and not need and all that.
I don’t take issue with considering continued improvement and largely agree with this, my issue is with all the proponents who speak about it as if it is guaranteed.
Why do you think such a world would have companies, governments or even money? We are way outside the horizon of predictability if LLMs reach AGI levels.
This has been said for years, first about robotics, now about AI. And today, most developed nations have trouble finding people to work because there's so much work that needs to be done.
The opposite is happening, yet it's still repeated.
Those are a tougher nut to crack because the entire road transportation infrastructure is designed for human drivers. Lots of so-called "wicked problems" that don't exist in the art world.
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.
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
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].
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
An acre of farmland costs $2000 in North Dakota. You need 5000 of them to make a living growing wheat, but an acre should be enough to feed a family, maybe a few more if you want meat.
Being a subsistence farmer is terrible though. There's a reason 99% of Americans stopped doing it just as soon as they were able to. It's certainly not a comfortable retirement!
Whenever somebody claims it would be easy to feed a family from some small farmland, it’s very clear that they’ve never had to live anywhere near that lifestyle. It’s terribly difficult and unpredictable.
I think growing a single crop is risky, makes it harder to be self-reliant. My girlfriend grows many different fruits and vegetables, so we’re less bothered by the price changes each season or year. And we can be sure our own food includes a lot of organic produce.
> 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...
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.
This is a solution that will work for a very small percentage of the people - those who were born in rich families and those who are a lot more driven and/or smarter and/or luckier than the average.
What about the other 99%? As they say a revolution is three missed meals away...
"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?
I don’t think huge wealth is needed, but it very much depends where you buy the land. Coastal land or land near big cities will be much more expensive than land in a remote village.
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.
Also foreigners can’t own land in Thailand, so while I hope the Swiss gentleman has many more years of happiness, it was never his garden, which might be a turnoff to the techno-libertarians out there.
My working definition of “foreigner” excludes Thai citizens, though maybe it’s more subtle than that: I didn’t know naturalized citizens were subject to ownership limits.
He has not, but has a wife and daughter. Possibly other kids. I did not get the impression from him that he was rich, but he did get lucky to buy a large plot of land for cheap due to:
A) living in a remote village
B) Currency conversion
The house itself was also pretty cheap, being a traditional Thai wooden house and not particularly huge.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One could argue that their art is also not theirs but it's based on the art they have seen before throughout their life. It makes you reflect on what's really 100% original, as the saying if you want to make an apple pie from scratch...
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
How do you know it won’t? I don’t mean to sound like a doomer , but I never see evidence for these claims around “AI not ever being creative like a human!”
These AI’s are literally trained on all of human creativity… i struggle to see how there’s any indication AI would fail to be as creative as a human in even the near-ish future.
They aren’t trained on all of human creativity. Most of human communication is verbal, and that still isn’t captured. I am not saying whether it will have much difference, just that your statement is factually wrong.
I used “all” instead of “most”, which is indeed inaccurate. A better response would have been “a collection of humanity’s creativity”.
However, you fail to recognize that OpenAI also created Whisper, which is a quote capable speech-to-text transcriber; and this tool easily converts audio and video (those verbal bits you mentioned) into text.
So the pool of creativity which OpenAI can train its models on is far larger than just original text; further, they demoed image modality a couple weeks back which would allow for VISUAL creative works to be parsed as well.
I understand your points, but what I wanted to highlight was something slightly different: verbal communication and dialogs should still consists of magnitude more human conversation than text, or presentation, or basically anything digital.
It's simpler even: there are conversations that are straight up never happen in writings. So by training only on written text, you will never got those conversations. For example: teacher - student conversation where one side is confused and need to be explained, or many kind of debates and discussions where there is no end conclusion.
Basically, pick a random human from the street and they would be talking and listening a lot more than they would be writing. Those talking and listening is never going to be captured by any digital system.
It might end up that written text has enough similarity with verbal communication that it doesn't matter anyway. But that's hard to guess as a priori that it would be the case.
Quite the opposite. AI will be better at learning "what surprises" humans than humans because it won't be filtered by a human going "oh, that wouldn't surprise me" (because you just thought of it, idiot). Now imagine a million, a billion "banksy" "surprise" pieces. This is the future.
And the future is now, of course, because there are tons of such artists and the value comes only from the elite who ascribe value and not some inherent value of the thing itself. Things are important ("worth money") because tasteless fucks with money say they are worth money. Go watch "The Menu". Ralph Fiennes face cooking the last meal says it all.
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.
that is technical minutia that will improve before artists relying on that hurdle saving their job have time to sign up for the dole
don't get me wrong, I have sympathy for everybody who for whatever reason sees their livelihood endangered overnight through no fault of their own and with little time to adapt
but I perceive a lot of denial:
- denial that "it could not/would not happen to me"
- denial that this rate of change is not rather unprecedented, "it was always thus" kind of denial
- denial that just because a certain niche won't be quickly automated, it follows that this job is safe or that a general reshaping of that general industry won't happen, changing the incentive structure massively
- denial that a second order effects may get you; so you can now automate some expensive part of your process? that also means the barrier of entry for the competition is lower and whatever competitive advantage you had in that process is now gone. Sure, embrace the efficiency but keep adapting because the only thing sure after those changes is that your industry will experience some "creative destruction"
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> "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."
>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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
I am not talking about GPT and LLM models. I have no opinion on those. I have an opinion on art because it's something I know intimately.
Art is a form of expression available to all, it's not just art for business or commission. That only the business side of art is being discussed is ignoring what art actually means. Not everything is business, and I loathe "time is money" kinda worldviews, honestly.
I'm already able to create excellent models of any subject I desire in 15-45 minutes, with remarkable quality aside from bad hands, and usable forever once trained, then how come I'm still drawing? (more than usual, in fact)
Understand that and you'll understand my argument.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Any time this argument gets trotted out it's using a baseline of European post-agrarian feudalism. There were definitely peoples in the past who enjoyed a high quality of life for many generations, but they tended to be small groups concentrated in areas of abundance, and were usually among the first to be exterminated by outsiders.
The fact that the industrial revolution created better life for most people doesn't prove an AI revolution will do the same.
The classical counter-example are horses - the industrial revolution increased the demand for horses, but once the cars became cheap horses numbers and jobs drastically decreased.
Agency is only half of the equation. The other half is opportunity. With Industrial Revolution, horses had neither. With AI revolution, people may retain agency, but I doubt there will be many opportunities available.
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.
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 ?
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.
Yeah, my theory is there will just be more shit to do, more startups, more tech, more than ever before. More ways to scale your business, spend your free time, yada yada yada.
Also most western countries have severely aging populations, there’s are big problem there which automation can help with, if it’s applied right.
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.
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.
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.
Companies are slow to move on things, but I think "video game concept artist" is done. An art director can now sit down in front of Midjourny and pump out years and years of a concept artists work in just an afternoon.
You are wrong, I have worked for many years as an artists and level builder in video games. Bioshock is the most famous game, and Void Bastards the most recent.
Could you instead use AI to reduce drudgery in your work, or to iterate faster between ideas until you settle on a final peace? What if you have something in mind that is hard to prompt for, or the tool just refuses to generate what you had in mind? I would try to lean into it as a tool to speed up some of the tedium, instead of fear it, if possible
I'm not in the camp that fears it, I think it will be an awesome tool and I can't wait to use it in my next game. I've been playing with Midjourny a lot already, but have been watching Stable Diffusion and the control net stuff closely as well.
I could see drawing a couple of characters and getting an AI to extend the style to more. Especially if you can give it feedback. But the idea that you could get years of concepts in an afternoon is silly. That's like saying I can generate hundreds of business plans using ChatGPT.
When electric sound amplification came along, it put most professional musicians out of business. Instead of an orchestra all you need is a band of 3 or 4.
Making music expanded though. In the sense that more people played, there was more variety, and indeed more professional musicians today than 100 years ago. (the bar for entry is also lower, and most are permantly broke - take that as you will.)
Some orchestras still exist. But they're pretty rare.
So yes, alot of job descriptions and job titles will change. Making indie games just got a lot easier. But where you see loss, many others see opportunity.
It’s nice that the barrier became lower but people still need jobs to afford food and rent. I doubt that UBI will come anytime soon so less jobs that pay enough is a serious issue.
Agreed. It feels like a lot of the people burning hard on AI seem to think that when the jobs are gone some benevolent benefactors (who exactly?) will decide to institute UBI for all because....why exactly?
It seems much more likely to me that all that will happen is there will be a lot more poor people...
it's not like "all jobs" will be taken by Robots and AI. That will be of little consolation though to modern-day buggy-whip-makers.
Jobs are a way of "adding value" to society. But over the last 120 years we've figured out how to add a Lot of value with minimal people. 95% of people used to grow food. Now it's like 2%.
People moved to factories, where today robots and automation rule. People moved to hi-tech, and leveraged that tech. Now AI is moving into that space.
In truth, we now create way, way, more value than we need. We need to figure out how to distribute the value created. Somehow I doubt that the US will be the leader here; things like UBI are too far against the "American Way".
When we see UBI emerge, in whatever form that takes (basically basic human needs met) it'll likely come from places that value community over individuality. Places that rate their success by their poor, not their rich. Places that celebrate achievements which don't require the exploitation of others.
I was just pointing out one job that I could see in my industry. I for one welcome the wealth of interesting new indies games with great looking graphics we'll soon see.
People will be able to take more risks and do more interesting projects. It will be awesome.
AI is opposite of human creation. Its definition of anti-creation. Its a spell that locks visual culture to year 2025. And it can only do this by illeagly stealing all the human work.
You don’t think we can make it come up with variations, and use people’s feedback on what’s interesting to figure out what new avenues are promising? It’s not that hard to do this sort of exploration, it’s not limited to just mimicking what it’s seen. If anything, I think we’ll see an increase in the pace of evolution of art as it becomes economical for normal people to get personalized art.
> Its a spell that locks visual culture to year 2025.
What a fantastic way of putting it.
I'm constantly reminded of _the Matrix_, with Agent Smith telling Neo that 1999 (the apparent year inside the Matrix) was the peak of human civilization.
First, of all, why it has to be "totally replaced"? It's enough for positions to be dramatically reduced, and most such "though workers" tasks getting done automatically, e.g. under the final supervision of much fewer people.
Second, why it has to be "thus far"? If it happens in 1 or 5 or 10 years does it disqualify it?
Because above you claimed it will "never take thought workers' jobs". Suddenly the goalposts moved so that it has to have happened "totally" and "thus far" to qualify as taking their jobs?
I'm witnessing engineers on my team and myself saving a lot of time in development and in operations (scripting).
I have no doubt in my mind it is reducing the need for more engineers and has probably already contributed to a reduction of them and I think it's just getting started.
Compilers and high-level languages assuredly reduced the number of engineers needed, right? No: we just started making much more complicated things and the basic level of "this isn't even a serviceable solution" has gone up so high that if you sat around and wrote a trivial program designed to be used over a teletype--which is got much easier as you can do it in C instead of assembly--you'd lose in the market to your competitors who are willing to put in the effort to build a modern fancy reactive single-page whatever's-hot-now web app.
The reality is that companies are going to continue allocating a similar percentage of their budget to tech that they were before, and what we DO might change a ton; but, frankly, I've been doing this now for decades, and the stuff I used to do 25 years ago (omg: a full quarter of a century of professional software development ;P) already often just isn't a thing anyone does anymore. Every time my job gets easier, the expectations for the products I architect also increase, because we're all in a rat race attempting to compete for the same customers to defend our margins.
Hell: I remember when the first step to deploying a new service--even if you were a company that only had a handful of people--was to attempt to predict how much capacity you needed and then buy a ton of parts so you'd be able to sit around and build machines for your server room to run your new product. I was involved in a project back in like, 1998/1999, for a company with all of maybe five people, and someone's job was just sitting around building the server room... that specific task is now a few lines of YAML configuration and a couple of accounts (AWS and Twilio <- back in the day, we had to have custom T1 lines brought in not for data but for bulk parallel phone service to hook up to the Dialogic boards we needed to simulate phone lines ;P).
The concept of cloud-computing entirely changed that part of the business--having a small handful of companies manage all the servers at scale and run numerous jobs on shared hardware, in some sense reducing the cost to the point where you can both outsource this and pay less--to the point where doing that almost sounds insane; and yet, I'm sure there are more people getting paid more to deploy and manage ever more virtualized servers in the cloud than there ever were people (including me!) literally screwing around with screwdrivers in the ubiquitous server rooms. You could argue that my job got "replaced", with all of the skills I had to deal with IRQ balancing and automated power backup systems being for naught... but, somehow, I'm apparently still relevant.
I'll also admit that I honestly kind of enjoyed doing that work?... and yet, I also was quite happy to never have to do it ever again. I'll never forget the day I took the first real-world server I was in charge of and just like, uploaded it to 1&1 where I had an early software-based hypervisor-like stack I was experimenting with (UML, aka User Mode Linux, which is no longer something people bother with due to the advent of Xen/KVM/etc.); it just worked and I was like "omg I'm never building another server again, am I? that was it: it's over". (It then turned out that I did build another complex hardware solution in 2016 to start doing work with GPUs, but there was only a small window of time there before cloud services caught up.)
So like, sure: at some point the AI is going to entirely replace what we do--not the specific frustrating coding tasks we do today, but the entire concept of our jobs--but, the issue at that point isn't going to be me figuring out what I'm going to do next to make ends meat... it is going to be that I'm not a serviceable warrior in the war against the machines as the world devolves into some kind of Terminator-inspired hellscape; because, if you can manage to do my job in its totality, then...
Would being the pet of an AI-run civilisation be so bad though? Iain M Banks's Culture novels explore basically this concept, and his vision of utopia is quite appealing.
I honestly don't like how we treat our pets (and especially so here in the United States). I keep imagining that the situation will end up feeling--at best--like this episode of (The New) Outer Limits. :(
Is Jernau Morat Gurgeh the Player of Games, or a mere pawn moved by Minds beyond his comprehension?
