Become a plumber. It'll be a while till robots can replace you in the trades.
You’re telling a highly creative person to pursue an unstimulating job that they’re not passionate about.
Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG
31–40 of 225 posts
Re: Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder about that. Sometimes when technology makes people 10x more productive society responds by increasing the demand for what they can do by a factor of ten. One example: I'm running an early-stage startup. If an explainer video for my product will cost me $20,000 I'm probably not going to commission one. If it costs $2,000 then maybe I will.
This is a huge part of it, and if you can ride that wave, you can be the person charging $10k for what everyone else is scrambling around trying to charge $2k.
Yeah it's really like the 90% are in a race to the bottom and the 10% are in a new field.
Re: Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG
#33Add these technologies to your toolbox. It is not easy to do "prompt engineering". Keep in mind that most generated material looks awful -- there is a huge selection bias going on. The outputted stuff needs to made production ready also, distribution, etc. If anything, the emergence of these technologies should greatly expand. You will have a new customer base that was not available before, and you will be able to de…
> Keep in mind that most generated material looks awful -- there is a huge selection bias going on.
Yeah. Look at machine translation - it's gotten pretty good, in some limited cases it's perfect, but it's also frequently just clueless, and for anything serious you absolutely need a real human translator.
I think these AI tools will improve, but I'm extremely skeptical that it's going to improve by like an order of magnitude any time soon. It will still require extensive tuning, heavy selection, and accepting that you probably can almost never get it to make exactly what you want.
Re: Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the difference between a human artist walking around in the world, seeing images and videos (many of which are under copyright) and then using those images as inspiration, versus an AI being fed millions of images and videos as part of a large training set? I am not a lawyer but I don't really see the "it's not fair use" argument.
There's a whole lot of unapologetic artistic theft of others’ work that has contributed to the creation of new art.
why do we even call it theft or pretend that any artist arrived at ideas without inspiration?
Re: Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG
#35Perhaps in the short term you do nothing. It will be many years before this moves from “toy” to “tool”. The industry is made up of humans and humans adapt at human speed. You don’t have to outrun the AI bears, you just have to outrun your colleagues. Perhaps this will just make your job easier and not impact your ability to make money. Maybe you will make even more money. And if at some point the industry dries up co…
I agree. The Imagen videos are incredibly impressive, but they are also cherry-picked examples and there are noticeable quality issues. Similar to what we have seen with self-driving cars, I expect it will take years to go from an impressive tech demo to the kind of tool that can reliably deliver the kind of quality, versatility, and specificity needed for professional applications.
So at the very least the parent probably has time to do a bit of soul searching to decide and prepare for their next undertaking.
Re: Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG
#36I am a 2d artist and I have similar feelings. Are you as full of loathing for all the HN people saying “just integrate the AI into your practice” as I am? I like drawing stuff and I love that this pays my bills and I really have zero interest in becoming a “prompt engineer” instead. I think a strategy of creating an image of AI art as cheap and tacky is useful. For how long, I don’t know. If we’re lucky then it’ll tu…
It’s ridiculous. There will be no integration - my job is just going to become less profitable and diverse. It’s beyond nonsense.
I make 100k a year in London making CG. I don’t see how that will be available to me doing AÍ prompt work.
Re: Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG
#37Learn the new AI tools and market yourself as an AI video production consultant.
Not a job I’m interested in tbh.
Re: Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG
#38I'm not so sure it will be that easy to exactly control the output of the AI algos. This is not that important when doing art for art's sake but, for commercial purposes, if you can't make that can of coke slightly bigger or more redder, or have the teenage in the picture hold it slighlty differently (all as per client's feedback), the tool might be a failure.
I think it's more likely that people are simply thinking of the AI algo as doing too much, rather than this kind of tool becoming a general failure. There will likely be many, many steps before, during, and after AI image / video generation that will need a highly skilled human in the loop to produce a great result.
Re: Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
...which, by the way, is how most automation turns out. I've worked in semiconductor manufacturing and software, and in both cases the automation that was at one point predicted to eliminate jobs, just made the people more productive, which made them more valuable, and instead of fewer jobs there were more, because more could be done by each person (so the range of applications that were economical to do was increase…
It made them appear more productive. The machines just did the once basic work. Numerous studies have been conducted to quantify which technology made workers more productive. They all ended up with models too complex and variable to be practical. Society just needs to accept a whole of our social truism is politically correct LARP to the drum beat of a financiers profit memes. What are a bunch of rich elders going t…
Did you generate this comment with GPT-3?
Re: Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG
#40I am a 2d artist and I have similar feelings. Are you as full of loathing for all the HN people saying “just integrate the AI into your practice” as I am? I like drawing stuff and I love that this pays my bills and I really have zero interest in becoming a “prompt engineer” instead. I think a strategy of creating an image of AI art as cheap and tacky is useful. For how long, I don’t know. If we’re lucky then it’ll tu…
What's the difference between a human artist walking around in the world, seeing images and videos (many of which are under copyright) and then using those images as inspiration, versus an AI being fed millions of images and videos as part of a large training set? I am not a lawyer but I don't really see the "it's not fair use" argument.
> What's the difference between a human artist walking around in the world, seeing images and videos (many of which are under copyright) and then using those images as inspiration, versus an AI being fed millions of images and videos as part of a large training set?
What's the difference between retelling someone's story orally, and using a printing press to make an exact replica?
What's the difference between writing down a conversation from memory, and recording that conversation?
What's the difference between making a nude painting of someone, and taking a nude photograph?
What's the difference between going out in public among human beings, and going out in public where there's a facial recognition camera on every corner feeding everyone's movements into a centralized database?
What's the difference between the grandma who knows everyone in the village, vs the social media company that knows everyone in the world?
Social customs evolved in a context of fundamental, sharp limits to human cognition and skill. When technology smashes through those limits, those social customs don't work anymore. Copyright law didn't exist in a world where you couldn't copy things mechanically. If you apply the old rules naively, you end up with a nasty world that nobody wants. So we have to invent new rules to limit how people use the new technology, otherwise people get exploited and life becomes intolerable.
"What does copyright law say about this" doesn't even make sense as a question. Copyright was invented before AI was. The question should be, "what would a society someone would want to live in, say about this?"