Any field that requires intelligence is safe,
as intelligence requires self awareness
Ask HN: What creative field will be safe from AI?
11–20 of 55 posts
Re: Ask HN: What creative field will be safe from AI?
#12I wouldn't say safe, but safEST is probably writing. Like creative writing where the narrative is something that spans hundreds or even thousands of pages with plot interactions that aren't directly apparent in the text itself. At least until a true AI/HCI is created. Most "AI" things are pretty superficial pattern recognition that are just better at unbiased processing of large "shallow" datasets.
As an amateur fiction writer who has experimented with GPT-3 I tend to agree.
However AI can definitely play a role in the process, especially around editing. Professional writers have the advantage of professional editors and expert beta readers. I would love a fiction writing companion similar to GitHub copilot that could suggest improvements and refine prose.
I think visual artists could benefit from similar tooling. Imagine a comic art tool that can take a pencil drawing and ink it in, or even take a rough sketch and refine the details.
Re: Ask HN: What creative field will be safe from AI?
#13All of 'em. All of them will be safe. AI generated content is devoid of meaning and randomly generating some pictures isn't indicative of anything to me. Human works of creativity are so much more than randomly generating things from prompts - and don't forget you're not seeing ALL of the pics that have been generated, but some of them. As people start to generate crap at tremendous volume with AI, more value and emp…
> All of 'em. All of them will be safe. AI generated content is devoid of meaning…
None of ‘em. None of them will be safe. Humans ascribe meaning to works where there is none, and intent by the artist or an AI can be wholly immaterial to what people appreciate about it. Great works may come from AI but the greatness of a work is virtue of the work itself.
That said, just because a computer can do it doesn’t mean that a human can’t, or that people will prefer the AI work over the human’s. I think AI threatens jobs in a lot of places, but not necessarily in creative spaces.
Re: Ask HN: What creative field will be safe from AI?
#14Do something where there's no training data available.
The AI companies are re-encoding large corpora of human creative work as a kind of compressed, conceptually-indexed representation. This allows that work to be mixed and the patterns regurgitated in very flexible ways.
Everybody's output (our creative work) is assimilated by the AI, and becomes the AI's output.
For example, OpenAI's Codex is trained on about 54 million public GitHub repositories.
This allows Microsoft's CoPilot to regurgitate pieces of that code without attribution. Code from many sources is blended together and regurgitated for Microsoft's customers (without any acknowledgement of the source).
It is perhaps the greatest theft of intellectual property in the history of Man.
Re: Ask HN: What creative field will be safe from AI?
#15All of 'em. All of them will be safe. AI generated content is devoid of meaning and randomly generating some pictures isn't indicative of anything to me. Human works of creativity are so much more than randomly generating things from prompts - and don't forget you're not seeing ALL of the pics that have been generated, but some of them. As people start to generate crap at tremendous volume with AI, more value and emp…
There are also such things as art direction, vision, and style. Even if AI can mimic style with style transfer, it will never achieve greatness this way.
You can apply an AI-powered “Starry Night” filter to any picture, but do you really think Van Gogh would draw something like that?
Re: Ask HN: What creative field will be safe from AI?
#16All of 'em. All of them will be safe. AI generated content is devoid of meaning and randomly generating some pictures isn't indicative of anything to me. Human works of creativity are so much more than randomly generating things from prompts - and don't forget you're not seeing ALL of the pics that have been generated, but some of them. As people start to generate crap at tremendous volume with AI, more value and emp…
> All of 'em. All of them will be safe.
Erm. Not really. I used to pay artists very frequently for art to be used in web pages as illustration. Not many people do this. But I did.
But when I saw the quality of pictures genereated by CLIP guided diffusion, I knew they were production-ready.
I used some of those instead.
I briefly worked with a company that served ecommerce sites with automating of various tasks- one of them was generating description of products.
In a meeting I asked a client how did they do it before. They said that they hired struggling writers. We replaced them for a fraction of cost.
We were not only doing bland product description, we were also generating beautiful prose around products.
I am still on the waitlist of Dall-E 2, but some friends have access and I played with it for hours, and it is not a trivial technology. It is production ready that can replace much of stock photos with generated content. So, not only artists, but some photographers are at risk, too.
It's not like AI will replace all creative workers, but it will certainly replace some of them, starting today. Hell, it has already started.