The Culture appeals to me, but there are literary critics who find even The Culture, let alone the grander environment beyond it, to be dystopian. And I definitely don't want to wake up dead with my mind in one of Joiler Veppers' simulations.
> companies are going to continue allocating a similar percentage of their budget to tech
I think your argument requires a paradigm shift like teletype -> web to soak up the new productivity. I don't think we have that today. For how many purposes have we reached peak consumer software capability? i.e. global reach to publish text, images, video and make purchases is the entire use case of most media and commerce businesses. If you gave every company double the amount of dev resources tomorrow, do they even have anything to build? Even for those with deep feature roadmaps, how much of that stuff is just nice-to-have things that won't move the revenue needle anyway?
Maybe we will get that new platform from AR or direct brain interfaces... but without it, the situation looks more like how the human role of "computer" just vanished... sure we then got programmers, but they weren't necessarily the same people.
> Suddenly the goalposts moved so that it has to have happened "totally" and "thus far" to qualify as taking their jobs?
I was asking a question. I don't think anyone can confidently quantify the effects of AI at this point so I was seeing if I was missing something. What I said is just some word vomit about what I'm seeing on the ground as an engineer. I'm happy to accept a refutation as we gather more concrete data. The reason I asked the question the way I did is because as I stated there is no doubt AI will impact our jobs, but I'm understandably more concerned about less jobs because of AI. I also have the experience of writing a lot of automation, and hearing this same style of rhetoric when we started doing that heavily. For all the scare around automation, it did end fact end up creating more jobs and typically made lives easier.
Jumping to "shifting goalposts" over that is pretty trash conversation.
I think Google has a weird pathological case maybe. So, I'm not sure I would use them as a forecast.
I think R&D is good in any company. Sure, the nature of R&D is that most of it is failure; that's just the way it is.
AI makes the R&D iteration shorter and cheaper, IMO. The more you try, the more likely you're to succeed (aside: I should listen to my own advice sometimes lol).
At some point, you saturate the market for whatever’s being produced and then prices drop and you have diminishing marginal returns for production so the economics of making more doesn’t make sense.
They did, and so did high-level languages, and not to mention the entire profession is first and foremost about automating other peoples' jobs away. Thing is, nobody is really tracking how improvements for software developers are replacing people, because this only manifests at slowing the absurdly high growth rate in this industry.
Yes they did, what are you thinking would have happened if all we had was assembly? To build any meaningful software you'd need armies of people and it'd take way longer and it wouldn't be as good.
You could say this about every efficiency improvement in any field ever. If everything still had to be written in C and we didn't have fancy IDEs and access to a vast ocean of libraries, cheap services doing the work for you and returning results over an API, etc., we would need many many many times over more software devs to have everything software based in the world that we do now.
But do you think if none of these things had changed, and everyone was still doing nearly everything themselves, with a limited subset of libraries in use, writing everything in C, we would have all of these applications, services, pieces of software, etc? That all of these viable businesses employing people would still exist?
I doubt it. And like the poster from the reddit link, a lot of software devs truly did enjoy a lot of that work that they did. I've talked to plenty of greybeards who will wax nostalgic over spending months writing things that a pip install and import solve in a few seconds now.
If we double the efficiency of a team, do we fire half of them? Or do we double the amount of products we're releasing? Or double the amount of features for one product?
I think we have far more software devs today because of the advent of higher level languages, large library selections available with package managers, feature-rich IDEs, etc.
Is this always the case, for every industry? Obviously not. There are a lot fewer people making furniture by hand today than there was before automated manufacturing, and any individual only needs so many chairs. But there is, of course, still demand for hand built furniture using traditional joinery techniques.
"Art" is a big space, and I don't think that the impact will be universal across every part of it. For games in specific, I think we'll see something more like the software development side - people will make more and more unique assets vs. reusing them, we'll see the artwork be more detailed and "populated" in general. We'll see more and more smaller studios putting out work with higher quality and more art assets. Same thing for other media-related positions. And the people who are reliably selling prints for people to hang on walls, collect, etc., I think are also likely quite safe. I think people relying on twitter/instagram/etc. commissions to draw people's D&D characters or anime waifu are likely in a lot of trouble.
Do you think it takes as many people to build whatever software you want today vs in the 80s? I agree more software can be built with the improvements, but per unit of functionality, way less people are needed, or they can do it much faster, which in both cases mean you spend less of your revenue on labor, which means "less jobs".
>which in both cases mean you spend less of your revenue on labor, which means "less jobs".
You can't view things in the void like this, though. Reducing the overall cost of doing something makes it viable for more businesses, which means more jobs. We have more jobs in software development overall now because of how much more productive it is today, which opens up so many more viable use cases for it. We have more CG artists for movies, games, etc. now in large part because more efficient workflows and more powerful software have increased productivity.
Will it be the same thing with generative AI? I think so, at least for the foreseeable future.
their point is simple: during the last 20-30 years we had efficiency improvements by orders of magnitude. Still we didn't have developers jobs reduction in any way. We evolved into doing more and more high-level and high-scale jobs. So no, -10% of time needed to build the same unit of functionality won't lead to -10% reduction of workforce. It will change the scope of said workforce.
I have seen at least one outsourced programming job slow down to the point where it’s effectively no longer outsourced. Previously there were two engineers working, and now there is one as the work isn’t needed anymore.
That in a very real way is a replaced job.
The remaining job is running large scale data loading for a startup and really now is just eyeballs to make sure errors are caught. No longer requires much skill either.
I think some degree of low end engineering work in the outsourcing world is at risk.
There are still professional, high quality hand knitters in the world.
Of course, having people hand knit garments used to be the only way to get a knitted garment at all.
Then we invented industrial knitting machines, and those hand knitters found their roles had changed. Instead of knitting a whole garment, they would be closing up the toe on the socks, or doing finishing work on a sweater. Of course, companies didn't need anywhere near as many knitters under this system, so a huge proportion of them lost their jobs.
Then the knitting machines got better. They could close the toes on the socks themselves, could do most of the finishing work automatically. Some of the remaining knitters became industrial knitting support workers, but most of the actual knitting jobs dried up.
But there are still professional, commercial hand knitters, even today! They test hand knitting patterns for the hobby market. Make the samples up for photographing, and make sure that all the sizes come out right.
They number... Dozens? Maybe? And most of them treat it as a side gig, despite being the absolute pinnacle of hand knitting talent, since it pays terribly.
A job doesn't have to have been totally replaced to be effectively replaced. As we find ways to hand over larger and larger pieces of the work to an automated system, the number of real roles in that field diminishes, until it eventually becomes infeasible as a career choice.
This is what a lot these digital content creation jobs are heading. Gradual obsolescence.
I hope they are right. But one thing that seems to be conflated in this debate is the comparison of AI with previous disruptions. The tools we have built before were taking some specific parts of the process and making it more productive. They were not trying to mimic human cognition in a way that can be applied to so many different processes at the same time.
>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.
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.
Instead of grinding away over a piece of code, I will get to talk to people more?
Doesn't sound like such a bad deal to me.
I get your point, of course. I just think communication can be like a craft, challenging and rewarding. I try to frame things positively, it helps me stay motivated at work.
I appreciate your attitude, and it is something we all have to pick-up eventually. When you pose it as "talk to more people", that does sound better. But I see it as a job with more pressure and tension, more politics, and less freedom to experiment.
Think about the average day of a manager/management consultant/VC (whose job it is to talk to people, make deals etc). I always looked at their careers and walked away thankful that a programmer career exists.
“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.
>> 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.
If you look at it from the bottom, then yes. SAP/Salesforce/IBM DB2/Oracle/OpenERP are ways for company departments to all work on one common set of data.
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.
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.
Oof. Firing isn't free, comrade. Reducing redundancy to a single point of failure has two major effects: the latency penalty becomes quadratic as workload scales, and if any person quits, you lose the whole team.
In general, creative roles like artists are the sum value of their education and experience, not just their measured output. If you don't possess art history vocabulary, you're going to be very limited in prompting or designing more advanced embeddings and LoRA or training models. I'm seeing this a lot right now - people don't want to share their prompts because they don't want everyone to know how much the model carried them and how little any actual "prompt engineering" went into it.
The smart thing for their boss to do would be to scale projects and have one of them focus on managing and filtering the new volume of assets. Since it sounds like they like working from scratch, even adding external time to "research tooling and methods" would probably keep them happy until they find the challenge in their new duties.
The majority of managers would jump at the opportunity to reduce their number of direct reports? Owners might want to cut salaries but managers want to increase direct reports.
> people don't want to share their prompts because they don't want everyone to know how much the model carried them and how little any actual "prompt engineering" went into it.
Right. Because this whole "prompt engineering" is just another job title, not an applied science, and then again, prompts can and will be automated away.
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.
>> 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.
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.
I agree with that sentiment, just a small correction:
It's not the rich who will decide; it's the powerful. In the classical sense of "capacity to impose will" – up to and including the capacity to turn off {machines, humans, institutions}.
There's a strong correlation between wealth and power, but those groups are not identical. And neither are their staying prospects in the coming years.
On seconds thoughts, interestingly, that difference between "wealth" and "power" also becomes relevant when quantifying your "most" in They can do without MOST of the "we".
Like, how many people do the wealthy/powerful actually need? What level of automation will allow maintaining their lifestyle, including:
1. Biological needs: Food & a sufficiently diverse pool of mates for themselves and their children.
2. A social hierarchy large enough to flex their power beyond mere biological survival (very important to primates). I'd expect this number to be strictly smaller than for 1), so likely not a concern: as long as there are enough people to biologically sustain a population, there are enough people to subjugate.
3. Technological scaffolding to produce, maintain and bootstrap (in case of calamities) said automation. Currently humans are a necessary physical substrate for the continued inflow of energy that automation needs. I don't have the numbers but the footprint to run even a single power plant must be tremendous: a large and complex society, once you include 2nd order effects. Without energy, the machines don't go "VRRROOM" and neither does AI.
And if the human population drops too low to interfere with any of these points, the automation was self-defeating. It doesn't matter how rich or powerful you were.
I mean, I'm sure someone somewhere ran the numbers and has a plan ready, while the rest of us wax lyrical about "just find a new job LOL" and UBI. Although to be fair, there are also preppers, who've taken the above analysis to its logical conclusion.
The true limit is item 2 on your list. Eventually AI can take care of the food production portion of 1 and most of item 3. The fact is that energy and secure storage are much less of a problem for AI and robots than people.
For population replacement, you can get by with a couple thousand people. That's really only about a dozen large tribes. If the tribes are kept suitably insular and antagonistic (with either ritualized external marriage or slave-taking to ensure proper genetic circulation) that society might even be stable. The trick would be keeping the population stable.
E.g. currently mostly the middle class pays for home improvements, which creates jobs for construction workers. Remove the middle class and there's a lot less demand for construction workers - so what are the IT people turned into construction workers going to do?
The low wages cannot go any lower. As it stands, poor workers in the US already don't make nearly enough to survive. They just keep increasing their debt until they either climb the ladder or die of an overdose or some other tragedy.
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.
We’re creating a new global average standard of living with disastrous consequences.
The poor areas rapidly gain wealth but at great cost to the environment and the whole thing is dependent on a never-ending fire hose of capital and tech transfers from the “wealthy” areas.
The wealthy areas, already unable to offer many citizens the ability to raise a family, are desperately engaging in extreme financialization, ludicrous political distractions, and “make work” shell games just to present an increasingly unconvincing veneer that society is still functioning and fully worthy of participation.
Western civilization is the metaphorical Biblical statue from Daniel: After spending decades replacing the support structures with ever cheaper materials, we’re now finally in the “feet of iron and clay” stage, and it’s likely AI will complete the metaphor by representing the boulder that smashes into the weakened base and topples the entire statue.
I realize this all sounds hilariously alarmist, but I have yet to see a positive spin on the impact of AI that isn’t ultimately the same old decoupled Pete Peterson style nonsense of “it’s gud because worker productivity number goes up”: as if we don’t already have two generations of human beings that grew up in an age of massively increased productivity yet cannot afford a family nor a home to put them in - a state of existence that even some medieval serfs would pity.
My weirdly accelerationist hope is that AI advances quickly enough (and management stays short-sighted enough) to cause a meaningful political coalition to form between the already-marginalized blue collar workers and the newly disrupted paper-pusher/cubicle class.
>> The poor areas rapidly gain wealth but at great cost to the environment and the whole thing is dependent on a never-ending fire hose of capital and tech transfers from the “wealthy” areas.
While I sympathize with your angst at the coming future, a future where the US isn't the highest, I see that for most of the world your prediction is both highly desirable, and inaccurate.
Firstly, let's dispel the great-cost-to-the-environment myth. The US has done, and continues to do great harm to the environment. Indeed many developing nations are skipping the harmful phase and embracing new tech like solar , better urban planning and so on.
Also, while it's fun to posit that thd globe depends on US capital, there's a bigger picture in play. TikTok is developed without western capital, suddenly its a surveillance risk (because Facebook and Google wouldn't spy on me).
Sure there's environmental cost to development, but complaining about the environment of others is a bit rich for the US (as it approves drilling in Alaska). The US accounts for 25% of global emissions, and about 5%ish of thd World population.
So yeah - you want your job yo be remote? Be careful what you wish for.
I agree with most of your comment but comparing Facebook or Google with Tiktok remains a classic "both sides" false equivalency that takes away from other valid points that you make. Yes, US social media companies too have to comply with government requests, which have at times been abused. No, the scale and impact that this has is in no way comparable to Chinese tech companies and their relation to the government.
There is an "easy" solution - a regulation that would remove copyright protection from AI-generated art, or perhaps even art that has an AI-generated output somewhere in the pipeline. Art could still be AI-generated for efficiency, but large studios would be forced to keep humans on a payroll for accountability.
