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Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG

news.ycombinator.com

61–70 of 225 posts

Re: Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG

#61
post #39
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Ok in this case it did not make him more productive...

Re: Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG

#62
The only constant in life is change. There is no guarantee of stability or order in life, despite the human desire to carve it out where it doesn't exist. You can either embrace that change, or fight against it.

Embracing the change means learning the new tools and adapting your job around them. Fighting against it means lobbying the government to create protectionist laws for your industry to prevent new technology from disrupting you.

The former is easier if you are more flexible and open minded. The latter is easier if you have a lot of money and are well connected. Neither is inherently easy, which is why most of us just complain instead.

Re: Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG

#63
post #40

Earlier 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? 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 writin…

> What's the difference between retelling someone's story orally, and using a printing press to make an exact replica? But that's not what's happening. You can't "crack open" a model to find the bitmap of a piece of training data. It's not there any more than a painting you've seen is "in" your brain. A model sometimes creates things that look similar to existing pieces if it got a ton of copies of the same image, fo…

>But that's not what's happening. You can't "crack open" a model to find the bitmap of a piece of training data. It's not there any more than a painting you've seen is "in" your brain. A model sometimes creates things that look similar to existing pieces if it got a ton of copies of the same image, for the same reason that most people's artistic rendition of a tree is going to be more accurate than their rendition of an anteater.

In other words, a technology that has never existed before and doesn't follow any of the categories and schemas we dreamt up to organize the world. So we need to make new rules.

Re: Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG

#64
I am not an ad person, but to me they always contain a specific subject (thing, place, etc). If you are making an ad for widget XJ900, you don't want it to actually show the XK800. What's harder, trying to prompt the AI into generating content on your specific subject, or just modeling/filming the subject with current methods? Which is harder to incorporate client feedback? So far, slight tweaks in prompts can produce radically difficult results. Paint back can help, but we'll see.

I have yet to see a stable diffusion output that is high quality work. They often lack any compositional sense, and all the lines are weirdly wavy. It's like someone trying to do realism but with the motor skills and spatial awareness of a toddler. The picture that won the state fair awards looked really terrible on further inspection. Basic composition elements like the horizon line or the giant circle in the middle were all skewed, and not in an attractive way. Any elements beyond the central figures are just noise. I see that story as more about bad judging than anything else.

Stable diffusion has its own version of uncanny valley, and it may be a long time before we can cross it. The people who decree stable diffusion as the death of human art don't often to have a firm grasp on artistic or design fundamentals.

Re: Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could have the same turnaround and half the employees, guess which is cheaper.

Imagine you have a company. You can get your work force and double your gross or keep half your employees and leave your gross unchanged. Which would you pick? Keep in mind you don't have to go through the headache of actually hiring people - all you need to do is not fire them.

Employees are my biggest expense by a wide margin. I could drop half my staff and increase my net overnight. I'm not going to double my customers nearly that fast so I'll be burning through payroll in the meantime... especially considering customer acquisition is going to get harder than employee acquisition over the next year.

Re: Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG

#66

I 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.

If that's how you feel, then I assume you won't be adapting at all (as evidenced by your other comment [0]), so your 100k job will go too to the ones who do adapt. I'm not saying this to be mean, you asked the question, people answered and it seems you don't like the answer. What are we supposed to do about how you feel?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33099182#33100703

Re: Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'm not sure how to say this in a non-dickish way, but most of us have to do stuff we don't particularly enjoy in order to make a living. I get that it sucks from your vantage point, but like... I'm sure there were stablehands who loved horses and had no interest in becoming mechanics. Sh…

The problem with your example is that it assumes there is a place for him to go to. Stable hands becoming mechanics. That is the key concern with automation replacing jobs is that it is a zero sum game.

Lump of labor fallacy. Automation is not a zero sum game because it creates new jobs.

Re: Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG

#68
AI for long time will be just another tool to improve your production. It will probably reduce the more repetitive boring part of the work. Quickly generating content will let you try out a lot of ideas faster and seeing the different results will inspire you more. Some of the simpler work will probably go away but most likely it will be replaced by other work that currently is considered more complex but becomes easier and cheaper with AI so more customer can afford it.

AI+human will produce better results than just AI for a long time but you have to learn how to use it.

One of the interesting possibility will be to train your own AI on your private creative work/dataset so others could not have it if they don't have access to your private dataset, and it would produce your style better than some general AI. There will be services that will do it for you as for example Emad from StabilityAI already mentioned they will provide something like that.

But yeah, if AI keeps improving the end game is a little scary.

Re: Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG

#69
post #40

Earlier 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? 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 writin…

> What's the difference between retelling someone's story orally, and using a printing press to make an exact replica? But that's not what's happening. You can't "crack open" a model to find the bitmap of a piece of training data. It's not there any more than a painting you've seen is "in" your brain. A model sometimes creates things that look similar to existing pieces if it got a ton of copies of the same image, fo…

the fact that automation always moves wealth into the hands of a smaller and smaller group of people

This is very much not a fact.

Re: Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG

#70

Auto-generated content has a tendency to raise only the baseline in industries. For web development first it was Dreamweaver, then WordPress templates, then SquareSpace and Wix. Bootstrap came along, then Material and a thousand other prepackaged design languages. While these advancements reduced the income from building mom & pop restaurant websites, the demand for high-end curated sites never really changed. Just f…

> those clients never dry up

As someone who used to work in web dev, they most certainly do and did.

And you have an ever growing pool (worldwide) of workers who are jostling over that dwindling supply of gigs.

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