> and don't forget you're not seeing ALL of the pics that have been generated, but some of them
This is not some corporate trick. This is standard practice. When I worked on an image generation project, I learned that it was standard to generate 250 or so images, and use CLIP to rank them, i.e. let CLIP score the images based on input prompt. Then the top-k images with highest scores, i.e. most similarity to prompt according to CLIP will be displayed.
> for calculating and optimizing moves and branching paths - no creativity is needed.
In the AlphaGo documentary, it was shown that one move was very original. It was unprecedented in Go history. Maybe it wasn’t creative, but it can mimic creativity.
Re: Ask HN: What creative field will be safe from AI?
#17All of 'em. All of them will be safe. AI generated content is devoid of meaning and randomly generating some pictures isn't indicative of anything to me. Human works of creativity are so much more than randomly generating things from prompts - and don't forget you're not seeing ALL of the pics that have been generated, but some of them. As people start to generate crap at tremendous volume with AI, more value and emp…
> All of 'em. All of them will be safe. AI generated content is devoid of meaning… None of ‘em. None of them will be safe. Humans ascribe meaning to works where there is none, and intent by the artist or an AI can be wholly immaterial to what people appreciate about it. Great works may come from AI but the greatness of a work is virtue of the work itself. That said, just because a computer can do it doesn’t mean that…
No piece of art exists without context. With AI there is no context, no meaning, no relevance. A pretty image by itself is just that - a bunch of bytes displayed on device of your choice.
Re: Ask HN: What creative field will be safe from AI?
#18Can you combine your talents with AI to make something better than either could alone?
Re: Ask HN: What creative field will be safe from AI?
#19> and Dall-E 2 has made me realize that my skills will soon be almost worthless.
How did you come to this realization? We will always need artists. Art, painting was always a zero-sum game with very few on top making millions and millions making peanuts. Dall-E 2 will further this divide. Art will venture further in the zero-sum area.
But we will always need artists, and people will continue to create art no matter what. Some of those created art will garner attention and many of them will speak to many of us. We will pay. I regularly pay for art.
> My role, if it continues to exist, will consist of prompting the software and selecting among its outputs.
No. Non-artists can do it comfortably. I have used CLIP-guided diffusion generated art in many web pages, that I picked myself, that replaced some art jobs.
> My artistic skills, my craft, has been automated.
But not your identity or you soul. Art always had a personal component.
> Go master Lee Sedol announced his retirement from professional play
I don't know why he did it. Chess was solved before AI with IBM Deep Blue, and during AI with Alpha Zero. Yet Chess continues to be extremely famous. Chess is more popular than ever. People are going gaga over Magnus Carlsen, Vishy Anand, and matches in general. Chess and Go will be famous even after a century or five.
> What creative skills will be safe from AI?
People will like to draw even after Dall-E version N. Teachers will be needed. Art teachers' jobs are safe.
People will love to listen to a live concert no matter what. Musicians' jobs are safe.
I can go on. Art, of any kind, was a field of lack of symmetry. Barbers, plumbers, accountants, tailors, tellers make similar amount of money all over the world (considering the PPP). But artists don't. Art was always a field of huge disparity.
One barber can do one person's hair at one time. But a musician can stream to millions and play live to thousands. Art always scaled and was thus always a field of wild inequality.
What AI will do immediately is further the divide. It will wipe out the vocation of many at the bottom.
Not traditionally considered a "creative work", but teaching jobs will be safe for quite a long time.
Have you considered illustration jobs, design jobs? Generating one image is far from a finished designed, well-thought layout. What about game art or animation studio?
Re: Ask HN: What creative field will be safe from AI?
#20In the renaissance paintbrush skills were a prerequisite for being for an artist, and maybe tomorrow’s artists will use giant GPU cluster with some ‘AI’ in them as paintbrushes.
Maybe, the only creative skills that will matter in the future (from a future art historian perspective) will be the ones to program or use AI.
Bu I don’t think the game is over:
- if you find AI art tools too demeaning and they make you feel that you’re only a dumb prompt writer, become or convince a programmer to build a better tool that connects with your own creative mind
- Or, come up with a new form of art that rebels against the current technological things. Your predecessors were able to raise a middle finger to photography by inventing new abstract forms of art