I think the ones you are referring to are still capitalist as companies are owned by an elite "capitalist" and the workers have no say in their workplace.
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).
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.
The reality is that an artist in a mobile games company is hired for their technical skills, with very little creative freedom. The real artist is usually the art director or a similar position responsible for stylistic/creative/conceptual decisions.
If your job is mostly technical, be ready to re-learn and reshape your skills when your tool goes the way of cel animation. I personally had to do this at least three times in 25 years, not entirely from scratch of course, but I had to relearn the vast majority of my skills. And I think I'll need to do more of it to stay relevant. So to me it's pretty normal.
The work of a creative professional is to deliver meaning. If you can't separate this from your tools and are only able to enjoy one specific tool, you have to question yourself what you're doing in the field. (yes, I'm also being too cynical)
I personally had to do this at least three times in 25 years [...] So to me it's pretty normal
Very relatable, but it seems unwise to just consider it normal. If you find yourself having to retool 3 times within 25 months, you'll be well on the way to burning out.
25 years, not months; it wasn't that hard. It wasn't just retooling though - aerospace engineering to SE in gamedev, to the management in the unrelated creative area, to ML.
Yes, I know you said 25 years. I was trying to point out that with the accelerating technological capabilities, you could find that need to retool happening faster and faster.
You're not being cynical. You're being overly optimistic here about creative professionals.
The creative professional IS a target for replacement. What LLMs do best is specifically what the "creative professional" does. Better than coding or mathematics, LLMs excel at creative English text. This is because creative output is trivial when compared with technical skills.
I don't think the "creative professional" will get replaced though. Because usually the task is so trivial that positions like these largely only exist because of politics. You convince people around you and yourself that your "creativity" has no peer.
It amounts to this: I want a photo-realistic animation of a cowboy with blue skin with a laser cannon riding a unicycle through the grand canyon with a dwarf chasing him. <<This sentence is trivial to come up with, ANYONE can come up with thousands a variations and tweak the sentence in various ways. No special talent needed here.
A creative director simply comes up with high level instructions (like the one above) THEN the ultra hard part is making that high level instruction a reality. That is HARD and as of now it looks like both skills are being replaced by AI.
But like I said, the directors' position is in actuality largely political. Thus his position is safe even though the actuality of what he does is EASY and therefore a prime target for replacement.
> A creative director simply comes up with high level instructions (like the one above) THEN the ultra hard part is making that high level instruction a reality. That is HARD and as of now it looks like both skills are being replaced by AI.
This is the opposite of what I see in reality right now. The hard part is to make the artists do exactly what you want, down to the subtle but meaningful details. That happens because the high-level instructions don't have enough capacity to deliver the full meaning. This is the same with generative models: extremely hard to control with the "prompt engineering" gimmick, it's only fine when you are OK with random output. Besides, they are purely functional and lack feedback mechanisms the creative director usually employ with artists.
That's why people are trying to make techniques more complex - large animation houses experiment with training their own model architectures and software. This is the way 3D CGI was born - simple at first, and yes it got plenty of doomposting at first (we are getting replaced by computers!), until it was clear that the field becomes extremely technical and complex, so it even has dozens of specializations inside it.
All entertainment is ultimately based on novelty, as human brain is really good at distilling meaning from the ocean of information. If you start with little meaning (your example - "a cowboy with blue skin with a laser cannon riding a unicycle through the grand canyon with a dwarf chasing him"), people get bored - no matter how much randomized artsy-looking stuff you add around it.
If you think that AI can generate all meaning that is relevant to people, I don't buy it, as it doesn't have the same training material. It's trained on the result and is forced to reverse engineer what moves people; reverse engineering is a fundamentally more costly and opaque task.
Train the AI exclusively on well lauded texts. Then you can get a generative AI that moves people.
The problem with "reverse engineering people" is that you don't need to, the things they like in any era follows predictable and generic patterns. These patterns can be encoded into AI provided we find enough curated training data.
> The hard part is to make the artists do exactly what you want, down to the subtle but meaningful details.
This is because the artist can't read your mind. It has nothing to do with your skill or the artists skill level. That feedback loop you are alluding to is more a reflection of the unclarity of your instructions or your imagination.
You thought what you imagined looked good but the artist in following your directions created something that showed you how flawed your imagination was.
> The problem with "reverse engineering people" is that you don't need to, the things they like in any era follows predictable and generic patterns. These patterns can be encoded into AI provided we find enough curated training data.
That only works to a certain degree. For the infamous example, try making GPT output the correct number of asterisks, you will get mixed results. You don't have any problem with typing exactly 1589 asterisks because you run the stateful counting algorithm in your head. GPT has no idea about the algorithm - it has to reverse engineer it from the text, and can only extract the vague correspondence between a number and a string about this or that length. You don't give humans examples to reverse engineer, you teach them to count.
This is a simplest example, it might even learn to count eventually, as it's far more capable in certain aspects. But as the dimensionality of the task grows, the amount of resources and training data required to reverse engineer it grows much faster.
Sure, it can spot some patterns and that can look good, but some things are just plain invisible in the result - you will have a hard time making it learn higher level concepts because they highly depend on hardwired things like the dumber part of neural circuitry and biochemistry in humans, which the model doesn't have.
It's like trying to make a photo in a dark room - no matter how you improve the sensitivity of your camera, you might not have a single photon in it.
> This is because the artist can't read your mind.
Yes, this is what I mean by the limited capacity of a simple textual description. It's a fundamental limitation - natural language is just poorly suited for the detailed conceptualization. A sketch, or a conceptual diagram, or other higher order control methods have far more capacity to explain your intent, and that's the direction those models move to. At which point their usage is nothing like "type something simple and receive the result".
The asterisks thing is another issue. LLMs don't need to do this to replace directors.
>Yes, this is what I mean by the limited capacity of a simple textual description. It's a fundamental limitation - natural language is just poorly suited for the detailed conceptualization.
Except LLMs can accept sketches as input. The higher order methods of communication are covered by encoders.
I think you're conflating imagination and creativity with taste. Your example might be cute and funny, but as you yourself alluded: it's completely bland and tasteless. It's maybe good enough for a "meme dump" but that's all.
Maybe I'm not sure what point you're trying to make either?
All fiction writers suck? I don't know how much fiction you read, but it's incredible varied. There's a lot writers need to think about and control in the reader (and account for multiple profiles) outside of just an idea. But the ideas themselves need to be coherent.
Creative directors suck? It's incredible difficult being s creative director having to organise multiple people to perform coherently, and even much harder for whole teams.
I think it's natural for humans to reduce and simplify things we don't engage with every day, or our brains would be overloaded. So we just handwave it off. We do it to other people too unfortunately... Remember how complex your life (internal and external) is; other's lives are equally complex and nuanced.
>Creative directors suck? It's incredible difficult being s creative director having to organise multiple people to perform coherently, and even much harder for whole teams.
Difficult in terms of effort. Not difficult in terms of skill. Make no mistake the quality of a movie is more the sum of the quality of the parts then it is the creative director. Who wrote the script? Who did the digital effects? Who did the lighting? Who did the editing?
The director did the hard work of picking the people and issuing orders.
>I think it's natural for humans to reduce and simplify things we don't engage with every day, or our brains would be overloaded. So we just handwave it off. We do it to other people too unfortunately... Remember how complex your life (internal and external) is; other's lives are equally complex and nuanced.
Except I am more or less a director. Not one for movies but for a company.
There is a difference between handwaving something off versus being delusional about your own role within the world. Directing is hard work, management is hard work. But none of these things are skilled work.
>All fiction writers suck? I don't know how much fiction you read, but it's incredible varied. There's a lot writers need to think about and control in the reader (and account for multiple profiles) outside of just an idea. But the ideas themselves need to be coherent. own position.
It is certainly easier to create an entire space opera in writing then it is to do it via a movie. Writing is skilled work in terms of one skill only: your ability to write. Every other aspect of it is hard work but, unfortunately, unskilled work.
I realize there are complex plots, paradoxical stories and imaginative settings and the pacing of a story is important as well. But all of this doesn't really require skill just time and deep thought to come up with. Plenty of the most popular authors never had a writing background or talent.
I would say again that these director positions while in principle are easily replaceable they are not in practice due to politics. A director or CEO is where he is mainly due to politics. Politics is unfortunately a skill with aspects that not only need to be imitated by AI but imitated by robotics as well, and it's simply a gateway into the role with no relation to the actuality of the job requirements.
Its hard to imagine a computer issuing the same exact orders as a director. But with LLMs computers are really close to doing that in principle. The issue is as I mentioned the social and political aspect of directing that cannot be replaced yet.
I've had to do something similar in a much shorter career as well (about 10 years or so). I think the rate of change is much quicker these days too. It was still always within the tech field, but for better or worse my career has been incredibly diverse. Not sure if I'll be able to keep up when I'm older (entering my 30ies now) or not, but so far I've always seen it as personal growth opportunities.
Jobs change and hopefully peoples’ skillset changes and gets better when they do.
This job was different 5 years ago and this entire animation process would be unrecognizable 50 years ago. Tweening didn’t ruin animation it just lowered the barrier of entry. This too will lower the barrier of entry so our future will be more high quality animation. Some of it will be lasting and some of it will be appreciated for mere seconds for throw away content such as ads.
Maybe when everyone gets home from their boring prompt engineering jobs they can go back to hand rolling animation stacks or whatever other workflow is currently getting destroyed by AI for the “fun” of it.
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.
This process has been happening for at least a couple decades (arguably more) without any AI, though. The entertainment industry almost ran itself into the ground that way, long before those things emerged. Or rather, the demand made it to.
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.
I‘m hoping, perhaps unreasonably, that the work in the short to medium term actually gets better. I‘m currently working on something very interesting after having worked an complete shit a few months last year: Shit where a designer draws up the exact thing and then it is redundantly implemented on mobile by overpaid developers. Let that be done by the AI. Good riddance.
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
> 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.
> 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?
The solution is the same one we should have had from the start: take some of the responsibility from peoples careers off individuals and place it on society. As mentioned above, this has always been a problem it's just that now it's a problem for intellectual careers and not just laborers.
Education (and re-education) should be at least affordable if not completely free. Unemployment benefits should be enough to live on (if not well) and be freely available to anyone getting an education. If that is "too expensive" then limit it to specific educations which are currently in short supply.
And lastly, tax income from investments exactly the same as income from labour. This part is actually necessary because if automation is a future we actually want (and we should!) then this will increasingly become the _only_ form of income.
How about striding for one of the core societal values that make many advanced democraties (including the European nordics) so much better/happier than the US? It’s called Equality.
Insert strong progressive taxes, especially on wealth, and use it to fund a strong public sector, so _everyone_ has as access to basic goods and services for free, like education/health/transport/… .
I think you vastly underestimate how much money is the rich have siphoned from society, what do you think that printed money goes to? The change impact would be _massive_, suddenly people would have disposable money instead of crushing debts, nd actually stimulate the economy!
Um...Python, C++, Linux, Erlang, mobile phones (Nokia), Spotify, HTML...
Having worked for both European and US companies, I would say that a) innovation is mutual (we learn from each other) and talent/mediocrity are pretty much evenly distributed.
The US has a more "dynamic" economy in some sense - for example the VC ecosystem is far better funded - but is detrimental in others (Byzantine health care system deters would-be entrepreneurs).
And yet if we take a snapshot literally right now:
Guido van Rossum - Microsoft Distinguished Engineer
Bjarne Stroustrup - professor of Computer Science at Columbia University (City of New York)
Linus Torvalds - Nationality American/US since 2010 (should I write GNU/American/US? Someone educate me).
Erlang - I don't know anything about Erlang so I've got nothing to say.
Nokia - brutally ejected from the market by the Americans, bought out and sepukku-ed under Microsoft leadership. Now phones may as well be an Asian technology. Oversaw the collapse of European leadership in the mobile space, to the point where it is going to be a case study in how to fail at innovation.
Spotify - Leading EU tech success story. Makes up 50% of the counterexamples, along with ASML. Not detectable as a serious tech company when compared to Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc, etc.
HTML - I mean, we'd probably have managed without the Europeans on this one. Although useful, HTML isn't a very technical accomplishment. Anyone could invent this, including most CS undergrads.
Most stuff you cheer here is basically a few tech giants out of Silicon Valley. The science kickstart for all that came from a bunch of scientists (like Von neumann) you got when winning WW2 from europe. In a time when many potential competitors were still rebuilding from ruins.
This is over now, europeans tend to no longer go to the us but still produce excellent scientists, Asian countries catched up and both continents start to leave the US behind in most aspects as a desirable place to live, except for 2 things: Military power and billionaires.
Enjoy your 5 tech giants while they last, but also keep in mind that these are international now and draw from nonamerican intellectual power also.
That's the point though. Van Rossum, Stroustrup and Torvalds made their name early on in their careers or even at college, while still in Europe. Sure, later on they emigrated to the US for the money, but that was on the back of their accomplishments.
Of course Nokia was eclipsed by foreign competition (mostly due to terrible management), but it was still innovative in its time. Just as US companies today face competition from Asia.
> Although useful, HTML isn't a very technical accomplishment. Anyone could invent this, including most CS undergrads.
Yes, but they didn't, did they? It's easy to look at something with 20/20 hindsight and say "anyone could have done this". Back in 1989 Berners-Lee had that insight.
Ever played some civilization (the game)? A mostly military focussed society can force others into unfavorable agreements, but while doing so other areas of society are lacking, amounting to huge problems later on when
a) blackmailing for some reason stops working
b) non-military related businesses are vanishing
c) increasing %share of your population has a degrading life quality
d) military costs become unsustainable for questionable ROI
… doubling down on military is a death spiral, especially when the funding money comes from slashing public services.
"Europe is irrelevant" is such a weird take for a country built by Europeans, populated by Europeans, using European legal system, European language, etc etc.
> HTML ... Anyone could invent this, including most CS undergrads.
