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

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

#81
post #25

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…

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 programmer looking at lots of open source code and github copilot looking at open source code? (And I'm talking MIT licensed code here).

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

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

These are some bold claims. Id like to see some evidence.

There are more bank tellers today in USA than at any other point, despite the growing number of ATM machines.

https://www.aei.org/economics/what-atms-bank-tellers-rise-ro...

This doesn't always happen mind you. But it shows that your (and my) economic instincts are piss poor. We can't just assume what the future holds.

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Another few examples:

3D animation has killed a lot of tweening artists (the people who smoothed out animations for Disney Films like 101 Dalmations or Sleeping Beauty). But 3d animation created the need of modelers, texture artists, riggers, and more.

Automatic Drum machines didn't kill drummers either, but allowed for more music to be made in general.

The only thing that automation "killed" recently was Lawyers, as online webpages that auto-generated common forms removed a ton of jobs that Lawyers used to do. IIRC, Lawyers are in somewhat of a decline because of this.

So it just goes to show that no one really can predict these things.

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

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Evidence

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

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That was a fact during the industrial revolution and it’s quite possible it will happen now with the digital revolution.

The average height of Englishmen actually went down during the industrial rev. presumably due to malnutrition. New histories of the period think of it as potentially as one of the few times we know where there was an enormous economic boom alongside a general collapse of quality of life.

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

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I hear this a lot, that “automation creates jobs” chestnut.

Whenever people try to support this argument, they either fall into the “not thinking quantitatively” fallacy by pointing out that “sure, 25 writers got laid off, but the company used to have no programmers, and now they have 2!” Or they fall into the “not explaining the mechanism” fallacy by giving examples from the past where “stablehands retrained as mechanics” without examining why that happened, and what aspects make 20th century mechanization and 21st century automation completely different in kind.

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

#87

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.

I would be surprised to learn that the absolute number of web devs today has gone down since SquareSpace came out. Yes, the $500 website is dead, but there’s still tons of work for tons of people.

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

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s not about how I feel - it’s about the potential obliteration of my way of life. The people who will make money out of this transition will be AÍ engineers, not image makers. I will bet you 1 ETH and place it under a smart contract bet if you’d like.

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

#89

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.

Meh. There’s plenty of work to go around. At the low end, companies are rebuilding their websites all the time, whether it’s on Webflow or whatever. At the higher end, there is plenty of integration work, enterprise apps, etc to be built. Competition is fierce but there is opportunity if you specialize properly and build the right relationships.

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

#90
post #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…

This is the least BS comment I’ve seen here. Thanks you’re right, change is inevitable. I just dropped this here as a challenge if you will, but the overall feeling seems to be “you will actually make more money” or just “become an AÍ prompt person”. The first I don’t think is true and the second doesn’t interest me honestly. I trained in my craft so I could become a craftsman, if you will I’ve always wanted to become a monk who would make copies of books, not a printing press operator.
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