Yes, For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
That’s the total opposite most people around me (many immigrants from the US!) experience for the like last 2 decades actually, where have you been to that draws such a funny picture?
Europe has more % Entrepreneurs/Self-employed people than the US, lots of great companies even though not leading in the richest top5-ranking, and the work ethic is focussed during working hours instead of chitchatting/looking busy 12h+ per day.
Maybe you are also fooled by one critical thing: US companies are muuuuch better at marketing than European ones, outshining them so you tend to see exclusively US blogvertising and not where real innovation actually happens: all around the world now and the US actually falling behind.
Could also be the advantage of a unified market helps US startups scale faster, maybe someone else can speak to that better. Its been influential where Ive worked, at least.
I also think at least US tech has significantly larger firms, but I dont think thats directly in line with societal good. Seems pretty fucking cancerous to me. Cant speak to industries outside of software though.
Europe (mostly, at least) does have a unified market on paper, but not culturally, which makes marketing, localization etc. harder - a commercial that sells well to Germans might go down like a lead balloon in Spain.
The biggest advantage I've seen in the US has been the VC ecosystem. For all we deride VCs - and sometimes (particularly given events over the past few weeks) with very good reason, the money spigot is just much more generous in the US. Of course that will change in the new low interest rate economy, but that to me seems more the deciding factor than silly claims that Americans are somehow more innately "innovative" than Europeans.
Money as a forcing function seems to come to an end, also I really am laughing right now how the US tries to suppress TikTok so it doesn’t overtake all these social media companies seemingly unable to compete :-)
There is also a language factor here. 100 years ago, English was not the ‘lingua franca’ of the world, traveling in Europe you were better off with French, German or even Latin.
US marketing currently happen to be understood almost everywhere and native speakers of English have an advantage. A company does not necessarily need to execute better, but through effective communication they may be able to pretend they are.
There are lot of examples of ideas being picked up and reimplemented in the US, where the original was better but where the adaptation got better traction. The film industry is full of it.
Why should ingenuity not be evenly spread around the globe as well as hopes for a better future? The US represents one particular policy for wealth distribution that happen to work well for, in particular, VCs.
This is the key point. The single unified market with 300+ million people speaking the same language is the advantage that will make all the other ones more or less irrelevant.
Sorry? You think the American economy is so broken that people 'can't afford stuff' anymore?
That there is an absurdly increasing wealth gap is a fact, but that doesn't mean that - for the time being - US households as consumers are still spending lots of money. And if you're in the B2B side of the market then it's even easier.
I said dimishing, not gone already. A shrinking middle class is a real problem, leading to all kinds of issues, like reduced spending power - something that until recently was hidden by people going into debt massively… which now turns into even more problems soon.
All the while you can now do stuff in English all over europe increasingly well and legislations are getting normalized between countries, ignoring the odd brexit events here and there.
Ultimately what I am saying is: the factor exists and is significant, but getting lower for the US and other parts of the world are catching up rather quickly.
This comment can be read as you being happy for the demise of the US. It’s wonderful to see how many actual allies we have, who the minute we trip up they’re immediately on scene saying “i told you so” and ready to pick the bones.
You are reading that wrong, and it even sounds you want to read it that way.
For sure Europeans are not keen to have to deal with china or Russia as the new world powers instead of the US. Really! But sometimes friends have to call out each other when things go in a bad direction.
But most Americans probably have to deal with the fact that they really aren’t the greatest country on earth any longer, except for military spending, gun deaths and prisoners. This realization is needed before one can really make steps into improving things again.
If the US was half a competent at city planning as Europe it would be a no brainier for me. Unfortunately the US cities that are remotely walkable are also the most expensive. Phoenix / LA / Texas car dependency? HELL NO
Yes a walkable city is a massive life quality factor, but one can only „get it“ after experiencing it. Add good public transport on top of that and you can see why european/asian cities are so popular nowadays
I can’t describe how much better Europe, specifically Netherlands felt due to the social safety nets provided, and do not tell me that The Dutch aren’t hard working people, because they are.
People are so much more relaxed there. 99% of the concern about AI is because we’re living in a cut throat capitalistic society, if we knew that AI didn’t mean starving or losing our homes, we’d be way more relaxed about it, and imo we’d take out time a bit more and think about safety.
It’s the American race to the bottom attitude which is IMO no longer compatible with a highly automated world.
To start with, if the economy breaks, AI breaks.
I saw Microsoft is winging because other search engines are stealing ChatGPT responses, get used to it M$, you own nothing.
I cannot imagine being rich and be surrounded by homeless people, crime, drugs and the like.
The only „solution“ that still avoids realizing the problem is to try to escape into gated communities and shoot those plebs coming too close, ideally robots so no human is at fault conveniently. Or what useful is having that mercedes when most others want to steal or at least damage it?
I, for one, prefer to treat other humans as, well, humans. And by making everyone around me better off, my quality of life also improves.
For simple striking example, how about giving homeless people housing for free, so they can get their stuff together again? You can argue about how „they„ don’t deserve this all day long or simply do it and eliminate a problem https://world-habitat.org/news/our-blog/helsinki-is-still-le... - and even save a lot of money in the process as a society!
When you think about it,
All wealth, every single bit of it has come from the same earth we’re all born on. This is the one truth which binds us all, including the AI, it’s too a child of this Earth, which means all people should have fairly equal access to at least basic protections the Earth provides us with. That’s all there really is to say about it.
Yes! The world where you end up in a random position with zero influence over the outcome if you could pick it before you were born is the one you should strive to create. That one has true equality.
I like that idea, but I don't even think it has to be "perfect equality", just if you're not inclined to strive for more, or you lose your job to a computer, you don't have to go home and tell your family that there live is about to get much worse.
> The only „solution“ that still avoids realizing the problem is to try to escape into gated communities and shoot those plebs coming too close, ideally robots so no human is at fault conveniently. Or what useful is having that mercedes when most others want to steal or at least damage it?
You say this like it shows how it's not a plausible outcome or shows the error of this path, but unfortunately that's exactly the American plan. Yes, that. Is what is literally already happening in USA. It is pretty nightmarish. The rich don't seem to think it's a problem, or don't seem to think there's any available option more desirable to them.
The great thing about fascism (the extreme form of conservativsm when going more rightwing) is that it’s always a matter of in-group vs out-group, THE stereotype of thinking of the right-wingers.
Like, we have the true values and they are immoral. This thinking naturally Leads of subselects within the in-group that are even more true than the others… and it gets recursively smaller going towards fascism.
So ultimately you end up with a tiny in-group (the führers are now some billionaires), that still want to backstab the others secretly, who become paranoid over time, isolate themselves to minimize contact with these lesser human beings left behind… and loose touch with reality.
this is where it ends, usually, one way or another.
But the important part is that it actually DOESNT MATTER what they think - at some point people are frustrated enough and simply take it all away from them… the tipping point is when even public security staff (like police) is willing to let it happen - mostly to reduce suffering from family/friends/… .
Self-righteousness, violence, or tendencies to authoritarianism can be found on both left and right. But fascism means a certain kind of far-right populist politics, not just these attributes in isolation.
words do have definitions. every political direction can have authoritarian traits, still fascism is the extreme form of conservatism. So is communism as the extreme form of socialism, to compare it with left-wing words. The third political direction is liberalism that ultimately leads to anarchy (no state at all). Both American parties are in the area of liberal-conservative… as a European it simply looks like slightly rightwing (dems) and bordering fascist (reps).
Political classification is a complex topic though, it needs multiple dimensions to somehow get to something useful as a mental model.
I am „green“ first and foremost, and while the solarpunk or eco-socialist movements surely have socialist aspects, the „green“ main focus isn’t even covered in previous models. Green is neither left nor right nor liberal, it’s… future oriented? Dunno.
Yup. One of the things that's going to become starkly obvious is this: being in ownership of the money machine doesn't entitle you to power and compensation matching the output of that machine.
Feedback loops set in. If you need X amount of power and Y amount of resources to get it going, but it pays you enough for X times 2 power and Y times 5 resources, the first person to get the machine cranking becomes a human version of that AI paperclip maximizer.
And this has obviously already happened…
So now it's just a matter of, how obvious does this need to get before all the world is paperclips with one idiot sitting there, in his limited human perception, thinking he's won.
It really is Star Trek Future or bust. We don't have the luxury of steampunk attitudes towards power and societal structure anymore. Machine assistance and its multiplier effect are too big, and the runaway feedback effects are too obvious.
Do we have to wait until it's no longer Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg, who are at least very aggressive ambitious idiots paying high prices for their goals, and instead it's some feckless Sam Bankman-Fried who ends up holding the bag? What's it going to take to illustrate the scale of the problem?
Morally comparing order of magnitude I don't really see the difference between any of your examples. They're all structurally lacking in empathy and every one of those would sell their mother if it got them ahead in the game.
I don't disagree, but there's a profound difference in effort (most notably seen in Bezos vs. Bankman-Fried). This changes the result, and I think it also significantly changes the framing.
Bezos started in the days of Windows 3.1, and already was positioning himself near Microsoft as a force multiplier even though, in those days, he and other humans had to do vast amounts of work and thinking.
If the only requirement for dominating the world is adjacency to AI, the gameplan is still exactly the same but now the work and thinking is what you turn over to machines as a force multiplier. Without that, where is the justification for producing individuals who dominate the world? It becomes, not arbitrary, but purely a factor of who is adjacent to the AI at the right time.
You'd best have good implementation or they'll be using ChatGPT to aim your guillotines towards their business rivals, further consolidating their power.
This is the challenge. Anything we've got, people like this have tenfold, or a thousandfold, or a millionfold. As long as we're still running on 18th and 19th century societies.
Mind that you're not literally being steered by the billionaires to accomplish their ends, because that has been the history for the last decade or two. The only thing AI brings to the equation is, perhaps, making the process more obvious and providing a toy version of it that anyone can play with.
Before that, we played with the zeitgeist through marketing, big business… and politics. The only difference is that now we can use it to draw pictures or have it talk back to us like it was a person. The billionaires have been 'prompt engineers' for as long as I've been alive.
The „aiming problem“ for me isn’t really an issue. The goal must be that no one can have too much power over others, no matter why/how. So yeah, the first victims might be tricked targets, but it doesn’t end there.
This might sound totally absurd when you hear it first, but I am fully in favor for randomized rulings in short/limited durations! Lottery style, a bit tweaked to have good entropy.
It's how France historically tried to deal with too much inequality, except it was a complete failure and after staggering levels of evil, bloodshed and oppression they simply ended up with a new elite that had absolute power. No inequality was solved.
Other countries didn't go down that road and none regretted it.
Yet it's amazing how quickly some will still exploit any new technology or change to justify reaching for violence. Some never learn.
>> so _everyone_ has as access to basic goods and services for free, like education/health/transport/…
Access? UK tries this. High taxes and high borrowing to fund a large public sector. Result:
- People can't reliably see dentists or get doctor's appointments because the nationalized health system can't manage capacity properly.
- People can't reliably move around the country because the public sector transport workers are constantly going on strike, despite Tube drivers earning £56k/yr, only a bit less than that of a software engineer.
Putting the public sector in charge doesn't guarantee access to anything, it can easily lead to the opposite, which is why the USSR was constantly being wracked by bizarre shortages especially for anything that mattered to the general public like consumer goods. And now the UK suffers massive healthcare shortages. Same problem.
This is a forced imageproblem try to get privatizations look better than state run, by defunding public sectors and claiming all kinds of weird stuff upto straight lies some people want to believe.
Don’t buy into that propaganda, look at the US how privatization ends up: still lots of tax money, additionally people can’t afford stuff, and a few assholes getting insanely rich in the process by siphoning money out of the society.
Try to ensure appropriate money is used to make the NHS effective again, including wages that allows people to live where they work (<1h commute).
Most communist shortages came from being cutoff from international trades with wealthy countries, and having to start from ruins or nothing at all btw. These are different problems, and you might learn in the process why capitalism is going to end soon. :-)
In the UK dentists are mostly private, it hasn't increased the quality or availability in the least.
Public transport is actually a fairly small part of the nation's transport, the UK is very car-centric so the strikes largely inconvenience commuters and drive even more people onto the roads, unless they can WFH.
Strikes are also a very recent phenomenon, just in the last 6 months or so, so this is quite a new thing driven by inflation.
Problems with the NHS are very much poor management by the last run of governments where there is a quite a growing suspicion they are deliberately trying to run down the NHS in order to make a case for to privatise it, following e.g. America's disastrous model.
That magical Nordic system is called "social democracy", it's of course rooted in socialism, and it's so old that one of the first dark memes amongst left-wing groups ("You killed Rose Luxemburg!) is about them.
It's strange how those who say the Nordics aren't really socialist will be the first to dismiss their policies as socialist when they're suggested for the US.
Neither does communism. Communism implies ownership and control of the economy by the people at large, but the presence of a state is, supposedly, a transitional phase.
> What are we gonna do about the ever increasing N+1% of people who won’t be cost effective versus an AI?
Fairly tax companies' profits.
And then you can afford to just feed 10% of society even if they don't contribute a thing. Also, free world-class education seems to do wonders in Europe ;)
Low corporate tax is fine. Fairly tax the recipients of those profits. Warren Buffet should pay more on his share of Apple's profit than some retiree with Apple in their portfolio. A large corporate tax ends up being regressive.
> What are we gonna do about the ever increasing N+1% of people who won’t be cost effective versus an AI?
Their quality of life will increase because of all the cheap stuff we can make with ai and robots.
They will coexist and compete with robots.
Upward mobility should be better, given the access to advanced technology.
Worst case scenario, they can all band together outside of the advanced civilisation, grow their food and live a separate life.
There is no need to make high iq people to pay for low iq to live in a high iq society.
We're already seeing a divide of cities for rich people and cities for poor people. It will just be more pronounced.
> Their quality of life will increase because of all the cheap stuff we can make with ai and robots.
Ahh, the old "modern poor people are better off than medevial kings since we have microwaves and supercomputers in our pockets". No matter that they are all stressed, living paycheck to paycheck and a single (treatable) disease from crippling debt.
Not really, have a closer look at anything outside. The Sun and rain and weather constantly erode the condition of human creations.
Try fixing some roads and bridges to start with. They're in terrible shape in most of the US. Any city could probably employ 10 times as many gardeners to take care of the plants and build nicer things.
Elderly need taking care of, and young people teaching. Houses need cleaning. Shoes need shinning. Endless list really.
Stop the traffic on a road to fix it without local administration permission? Do you think getting such permission is easy? How are you going to pay for the materials to do the repairs? Do you think it's easy to get a job as a gardener?
I think you need to read other’s thoughts more charitably. I doubt he was suggesting bored artists and call center workers grab a hard hat and pick a road. The point is that AI makes it easier for humans to do work, and there’s an endless amount of work we as a society want done. Avandon capitalist frameworks of wages/capital/“deserved poverty” for a minute, and just consider a group of humans and a pile of tasks that need to be done.
Don’t forget all the people who laugh in your face and tell you you don’t actually know your newly learned skills, and reduces you to a bartender fraudulently entering their field.
Its been like that forever. Factory workers had to adapt when the jobs went to Asia. I don't see how comfortable office guys should get any other treatment.
It used to be learn to code then maybe learn to weld or plumb it something that is harder to automate away.
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.
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.
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.)
When faced with the reality of capitalism, maybe toxic positivity is all there is. I’d like to think that there’s a way that we could plan our society better, and evaluate tech against social costs, but the reality is that in the US we have never done that.
I disagree with your point. The problem is that people will gladly accept changes brought by technology up until the point that it affects them personally. The people that bought a cheap vinyl sign were not forced to purchase them, and yet they did.
This is not a problem with tech, it’s a problem with us. If you like liberty, then you know the choice that people will make, and that’s what is terrifying.
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.
> 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?
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.
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?
Naw there are many possible futures. There is nothing saying the trendline is absolute. However...
The future predicted via extrapolation of a trendline is unfortunately more probable and more realistic then a future predicted via mistrust of AI.
Artists have already formed lawsuits against companies that own LLMs, this one in the article already involves an artist complaining about his job being more or less replaced.
You have to be next level delusional not to consider the extrapolation to programming.
Oh, I do believe programming as a profession is at risk and will change a lot, if not rendered obsolete. What I'm talking about is this idea of "just get used to the fact that there is no human skill that won't be replicable by AI in 2-10 years". It's a very bleak view of the future and our own biological complexity. We need to remember that we are the ones inventing the AI in the first place. We are limited by our imperfect ability to understand ourselves. It will get better, sure, there will be emergent properties, but there's no need to reject the inherent value of humanity even if it happens to produce less economically viable output.
Not everything will be replaced, but you can extrapolate that much of what we do will be replaced.
The thing that is harder to replace is the versatility of the human form. Manual labor can't fully be replaced because robotics have yet to catch up.
>there's no need to reject the inherent value of humanity
There's no fundamental rejection here. Capitalism simply selects the most efficient methodology. If humans arent the most efficient methodology for a given task then capitalism eliminated that methodology. That's the logical extrapolation. You subjective opinions on humanities worth is irrelevant to the most likely outcome.
Capitalism and its value system is subjective, too. It's not set in stone. I believe we can still steer away from profit as the sole driver of, well, everything, if we want to.
Historically speaking, from crypto to AI, the market constantly evolves towards the next most profitable thing.
Only regulatory systems like the government has the tendency to temper such things (see the Fed and rising interest rates). However do note that capitalist entities have infiltrated the government and have huge sway over it's regulatory policies meaning that anti-business regulatory policies are unlikely to occur.
All of this just means that my conclusions are most likely going to play out. Barring some event that will cause intense negative public reaction.
> However do note that capitalist entities have infiltrated the government and have huge sway over it's regulatory policies meaning that anti-business regulatory policies are unlikely to occur.
Maybe this is the case in the US, the EU is known for being much more strict in its regulations, which is often ridiculed by the rest of the world. Those same people are going to hope for regulations once we see the effects of the current Wild West that is AI.
Agreed. The EU is ridiculed but it's also one of the happiest places to live. The relationship between the US and EU is almost parasitic with the EU simply feeding off most of the business innovation coming from the US.
I don't think the world needs this much constant innovation. Additionally the innovation itself can be disruptive. The US will doggedly pursue profits even if those profits involve technology that can cause the US to eat itself. If AI replaces all jobs and nobody has any money to buy stuff who will the companies sell shit too?
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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
Okay so? Back in the day people trained up for 2D art, and then suddenly not long after 3D graphics came around. Imagine working on Final Fantasy 6, and then being told you now have to do 3D art for Final Fantasy 7.
Amazingly, despite 3D graphics, in the year 2023 there are now more employed 2D pixel artists than there were in the 90s. They are still making new games for the NES!
So while I’m sad for this person’s loss of love for their current job, I’m sure they will be able to find work.
I understand where you're coming from. I don't think this person really fears losing their job. It's more that their current job, and probably all future ones, will be done in a way that they dislike. That is a valid complaint.
There are probably some employed pixel artists that liked creating things pixel by pixel and are disliking the fact that their job is radically changing since these tools create an expectation for faster output.
I apologize if I came across arguing with anyone.
I just wanted to call out that to me - it doesn't seem like this person thinks they are going to lose their job. They did their job in a way that they really enjoyed. That's changed.
Does that happen all the time in other industries? Yes. Is it valid to point out that this has happened before? Yes. Will this person be able to find work? Yes.
This person is just expressing their frustration. With the way all these tools are progressing, I imagine we are going to be seeing posts like these more in the future.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
you could argue that this LLM's will benefit more users than the produced value itself lost on sea of SEO garbage. But my point is that the openness wont stop because people will still need to show their craft for better employment opportunities.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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"
> Conservatives think trans people are crimes against God
You're mistaking christian fundamentalists for conservatives. Conservatives are saying that changing your name doesn't mean you now get to compete in women's sports.
My point was: "Progress is always good, conservatives need to go" has been touted by the same people for decades, and suddenly they want to change the tune when it affects them. It's predictable and should be ignored.
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.
> In other words we can embrace the future without being cruel.
That's not "progress is necessary good". We're forming the future, our choices define the future, we're not damned to be powerless and either embrace what cannot be changed or suffer from resisting that which cannot be stopped.
Right now, lots of people are having their first experience that not all progress is necessarily good. It's fun to watch how they suddenly change their tune, much like banks when they need another bailout, and they start talking about "what's good for society" a lot.
> As far as affecting different people, LLMs are about to squish the middle class.
I'll believe it when I see it. We were promised widespread unemployment thanks to robotics, too.
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.
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...
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?
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.
That's the change in perspective. They are inefficient from a CPU point of view. They are efficient from the perspective of "churning out more shit for less". So it's the same, soul destroying effect as for artistic professions.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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)
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 427 ms ] threadPortraits still get drawn, but not many, and certainly not for the sake of preserving what somebody looks like.
What field are all of these nail makers supposed to switch to this time?
I'm not sure what do you intend this word to mean. Minimum wage is sustained in many countries for many years.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/minimum-w...
> looking as how even $15/hr isn't enough to cover rent basically anywhere where they actually pay $15/hr
That's a bit different problem. What UBI could do is let people migrate away from very expensive places because they would no longer fear they'll become destitute if they risk not being able to get a job in cheaper place.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
It is about 12% in Poland (2018) and in most countries from the link it was less than 10%.
Thanks for the link though. I tried to find such chart and I failed.
I guess there's no point of discussing what is and what isn't small.
Various sea organisms rely on calcium carbonate for the formation of their shells and bones. If the water is too acidic there less calcium carbonate in the water…
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...
Economic collapses are a thing.
I'm still not scared about my job since I provide specific solutions (C++ architectures) that an AI cannot produce (yet), but it's worrying for everyone and every kind of job at the same time.
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.
But that is one of the fun parts...
actually I think this problem started earlier, with many _musicians_ using pre made beats and auto tune. right now it just takes it to a whole other level.
music should be a tool of expression, not one to gain fame & social acceptance
I don’t get it then why you care, let alone care enough to make you feel sick. Nobody is stopping you from using music as a tool of expression. You do you, yam in your basement or wherever you want. I bet that you will find like minded people who appreciate what you do, but even if not you yourself are saying “music should not be a tool to gain fame and social acceptance”.
So why do you care what other people do?
a bit of context: I've been producing music for ~15 years now, purely as a hobby (due to incompetence on my part to up a level).
I have friends which I helped and collaborated with for years on and off, and some of them seem to me like they are stuck in a loop of wanting to succeed without actually expressing themselves. they seem to be stuck in the mode of _this is how it's done, and this is what I want and anything else is incorrect_.
even when there are many other options to make it sound better and make it richer.
so correction: what makes me _sick_ is the fact that some people try to copy other successful musicians without even considering doing something original, purely because they want the same level of _fame and success_.
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.
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.
The scary part to me is that there’s scant evidence that a post-scarcity society will be allowed to develop. It seems more likely that those at the top will reap the entirety of the fruits of productivity gains enabled by employing AI, much as they’ve been doing for the more incremental (but still massive) productivity gains of the past several decades. Very little of the pie will be shared with the working class.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> okinawa street on a rainy night. Impressionism style
> 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?
I could have surfaced, or learned about it 20 seconds earlier from a different ChatGPT conversation (throwing vaguely related questions at GPT[1]), or something as old fashioned as a search engine. Maybe turning up the "novel" kernels of information that you won't get from LLMs without knowing to ask will be its own thing in the future. A few Pinterests for prompts are already out there if I'm not mistaken.
Great choice of art styles, by the way!
[1] https://sharegpt.com/c/jnpoQRv
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.
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.
I’m saying that people extrapolating this to the full spectrum of artists (both on HN and the Blender Reddit) are missing the context.
I already acknowledged that the people at this low end of the spectrum are vulnerable because they’re basically just used to churn stuff out, without any value for their work.
The point is, this persons job has always been one level of automation or efficiency away from being just an operator. If it’s not generative art, it’s other forms of automation or outsourcing or some new high school dropout who’s good enough.
Midjourney here is a symptom not a cause. Though it’ll be a symptom that’ll affect the most vulnerable roles: the people who are largely just a factory operator
The tragedy of the author of the post is that they expected that the product of their work would be treated like art, but it turned out their boss had different vision.
Nothing of value have been lost, because the artistic value of author's work has never been actually appreciated in the first place - but they tricked themselves into thinking it has (because of paycheck I guess).
The tragedy here is that AI doesn't need to be better than humans (at least in many cases like art, writing etc). It just needs to be "good enough", maybe 80% as good as a human. Since humans can't compete with software on speed or cost, they are gonna lose.
How exactly can the author improve to a higher standard here, assuming they want to continue doing what they love, and not change careers?
Now the parts of turning the crank they enjoyed are gone. And their job is a shitty, demoralizing drag.
Is that of no value in your world? Have you never weighed jobs based on whether one sounded like more fun than another, along with other considerations like how much money it would make? Has nobody you've known ever made an employment choice based in that?
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
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.
What's ending is the era of CRUD work.
Get ready to take on more clients and at a smaller and smaller gain. An avalanche of competition is coming your way too if you have no moat.
I still work about the same hours, though. AI has just raised the level of abstraction. Less time is spent on looking up specific syntax and more on reviewing, iterating, testing, architecting.
I hope Silicon Valley builds itself a starship and ships itself off to Alpha Centuri and leaves me to live a pretty simple life with way less grind.
The opposite is happening, yet it's still repeated.
Since it only takes minutes to make you must have a lot of examples.
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.
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.
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)
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.
[0] Surely someone will quickly post that it is.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
>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.
> However its hard to see, results are better than my work.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Still, every year you’d have like 2 tons of wheat from your acre. You’d be able to live on that, even if your diet is a bit colorless.
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...
AI will be yet another tool to further wealth inequality. We won't be able to afford retiring and tending to our plants.
What about the other 99%? As they say a revolution is three missed meals away...
And where is the fantasy world where "we all" have enough money for this?
A) living in a remote village
B) Currency conversion
The house itself was also pretty cheap, being a traditional Thai wooden house and not particularly huge.
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.
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.
And what does your crystal ball tell you that is?
People really do argue themselves aggressively into points that exploit themselves without any benefit.
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.
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.
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.
like javascript
Bringing characters and worlds to life is what artists really dream about, and AI tools make that easier.
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.
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.
These AI’s are literally trained on all of human creativity… i struggle to see how there’s any indication AI would fail to be as creative as a human in even the near-ish future.
However, you fail to recognize that OpenAI also created Whisper, which is a quote capable speech-to-text transcriber; and this tool easily converts audio and video (those verbal bits you mentioned) into text.
So the pool of creativity which OpenAI can train its models on is far larger than just original text; further, they demoed image modality a couple weeks back which would allow for VISUAL creative works to be parsed as well.
Do you mean things like tone, facial expression, the general “energy” around a conversation, etc?
Basically, pick a random human from the street and they would be talking and listening a lot more than they would be writing. Those talking and listening is never going to be captured by any digital system.
It might end up that written text has enough similarity with verbal communication that it doesn't matter anyway. But that's hard to guess as a priori that it would be the case.
And the future is now, of course, because there are tons of such artists and the value comes only from the elite who ascribe value and not some inherent value of the thing itself. Things are important ("worth money") because tasteless fucks with money say they are worth money. Go watch "The Menu". Ralph Fiennes face cooking the last meal says it all.
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..."
don't get me wrong, I have sympathy for everybody who for whatever reason sees their livelihood endangered overnight through no fault of their own and with little time to adapt
but I perceive a lot of denial:
- denial that "it could not/would not happen to me"
- denial that this rate of change is not rather unprecedented, "it was always thus" kind of denial
- denial that just because a certain niche won't be quickly automated, it follows that this job is safe or that a general reshaping of that general industry won't happen, changing the incentive structure massively
- denial that a second order effects may get you; so you can now automate some expensive part of your process? that also means the barrier of entry for the competition is lower and whatever competitive advantage you had in that process is now gone. Sure, embrace the efficiency but keep adapting because the only thing sure after those changes is that your industry will experience some "creative destruction"
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
After the software developers made a lot of jobs obsolete, their own job is being made obsolete by the data scientists.
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.
Yeah I remember the whole "learn to code" movement that mocked people who were losing their jobs.
Maybe this is the "learn to weld" moment?
> "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."
You can read more about it there if you'd like.
Twitter was full with snarky "just learn to code" comments.
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.
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.
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.
I'm already able to create excellent models of any subject I desire in 15-45 minutes, with remarkable quality aside from bad hands, and usable forever once trained, then how come I'm still drawing? (more than usual, in fact)
Understand that and you'll understand my argument.
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
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.
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.
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).
The classical counter-example are horses - the industrial revolution increased the demand for horses, but once the cars became cheap horses numbers and jobs drastically decreased.
I refuse to believe humans don't have agency.
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.
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.
Also most western countries have severely aging populations, there’s are big problem there which automation can help with, if it’s applied right.
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.
Like personally, I think I will still draw concept art instead of asking a GAN. Feels like that greases my creative wheels more. Just me though.
0:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YajBa5PO1Hk
Making music expanded though. In the sense that more people played, there was more variety, and indeed more professional musicians today than 100 years ago. (the bar for entry is also lower, and most are permantly broke - take that as you will.)
Some orchestras still exist. But they're pretty rare.
So yes, alot of job descriptions and job titles will change. Making indie games just got a lot easier. But where you see loss, many others see opportunity.
It seems much more likely to me that all that will happen is there will be a lot more poor people...
Jobs are a way of "adding value" to society. But over the last 120 years we've figured out how to add a Lot of value with minimal people. 95% of people used to grow food. Now it's like 2%.
People moved to factories, where today robots and automation rule. People moved to hi-tech, and leveraged that tech. Now AI is moving into that space.
In truth, we now create way, way, more value than we need. We need to figure out how to distribute the value created. Somehow I doubt that the US will be the leader here; things like UBI are too far against the "American Way".
When we see UBI emerge, in whatever form that takes (basically basic human needs met) it'll likely come from places that value community over individuality. Places that rate their success by their poor, not their rich. Places that celebrate achievements which don't require the exploitation of others.
People will be able to take more risks and do more interesting projects. It will be awesome.
AI is opposite of human creation. Its definition of anti-creation. Its a spell that locks visual culture to year 2025. And it can only do this by illeagly stealing all the human work.
What a fantastic way of putting it.
I'm constantly reminded of _the Matrix_, with Agent Smith telling Neo that 1999 (the apparent year inside the Matrix) was the peak of human civilization.
Our own Matrix will use the year 2025.
Second, why it has to be "thus far"? If it happens in 1 or 5 or 10 years does it disqualify it?
Because above you claimed it will "never take thought workers' jobs". Suddenly the goalposts moved so that it has to have happened "totally" and "thus far" to qualify as taking their jobs?
I have no doubt in my mind it is reducing the need for more engineers and has probably already contributed to a reduction of them and I think it's just getting started.
The reality is that companies are going to continue allocating a similar percentage of their budget to tech that they were before, and what we DO might change a ton; but, frankly, I've been doing this now for decades, and the stuff I used to do 25 years ago (omg: a full quarter of a century of professional software development ;P) already often just isn't a thing anyone does anymore. Every time my job gets easier, the expectations for the products I architect also increase, because we're all in a rat race attempting to compete for the same customers to defend our margins.
Hell: I remember when the first step to deploying a new service--even if you were a company that only had a handful of people--was to attempt to predict how much capacity you needed and then buy a ton of parts so you'd be able to sit around and build machines for your server room to run your new product. I was involved in a project back in like, 1998/1999, for a company with all of maybe five people, and someone's job was just sitting around building the server room... that specific task is now a few lines of YAML configuration and a couple of accounts (AWS and Twilio <- back in the day, we had to have custom T1 lines brought in not for data but for bulk parallel phone service to hook up to the Dialogic boards we needed to simulate phone lines ;P).
The concept of cloud-computing entirely changed that part of the business--having a small handful of companies manage all the servers at scale and run numerous jobs on shared hardware, in some sense reducing the cost to the point where you can both outsource this and pay less--to the point where doing that almost sounds insane; and yet, I'm sure there are more people getting paid more to deploy and manage ever more virtualized servers in the cloud than there ever were people (including me!) literally screwing around with screwdrivers in the ubiquitous server rooms. You could argue that my job got "replaced", with all of the skills I had to deal with IRQ balancing and automated power backup systems being for naught... but, somehow, I'm apparently still relevant.
I'll also admit that I honestly kind of enjoyed doing that work?... and yet, I also was quite happy to never have to do it ever again. I'll never forget the day I took the first real-world server I was in charge of and just like, uploaded it to 1&1 where I had an early software-based hypervisor-like stack I was experimenting with (UML, aka User Mode Linux, which is no longer something people bother with due to the advent of Xen/KVM/etc.); it just worked and I was like "omg I'm never building another server again, am I? that was it: it's over". (It then turned out that I did build another complex hardware solution in 2016 to start doing work with GPUs, but there was only a small window of time there before cloud services caught up.)
So like, sure: at some point the AI is going to entirely replace what we do--not the specific frustrating coding tasks we do today, but the entire concept of our jobs--but, the issue at that point isn't going to be me figuring out what I'm going to do next to make ends meat... it is going to be that I'm not a serviceable warrior in the war against the machines as the world devolves into some kind of Terminator-inspired hellscape; because, if you can manage to do my job in its totality, then...
https://theouterlimits.fandom.com/wiki/The_Human_Operators
The Culture appeals to me, but there are literary critics who find even The Culture, let alone the grander environment beyond it, to be dystopian. And I definitely don't want to wake up dead with my mind in one of Joiler Veppers' simulations.
Only for people with dignity. So, in general, no!
I think your argument requires a paradigm shift like teletype -> web to soak up the new productivity. I don't think we have that today. For how many purposes have we reached peak consumer software capability? i.e. global reach to publish text, images, video and make purchases is the entire use case of most media and commerce businesses. If you gave every company double the amount of dev resources tomorrow, do they even have anything to build? Even for those with deep feature roadmaps, how much of that stuff is just nice-to-have things that won't move the revenue needle anyway?
Maybe we will get that new platform from AR or direct brain interfaces... but without it, the situation looks more like how the human role of "computer" just vanished... sure we then got programmers, but they weren't necessarily the same people.
I was asking a question. I don't think anyone can confidently quantify the effects of AI at this point so I was seeing if I was missing something. What I said is just some word vomit about what I'm seeing on the ground as an engineer. I'm happy to accept a refutation as we gather more concrete data. The reason I asked the question the way I did is because as I stated there is no doubt AI will impact our jobs, but I'm understandably more concerned about less jobs because of AI. I also have the experience of writing a lot of automation, and hearing this same style of rhetoric when we started doing that heavily. For all the scare around automation, it did end fact end up creating more jobs and typically made lives easier.
Jumping to "shifting goalposts" over that is pretty trash conversation.
What do you expect will happen if an entry-level software engineer becomes 2x as productive? You need 2x less, so you fire half the team.
I think R&D is good in any company. Sure, the nature of R&D is that most of it is failure; that's just the way it is.
AI makes the R&D iteration shorter and cheaper, IMO. The more you try, the more likely you're to succeed (aside: I should listen to my own advice sometimes lol).
But that's not how the economics works out. The business can simply choose to sell 10% more content.
But do you think if none of these things had changed, and everyone was still doing nearly everything themselves, with a limited subset of libraries in use, writing everything in C, we would have all of these applications, services, pieces of software, etc? That all of these viable businesses employing people would still exist?
I doubt it. And like the poster from the reddit link, a lot of software devs truly did enjoy a lot of that work that they did. I've talked to plenty of greybeards who will wax nostalgic over spending months writing things that a pip install and import solve in a few seconds now.
If we double the efficiency of a team, do we fire half of them? Or do we double the amount of products we're releasing? Or double the amount of features for one product?
I think we have far more software devs today because of the advent of higher level languages, large library selections available with package managers, feature-rich IDEs, etc.
Is this always the case, for every industry? Obviously not. There are a lot fewer people making furniture by hand today than there was before automated manufacturing, and any individual only needs so many chairs. But there is, of course, still demand for hand built furniture using traditional joinery techniques.
"Art" is a big space, and I don't think that the impact will be universal across every part of it. For games in specific, I think we'll see something more like the software development side - people will make more and more unique assets vs. reusing them, we'll see the artwork be more detailed and "populated" in general. We'll see more and more smaller studios putting out work with higher quality and more art assets. Same thing for other media-related positions. And the people who are reliably selling prints for people to hang on walls, collect, etc., I think are also likely quite safe. I think people relying on twitter/instagram/etc. commissions to draw people's D&D characters or anime waifu are likely in a lot of trouble.
You can't view things in the void like this, though. Reducing the overall cost of doing something makes it viable for more businesses, which means more jobs. We have more jobs in software development overall now because of how much more productive it is today, which opens up so many more viable use cases for it. We have more CG artists for movies, games, etc. now in large part because more efficient workflows and more powerful software have increased productivity.
Will it be the same thing with generative AI? I think so, at least for the foreseeable future.
That in a very real way is a replaced job.
The remaining job is running large scale data loading for a startup and really now is just eyeballs to make sure errors are caught. No longer requires much skill either.
I think some degree of low end engineering work in the outsourcing world is at risk.
Of course, having people hand knit garments used to be the only way to get a knitted garment at all.
Then we invented industrial knitting machines, and those hand knitters found their roles had changed. Instead of knitting a whole garment, they would be closing up the toe on the socks, or doing finishing work on a sweater. Of course, companies didn't need anywhere near as many knitters under this system, so a huge proportion of them lost their jobs.
Then the knitting machines got better. They could close the toes on the socks themselves, could do most of the finishing work automatically. Some of the remaining knitters became industrial knitting support workers, but most of the actual knitting jobs dried up.
But there are still professional, commercial hand knitters, even today! They test hand knitting patterns for the hobby market. Make the samples up for photographing, and make sure that all the sizes come out right.
They number... Dozens? Maybe? And most of them treat it as a side gig, despite being the absolute pinnacle of hand knitting talent, since it pays terribly.
A job doesn't have to have been totally replaced to be effectively replaced. As we find ways to hand over larger and larger pieces of the work to an automated system, the number of real roles in that field diminishes, until it eventually becomes infeasible as a career choice.
This is what a lot these digital content creation jobs are heading. Gradual obsolescence.
Here are tweets from famous HN users Simon Willison[0] and Patrick Mckenzie[1] endorsing the viewpoint as well.
[0]: https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1639692312585572352
[1]: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1639787193580519424
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.
AI is going to make our bullshit jobs even shittier.
Doesn't sound like such a bad deal to me.
I get your point, of course. I just think communication can be like a craft, challenging and rewarding. I try to frame things positively, it helps me stay motivated at work.
crafting
> get to talk to people more
about KPIs and OKRs
Think about the average day of a manager/management consultant/VC (whose job it is to talk to people, make deals etc). I always looked at their careers and walked away thankful that a programmer career exists.
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.
AI is that, but for intellectual output.
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.
In general, creative roles like artists are the sum value of their education and experience, not just their measured output. If you don't possess art history vocabulary, you're going to be very limited in prompting or designing more advanced embeddings and LoRA or training models. I'm seeing this a lot right now - people don't want to share their prompts because they don't want everyone to know how much the model carried them and how little any actual "prompt engineering" went into it.
The smart thing for their boss to do would be to scale projects and have one of them focus on managing and filtering the new volume of assets. Since it sounds like they like working from scratch, even adding external time to "research tooling and methods" would probably keep them happy until they find the challenge in their new duties.
I would wager that the majority of managers will rather reactively jump at the chance to cut an entire salary from their cost structure.
Right. Because this whole "prompt engineering" is just another job title, not an applied science, and then again, prompts can and will be automated away.
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.
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.
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.
It's not the rich who will decide; it's the powerful. In the classical sense of "capacity to impose will" – up to and including the capacity to turn off {machines, humans, institutions}.
There's a strong correlation between wealth and power, but those groups are not identical. And neither are their staying prospects in the coming years.
Like, how many people do the wealthy/powerful actually need? What level of automation will allow maintaining their lifestyle, including:
1. Biological needs: Food & a sufficiently diverse pool of mates for themselves and their children.
2. A social hierarchy large enough to flex their power beyond mere biological survival (very important to primates). I'd expect this number to be strictly smaller than for 1), so likely not a concern: as long as there are enough people to biologically sustain a population, there are enough people to subjugate.
3. Technological scaffolding to produce, maintain and bootstrap (in case of calamities) said automation. Currently humans are a necessary physical substrate for the continued inflow of energy that automation needs. I don't have the numbers but the footprint to run even a single power plant must be tremendous: a large and complex society, once you include 2nd order effects. Without energy, the machines don't go "VRRROOM" and neither does AI.
And if the human population drops too low to interfere with any of these points, the automation was self-defeating. It doesn't matter how rich or powerful you were.
I mean, I'm sure someone somewhere ran the numbers and has a plan ready, while the rest of us wax lyrical about "just find a new job LOL" and UBI. Although to be fair, there are also preppers, who've taken the above analysis to its logical conclusion.
For population replacement, you can get by with a couple thousand people. That's really only about a dozen large tribes. If the tribes are kept suitably insular and antagonistic (with either ritualized external marriage or slave-taking to ensure proper genetic circulation) that society might even be stable. The trick would be keeping the population stable.
E.g. currently mostly the middle class pays for home improvements, which creates jobs for construction workers. Remove the middle class and there's a lot less demand for construction workers - so what are the IT people turned into construction workers going to do?
There is no model that works in a purely capitalistic setting. The reality this this issue will hit us hard, everywhere and faster every day.
The gradient is just too strong, and you can't keep a pedigree on every image you publish that originated from a design firm.
The poor areas rapidly gain wealth but at great cost to the environment and the whole thing is dependent on a never-ending fire hose of capital and tech transfers from the “wealthy” areas.
The wealthy areas, already unable to offer many citizens the ability to raise a family, are desperately engaging in extreme financialization, ludicrous political distractions, and “make work” shell games just to present an increasingly unconvincing veneer that society is still functioning and fully worthy of participation.
Western civilization is the metaphorical Biblical statue from Daniel: After spending decades replacing the support structures with ever cheaper materials, we’re now finally in the “feet of iron and clay” stage, and it’s likely AI will complete the metaphor by representing the boulder that smashes into the weakened base and topples the entire statue.
I realize this all sounds hilariously alarmist, but I have yet to see a positive spin on the impact of AI that isn’t ultimately the same old decoupled Pete Peterson style nonsense of “it’s gud because worker productivity number goes up”: as if we don’t already have two generations of human beings that grew up in an age of massively increased productivity yet cannot afford a family nor a home to put them in - a state of existence that even some medieval serfs would pity.
My weirdly accelerationist hope is that AI advances quickly enough (and management stays short-sighted enough) to cause a meaningful political coalition to form between the already-marginalized blue collar workers and the newly disrupted paper-pusher/cubicle class.
While I sympathize with your angst at the coming future, a future where the US isn't the highest, I see that for most of the world your prediction is both highly desirable, and inaccurate.
Firstly, let's dispel the great-cost-to-the-environment myth. The US has done, and continues to do great harm to the environment. Indeed many developing nations are skipping the harmful phase and embracing new tech like solar , better urban planning and so on.
Also, while it's fun to posit that thd globe depends on US capital, there's a bigger picture in play. TikTok is developed without western capital, suddenly its a surveillance risk (because Facebook and Google wouldn't spy on me).
Sure there's environmental cost to development, but complaining about the environment of others is a bit rich for the US (as it approves drilling in Alaska). The US accounts for 25% of global emissions, and about 5%ish of thd World population.
So yeah - you want your job yo be remote? Be careful what you wish for.
No one gives a crap until it’s your own child, then it’s probably too late.
Change happened, yes, but it's not necessarily fast even in such situations.
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.
If your job is mostly technical, be ready to re-learn and reshape your skills when your tool goes the way of cel animation. I personally had to do this at least three times in 25 years, not entirely from scratch of course, but I had to relearn the vast majority of my skills. And I think I'll need to do more of it to stay relevant. So to me it's pretty normal.
The work of a creative professional is to deliver meaning. If you can't separate this from your tools and are only able to enjoy one specific tool, you have to question yourself what you're doing in the field. (yes, I'm also being too cynical)
Very relatable, but it seems unwise to just consider it normal. If you find yourself having to retool 3 times within 25 months, you'll be well on the way to burning out.
The creative professional IS a target for replacement. What LLMs do best is specifically what the "creative professional" does. Better than coding or mathematics, LLMs excel at creative English text. This is because creative output is trivial when compared with technical skills.
I don't think the "creative professional" will get replaced though. Because usually the task is so trivial that positions like these largely only exist because of politics. You convince people around you and yourself that your "creativity" has no peer.
It amounts to this: I want a photo-realistic animation of a cowboy with blue skin with a laser cannon riding a unicycle through the grand canyon with a dwarf chasing him. <<This sentence is trivial to come up with, ANYONE can come up with thousands a variations and tweak the sentence in various ways. No special talent needed here.
A creative director simply comes up with high level instructions (like the one above) THEN the ultra hard part is making that high level instruction a reality. That is HARD and as of now it looks like both skills are being replaced by AI.
But like I said, the directors' position is in actuality largely political. Thus his position is safe even though the actuality of what he does is EASY and therefore a prime target for replacement.
This is the opposite of what I see in reality right now. The hard part is to make the artists do exactly what you want, down to the subtle but meaningful details. That happens because the high-level instructions don't have enough capacity to deliver the full meaning. This is the same with generative models: extremely hard to control with the "prompt engineering" gimmick, it's only fine when you are OK with random output. Besides, they are purely functional and lack feedback mechanisms the creative director usually employ with artists.
That's why people are trying to make techniques more complex - large animation houses experiment with training their own model architectures and software. This is the way 3D CGI was born - simple at first, and yes it got plenty of doomposting at first (we are getting replaced by computers!), until it was clear that the field becomes extremely technical and complex, so it even has dozens of specializations inside it.
All entertainment is ultimately based on novelty, as human brain is really good at distilling meaning from the ocean of information. If you start with little meaning (your example - "a cowboy with blue skin with a laser cannon riding a unicycle through the grand canyon with a dwarf chasing him"), people get bored - no matter how much randomized artsy-looking stuff you add around it.
If you think that AI can generate all meaning that is relevant to people, I don't buy it, as it doesn't have the same training material. It's trained on the result and is forced to reverse engineer what moves people; reverse engineering is a fundamentally more costly and opaque task.
The problem with "reverse engineering people" is that you don't need to, the things they like in any era follows predictable and generic patterns. These patterns can be encoded into AI provided we find enough curated training data.
> The hard part is to make the artists do exactly what you want, down to the subtle but meaningful details.
This is because the artist can't read your mind. It has nothing to do with your skill or the artists skill level. That feedback loop you are alluding to is more a reflection of the unclarity of your instructions or your imagination.
You thought what you imagined looked good but the artist in following your directions created something that showed you how flawed your imagination was.
That only works to a certain degree. For the infamous example, try making GPT output the correct number of asterisks, you will get mixed results. You don't have any problem with typing exactly 1589 asterisks because you run the stateful counting algorithm in your head. GPT has no idea about the algorithm - it has to reverse engineer it from the text, and can only extract the vague correspondence between a number and a string about this or that length. You don't give humans examples to reverse engineer, you teach them to count.
This is a simplest example, it might even learn to count eventually, as it's far more capable in certain aspects. But as the dimensionality of the task grows, the amount of resources and training data required to reverse engineer it grows much faster.
Sure, it can spot some patterns and that can look good, but some things are just plain invisible in the result - you will have a hard time making it learn higher level concepts because they highly depend on hardwired things like the dumber part of neural circuitry and biochemistry in humans, which the model doesn't have.
It's like trying to make a photo in a dark room - no matter how you improve the sensitivity of your camera, you might not have a single photon in it.
> This is because the artist can't read your mind.
Yes, this is what I mean by the limited capacity of a simple textual description. It's a fundamental limitation - natural language is just poorly suited for the detailed conceptualization. A sketch, or a conceptual diagram, or other higher order control methods have far more capacity to explain your intent, and that's the direction those models move to. At which point their usage is nothing like "type something simple and receive the result".
>Yes, this is what I mean by the limited capacity of a simple textual description. It's a fundamental limitation - natural language is just poorly suited for the detailed conceptualization.
Except LLMs can accept sketches as input. The higher order methods of communication are covered by encoders.
Maybe I'm not sure what point you're trying to make either?
All fiction writers suck? I don't know how much fiction you read, but it's incredible varied. There's a lot writers need to think about and control in the reader (and account for multiple profiles) outside of just an idea. But the ideas themselves need to be coherent.
Creative directors suck? It's incredible difficult being s creative director having to organise multiple people to perform coherently, and even much harder for whole teams.
I think it's natural for humans to reduce and simplify things we don't engage with every day, or our brains would be overloaded. So we just handwave it off. We do it to other people too unfortunately... Remember how complex your life (internal and external) is; other's lives are equally complex and nuanced.
Difficult in terms of effort. Not difficult in terms of skill. Make no mistake the quality of a movie is more the sum of the quality of the parts then it is the creative director. Who wrote the script? Who did the digital effects? Who did the lighting? Who did the editing?
The director did the hard work of picking the people and issuing orders.
>I think it's natural for humans to reduce and simplify things we don't engage with every day, or our brains would be overloaded. So we just handwave it off. We do it to other people too unfortunately... Remember how complex your life (internal and external) is; other's lives are equally complex and nuanced.
Except I am more or less a director. Not one for movies but for a company.
There is a difference between handwaving something off versus being delusional about your own role within the world. Directing is hard work, management is hard work. But none of these things are skilled work.
>All fiction writers suck? I don't know how much fiction you read, but it's incredible varied. There's a lot writers need to think about and control in the reader (and account for multiple profiles) outside of just an idea. But the ideas themselves need to be coherent. own position.
It is certainly easier to create an entire space opera in writing then it is to do it via a movie. Writing is skilled work in terms of one skill only: your ability to write. Every other aspect of it is hard work but, unfortunately, unskilled work.
I realize there are complex plots, paradoxical stories and imaginative settings and the pacing of a story is important as well. But all of this doesn't really require skill just time and deep thought to come up with. Plenty of the most popular authors never had a writing background or talent.
I would say again that these director positions while in principle are easily replaceable they are not in practice due to politics. A director or CEO is where he is mainly due to politics. Politics is unfortunately a skill with aspects that not only need to be imitated by AI but imitated by robotics as well, and it's simply a gateway into the role with no relation to the actuality of the job requirements.
Its hard to imagine a computer issuing the same exact orders as a director. But with LLMs computers are really close to doing that in principle. The issue is as I mentioned the social and political aspect of directing that cannot be replaced yet.
This job was different 5 years ago and this entire animation process would be unrecognizable 50 years ago. Tweening didn’t ruin animation it just lowered the barrier of entry. This too will lower the barrier of entry so our future will be more high quality animation. Some of it will be lasting and some of it will be appreciated for mere seconds for throw away content such as ads.
Maybe when everyone gets home from their boring prompt engineering jobs they can go back to hand rolling animation stacks or whatever other workflow is currently getting destroyed by AI for the “fun” of it.
How much longer will he be able to KEEP his job.
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.
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?
Education (and re-education) should be at least affordable if not completely free. Unemployment benefits should be enough to live on (if not well) and be freely available to anyone getting an education. If that is "too expensive" then limit it to specific educations which are currently in short supply.
And lastly, tax income from investments exactly the same as income from labour. This part is actually necessary because if automation is a future we actually want (and we should!) then this will increasingly become the _only_ form of income.
We are going to print so much money. I don’t see how bumping up capital gains taxes are going to change anything.
People will plow extra help into speculative bubbles. Casino thesis.
Insert strong progressive taxes, especially on wealth, and use it to fund a strong public sector, so _everyone_ has as access to basic goods and services for free, like education/health/transport/… .
I think you vastly underestimate how much money is the rich have siphoned from society, what do you think that printed money goes to? The change impact would be _massive_, suddenly people would have disposable money instead of crushing debts, nd actually stimulate the economy!
Having worked for both European and US companies, I would say that a) innovation is mutual (we learn from each other) and talent/mediocrity are pretty much evenly distributed.
The US has a more "dynamic" economy in some sense - for example the VC ecosystem is far better funded - but is detrimental in others (Byzantine health care system deters would-be entrepreneurs).
Guido van Rossum - Microsoft Distinguished Engineer
Bjarne Stroustrup - professor of Computer Science at Columbia University (City of New York)
Linus Torvalds - Nationality American/US since 2010 (should I write GNU/American/US? Someone educate me).
Erlang - I don't know anything about Erlang so I've got nothing to say.
Nokia - brutally ejected from the market by the Americans, bought out and sepukku-ed under Microsoft leadership. Now phones may as well be an Asian technology. Oversaw the collapse of European leadership in the mobile space, to the point where it is going to be a case study in how to fail at innovation.
Spotify - Leading EU tech success story. Makes up 50% of the counterexamples, along with ASML. Not detectable as a serious tech company when compared to Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc, etc.
HTML - I mean, we'd probably have managed without the Europeans on this one. Although useful, HTML isn't a very technical accomplishment. Anyone could invent this, including most CS undergrads.
Most stuff you cheer here is basically a few tech giants out of Silicon Valley. The science kickstart for all that came from a bunch of scientists (like Von neumann) you got when winning WW2 from europe. In a time when many potential competitors were still rebuilding from ruins.
This is over now, europeans tend to no longer go to the us but still produce excellent scientists, Asian countries catched up and both continents start to leave the US behind in most aspects as a desirable place to live, except for 2 things: Military power and billionaires.
Enjoy your 5 tech giants while they last, but also keep in mind that these are international now and draw from nonamerican intellectual power also.
Don't forget that the USians would all be speaking Japanese if it wasn't for the technology they "borrowed" from the British.
American "RADAR" was a laughable non-starter until they got shown how to make magnetrons by Randall and Boot.
Of course Nokia was eclipsed by foreign competition (mostly due to terrible management), but it was still innovative in its time. Just as US companies today face competition from Asia.
> Although useful, HTML isn't a very technical accomplishment. Anyone could invent this, including most CS undergrads.
Yes, but they didn't, did they? It's easy to look at something with 20/20 hindsight and say "anyone could have done this". Back in 1989 Berners-Lee had that insight.
a) blackmailing for some reason stops working
b) non-military related businesses are vanishing
c) increasing %share of your population has a degrading life quality
d) military costs become unsustainable for questionable ROI
… doubling down on military is a death spiral, especially when the funding money comes from slashing public services.
Yes, For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
Europe has more % Entrepreneurs/Self-employed people than the US, lots of great companies even though not leading in the richest top5-ranking, and the work ethic is focussed during working hours instead of chitchatting/looking busy 12h+ per day.
Maybe you are also fooled by one critical thing: US companies are muuuuch better at marketing than European ones, outshining them so you tend to see exclusively US blogvertising and not where real innovation actually happens: all around the world now and the US actually falling behind.
I also think at least US tech has significantly larger firms, but I dont think thats directly in line with societal good. Seems pretty fucking cancerous to me. Cant speak to industries outside of software though.
The biggest advantage I've seen in the US has been the VC ecosystem. For all we deride VCs - and sometimes (particularly given events over the past few weeks) with very good reason, the money spigot is just much more generous in the US. Of course that will change in the new low interest rate economy, but that to me seems more the deciding factor than silly claims that Americans are somehow more innately "innovative" than Europeans.
Instead you have hick senators asking if TikTok listens to your Wifi.
It may be about competition, but it's more likely grandstanding over the latest Red Scare.
US marketing currently happen to be understood almost everywhere and native speakers of English have an advantage. A company does not necessarily need to execute better, but through effective communication they may be able to pretend they are.
There are lot of examples of ideas being picked up and reimplemented in the US, where the original was better but where the adaptation got better traction. The film industry is full of it.
Why should ingenuity not be evenly spread around the globe as well as hopes for a better future? The US represents one particular policy for wealth distribution that happen to work well for, in particular, VCs.
Who cares about this big majority of people that can’t afford stuff?
That there is an absurdly increasing wealth gap is a fact, but that doesn't mean that - for the time being - US households as consumers are still spending lots of money. And if you're in the B2B side of the market then it's even easier.
All the while you can now do stuff in English all over europe increasingly well and legislations are getting normalized between countries, ignoring the odd brexit events here and there.
Ultimately what I am saying is: the factor exists and is significant, but getting lower for the US and other parts of the world are catching up rather quickly.
For sure Europeans are not keen to have to deal with china or Russia as the new world powers instead of the US. Really! But sometimes friends have to call out each other when things go in a bad direction.
But most Americans probably have to deal with the fact that they really aren’t the greatest country on earth any longer, except for military spending, gun deaths and prisoners. This realization is needed before one can really make steps into improving things again.
Yes a walkable city is a massive life quality factor, but one can only „get it“ after experiencing it. Add good public transport on top of that and you can see why european/asian cities are so popular nowadays
NYC Omny card introduced October 2021
There is no innovation in the US, nothing that would make me want to get up and go to work in the morning.
People are so much more relaxed there. 99% of the concern about AI is because we’re living in a cut throat capitalistic society, if we knew that AI didn’t mean starving or losing our homes, we’d be way more relaxed about it, and imo we’d take out time a bit more and think about safety.
It’s the American race to the bottom attitude which is IMO no longer compatible with a highly automated world.
To start with, if the economy breaks, AI breaks. I saw Microsoft is winging because other search engines are stealing ChatGPT responses, get used to it M$, you own nothing.
The only „solution“ that still avoids realizing the problem is to try to escape into gated communities and shoot those plebs coming too close, ideally robots so no human is at fault conveniently. Or what useful is having that mercedes when most others want to steal or at least damage it?
I, for one, prefer to treat other humans as, well, humans. And by making everyone around me better off, my quality of life also improves.
For simple striking example, how about giving homeless people housing for free, so they can get their stuff together again? You can argue about how „they„ don’t deserve this all day long or simply do it and eliminate a problem https://world-habitat.org/news/our-blog/helsinki-is-still-le... - and even save a lot of money in the process as a society!
You say this like it shows how it's not a plausible outcome or shows the error of this path, but unfortunately that's exactly the American plan. Yes, that. Is what is literally already happening in USA. It is pretty nightmarish. The rich don't seem to think it's a problem, or don't seem to think there's any available option more desirable to them.
Like, we have the true values and they are immoral. This thinking naturally Leads of subselects within the in-group that are even more true than the others… and it gets recursively smaller going towards fascism.
So ultimately you end up with a tiny in-group (the führers are now some billionaires), that still want to backstab the others secretly, who become paranoid over time, isolate themselves to minimize contact with these lesser human beings left behind… and loose touch with reality.
this is where it ends, usually, one way or another.
But the important part is that it actually DOESNT MATTER what they think - at some point people are frustrated enough and simply take it all away from them… the tipping point is when even public security staff (like police) is willing to let it happen - mostly to reduce suffering from family/friends/… .
Stopped reading after you asserted that fascism is a right only attribute.
Political classification is a complex topic though, it needs multiple dimensions to somehow get to something useful as a mental model.
I am „green“ first and foremost, and while the solarpunk or eco-socialist movements surely have socialist aspects, the „green“ main focus isn’t even covered in previous models. Green is neither left nor right nor liberal, it’s… future oriented? Dunno.
Feedback loops set in. If you need X amount of power and Y amount of resources to get it going, but it pays you enough for X times 2 power and Y times 5 resources, the first person to get the machine cranking becomes a human version of that AI paperclip maximizer.
And this has obviously already happened…
So now it's just a matter of, how obvious does this need to get before all the world is paperclips with one idiot sitting there, in his limited human perception, thinking he's won.
It really is Star Trek Future or bust. We don't have the luxury of steampunk attitudes towards power and societal structure anymore. Machine assistance and its multiplier effect are too big, and the runaway feedback effects are too obvious.
Do we have to wait until it's no longer Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg, who are at least very aggressive ambitious idiots paying high prices for their goals, and instead it's some feckless Sam Bankman-Fried who ends up holding the bag? What's it going to take to illustrate the scale of the problem?
Bezos started in the days of Windows 3.1, and already was positioning himself near Microsoft as a force multiplier even though, in those days, he and other humans had to do vast amounts of work and thinking.
If the only requirement for dominating the world is adjacency to AI, the gameplan is still exactly the same but now the work and thinking is what you turn over to machines as a force multiplier. Without that, where is the justification for producing individuals who dominate the world? It becomes, not arbitrary, but purely a factor of who is adjacent to the AI at the right time.
Just waiting for enough momentum, will happily join/support.
This is the challenge. Anything we've got, people like this have tenfold, or a thousandfold, or a millionfold. As long as we're still running on 18th and 19th century societies.
Mind that you're not literally being steered by the billionaires to accomplish their ends, because that has been the history for the last decade or two. The only thing AI brings to the equation is, perhaps, making the process more obvious and providing a toy version of it that anyone can play with.
Before that, we played with the zeitgeist through marketing, big business… and politics. The only difference is that now we can use it to draw pictures or have it talk back to us like it was a person. The billionaires have been 'prompt engineers' for as long as I've been alive.
This might sound totally absurd when you hear it first, but I am fully in favor for randomized rulings in short/limited durations! Lottery style, a bit tweaked to have good entropy.
Other countries didn't go down that road and none regretted it.
Yet it's amazing how quickly some will still exploit any new technology or change to justify reaching for violence. Some never learn.
Access? UK tries this. High taxes and high borrowing to fund a large public sector. Result:
- People can't reliably see dentists or get doctor's appointments because the nationalized health system can't manage capacity properly.
- People can't reliably move around the country because the public sector transport workers are constantly going on strike, despite Tube drivers earning £56k/yr, only a bit less than that of a software engineer.
Putting the public sector in charge doesn't guarantee access to anything, it can easily lead to the opposite, which is why the USSR was constantly being wracked by bizarre shortages especially for anything that mattered to the general public like consumer goods. And now the UK suffers massive healthcare shortages. Same problem.
Not accurate in the slightest, this is due to the current administration deliberately funding the NHS less than it needs to function effectively.
> People can't reliably move around the country because the public sector transport workers are constantly going on strike
Only currently true because of similar reasons, it's not structurally true of that sector.
> Putting the public sector in charge ... And now the UK suffers massive healthcare shortages. Same problem.
Not accurate at all.
Don’t buy into that propaganda, look at the US how privatization ends up: still lots of tax money, additionally people can’t afford stuff, and a few assholes getting insanely rich in the process by siphoning money out of the society.
Try to ensure appropriate money is used to make the NHS effective again, including wages that allows people to live where they work (<1h commute).
Most communist shortages came from being cutoff from international trades with wealthy countries, and having to start from ruins or nothing at all btw. These are different problems, and you might learn in the process why capitalism is going to end soon. :-)
Public transport is actually a fairly small part of the nation's transport, the UK is very car-centric so the strikes largely inconvenience commuters and drive even more people onto the roads, unless they can WFH.
Strikes are also a very recent phenomenon, just in the last 6 months or so, so this is quite a new thing driven by inflation.
Problems with the NHS are very much poor management by the last run of governments where there is a quite a growing suspicion they are deliberately trying to run down the NHS in order to make a case for to privatise it, following e.g. America's disastrous model.
AI is a philosopher's stone that transmutes labor into capital. This is as good as lead into gold for capitalists, but the rest of us are hosed.
Or maybe you mean something like Nordic countries that are capitalist but tax more heavily and redistribute wealth more?
Fairly tax companies' profits.
And then you can afford to just feed 10% of society even if they don't contribute a thing. Also, free world-class education seems to do wonders in Europe ;)
Their quality of life will increase because of all the cheap stuff we can make with ai and robots. They will coexist and compete with robots. Upward mobility should be better, given the access to advanced technology.
Worst case scenario, they can all band together outside of the advanced civilisation, grow their food and live a separate life.
There is no need to make high iq people to pay for low iq to live in a high iq society.
We're already seeing a divide of cities for rich people and cities for poor people. It will just be more pronounced.
Ahh, the old "modern poor people are better off than medevial kings since we have microwaves and supercomputers in our pockets". No matter that they are all stressed, living paycheck to paycheck and a single (treatable) disease from crippling debt.
This sounds a lot better than being a single (treatable) disease from guaranteed death?
Which many, many, historical monarchs experienced.
At least some fraction of such monarchs would have gladly taken the opportunity to swap places if they had known in advance.
You can justify pretty much any horrible thing with "sounds better than a torment nexus"
It's all fun and games until suddenly you're the one on the outside, wondering how you get there.
Try fixing some roads and bridges to start with. They're in terrible shape in most of the US. Any city could probably employ 10 times as many gardeners to take care of the plants and build nicer things.
Elderly need taking care of, and young people teaching. Houses need cleaning. Shoes need shinning. Endless list really.
Stop the traffic on a road to fix it without local administration permission? Do you think getting such permission is easy? How are you going to pay for the materials to do the repairs? Do you think it's easy to get a job as a gardener?
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).
It used to be learn to code then maybe learn to weld or plumb it something that is harder to automate away.
"Just prepare" does not work when years become days.
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.
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.)
I disagree with your point. The problem is that people will gladly accept changes brought by technology up until the point that it affects them personally. The people that bought a cheap vinyl sign were not forced to purchase them, and yet they did.
This is not a problem with tech, it’s a problem with us. If you like liberty, then you know the choice that people will make, and that’s what is terrifying.
You don’t feel like you should quote some data for this claim?
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.
The future predicted via extrapolation of a trendline is unfortunately more probable and more realistic then a future predicted via mistrust of AI.
Artists have already formed lawsuits against companies that own LLMs, this one in the article already involves an artist complaining about his job being more or less replaced.
You have to be next level delusional not to consider the extrapolation to programming.
The thing that is harder to replace is the versatility of the human form. Manual labor can't fully be replaced because robotics have yet to catch up.
>there's no need to reject the inherent value of humanity
There's no fundamental rejection here. Capitalism simply selects the most efficient methodology. If humans arent the most efficient methodology for a given task then capitalism eliminated that methodology. That's the logical extrapolation. You subjective opinions on humanities worth is irrelevant to the most likely outcome.
Historically speaking, from crypto to AI, the market constantly evolves towards the next most profitable thing.
Only regulatory systems like the government has the tendency to temper such things (see the Fed and rising interest rates). However do note that capitalist entities have infiltrated the government and have huge sway over it's regulatory policies meaning that anti-business regulatory policies are unlikely to occur.
All of this just means that my conclusions are most likely going to play out. Barring some event that will cause intense negative public reaction.
Maybe this is the case in the US, the EU is known for being much more strict in its regulations, which is often ridiculed by the rest of the world. Those same people are going to hope for regulations once we see the effects of the current Wild West that is AI.
I don't think the world needs this much constant innovation. Additionally the innovation itself can be disruptive. The US will doggedly pursue profits even if those profits involve technology that can cause the US to eat itself. If AI replaces all jobs and nobody has any money to buy stuff who will the companies sell shit too?
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.
What happens is that it changes the job into something different.
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.
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.
Amazingly, despite 3D graphics, in the year 2023 there are now more employed 2D pixel artists than there were in the 90s. They are still making new games for the NES!
So while I’m sad for this person’s loss of love for their current job, I’m sure they will be able to find work.
There are probably some employed pixel artists that liked creating things pixel by pixel and are disliking the fact that their job is radically changing since these tools create an expectation for faster output.
I apologize if I came across arguing with anyone.
I just wanted to call out that to me - it doesn't seem like this person thinks they are going to lose their job. They did their job in a way that they really enjoyed. That's changed.
Does that happen all the time in other industries? Yes. Is it valid to point out that this has happened before? Yes. Will this person be able to find work? Yes.
This person is just expressing their frustration. With the way all these tools are progressing, I imagine we are going to be seeing posts like these more in the future.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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"
You're mistaking christian fundamentalists for conservatives. Conservatives are saying that changing your name doesn't mean you now get to compete in women's sports.
My point was: "Progress is always good, conservatives need to go" has been touted by the same people for decades, and suddenly they want to change the tune when it affects them. It's predictable and should be ignored.
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.
That's not "progress is necessary good". We're forming the future, our choices define the future, we're not damned to be powerless and either embrace what cannot be changed or suffer from resisting that which cannot be stopped.
Right now, lots of people are having their first experience that not all progress is necessarily good. It's fun to watch how they suddenly change their tune, much like banks when they need another bailout, and they start talking about "what's good for society" a lot.
> As far as affecting different people, LLMs are about to squish the middle class.
I'll believe it when I see it. We were promised widespread unemployment thanks to robotics, too.
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...
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.
The same —hilariously inefficient— design patterns.
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)