Same feeling as a software developer. Programming as we know it will be completely transformed before the end of the decade.
Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG
111–120 of 225 posts
Re: Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG
#112While I think humanity is bad at predicting what the future will look like (where's my damn flying car..), _my_ prediction is that AI video generation will not be a major disrupter to ad agencies / film makers. It's a nice experiment, but I really doubt the level of artistic direction required to meet specific customer requirements will ever be replaced by "AI"
I think it probably will within a decade. Just to use still images, the tools that have come out with stable diffusion already allow a lot in terms of generating variations, inpainting, fixing faces, etc. Give these tools time to mature, models keep getting better and bigger, and hardware keeps getting better - you are absolutely going to replace still images "soon" and if you can do still images, video won't be far…
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Re: Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Then perhaps you'll have to do what the vast, vast majority of humanity has done for thousands of years, work jobs they don't like to put food on the table. Working in art is a luxury reserved for only the highest echelon of people, like Michaelangelo or Leonardo. The rest of us are not so lucky.
I beg to differ. Art isnt just fancy paintings for pseudo intellectuals to show off. Art is a good looking app, a nice looking car, a cozy feeing house design or kitchen furniture, an ad that communicates vision, and so on. Art is emotion which ai cant create. Sure it can randomise visuals within the constraints of what it has “learned” but it definitely cant create human emotion. No amount of micro-dosing can convince the world it is going to completely replace artists or indeed programmers.
Re: Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG
#114Learn how to write. It's as simple as that. These models will require well-crafted prompts to produce the desired outputs. Your way to get ahead of this is to learn how the models transform a prompt into a video or image. You will quickly realize there's way more nuance and need for precise terminology than the shelf examples you're seeing. These models are only as good as the prompts they receive. Someone needs to w…
Yeah, but what happens when GPT-3 starts writing better prompts than humans? People are talking like that’s not going to happen, just like a few years ago people wouldn’t have foreseen how far AI Art would come. I feel like putting bounds on where AI will go next is a bit of a fool’s errand.
You still need to prompt GPT-3 with something. Stacking two systems won't improve the outputs if your original input lacks precision. Garbage in, garbage out. Granted, GPT-3 requires way less precision to generate something useful, but you still need to pass the proper context.
I think you're right, though. It's hard to speculate how these things would turn out, but I think it's reasonable to assume that we will still need some relatively sophisticated human input to produce the best results out of these systems.
Re: Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG
#115Auto-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…
AI hasn't really come for programming yet. Copilot, imperfect as it is, is proof that the problem can be approached. I think junior software engineers could realistically be obsolete in 5 years. Imagine a software architect being able to prompt: "write a rest API that exposes user data from system A to internal system B", and have a complete API dumped out, with tests, ready to be deployed.
Sounds a bit like Zapier. Love that tool.
Re: Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG
#116Become 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.
Perhaps, but jobs are what you make of them. I know a guy that does floor polishing and epoxy floors. Not a very creative job but plenty of work.
Him and his crew spend a lot of time together. They have deep discussions about philosophy, art and ethics while spreading smelly goop around concrete floors. I bet they go home pretty intellectually satisfied from doing epoxy floors.
Re: Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG
#117In a broad sense, we can think of the economy in terms of resource inputs to society and the dependencies that result in goods and services. This is the kind of thing you can plot out, industry by industry, with Wardley mapping.
Now, clearly, resource extraction jobs aren't going away. The methods change as we go from "ape poking at insects with stick" to "hydraulic fracking", but someone has to have some oversight of the process.
But everything leading to a resulting experience fulfilling some human need is subject to change with AI in the picture, because we can imagine machines in the loop doing all the processing, moving, coordinating, and final delivery. Experiences that used to be jobs don't have to be anymore.
And therefore the whole social contract of industrial economies is subject to a gradual shift towards indifference: if I have some land, some machines, some access to raw materials, I don't need a job, or to sell things, or to run an organization. But, counterbalancing that, there still have to be voices coordinating and controlling access to those things, because there are too many ethical dangers involved in making it completely permissionless.
What financial systems(hence money, wages, etc.) do in controlling access is a way of assigning credit, so that you gain general permissions to stuff. If you do things that persistently assign credit to yourself, without also turning it into a reassignment of credit that makes enemies(power-monging etc.), you survive in any economy.
The role of anything artistic in that is, broadly speaking, going to be one of storytelling and aesthetic presentation of information. And I think the key insight to take from the tools we're getting is that direct prompt engineering is going to be taken for granted; but prompt engineering as a layer on top of or beneath a more specialized skillset will still produce distinguished results.
That is, if you can glue a little bit of API code together, you can create a job where 90% of your creative time is still spent in a more hands-on mode, but then you send it through the machine as the last step. The trick is in not getting too dependent on someone's platform control play in the process.
Re: Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG
#118My practical advice: Plan for your future from a blank state of mind.
Reduce all unnecessary expenses, invest into more self-sufficient survival.
The race between semi-pros and professionals is marketing driven, same applies in AI situation, AI will not be as good as the best in the business, but clients/corporations will use the AI argument to lower the reward for professional labor.
This is normal. This is the Surveillance Capitalism. And is the direct result of the lack of ethics behind the tech overlords. They simply don't care. And now their social position of demigods and keepers of "the knowledge" will give them the ultimate power over peoples imagination and thoughts.
So be it. I cannot stop this. And the "adaptation" argument is utter nonsense. But I can move into the woods and live a simple and happy life. I can create my own paper and paints from surrounding materials, and I will paint for myself and my friends.
The majority of the next generations will have no problem to be controlled by AI. Corporations will package this as a "progress" and people will swallow it willingly.
So what? It is a choice, a minority will refuse to live in AI induced comma and will search for human touch, human emotions, human produced reality.
Re: Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Web dev as in building websites has been dead for a quite a while. Web dev as in building web systems is alive and kicking. I fail to see how a complex webapp can be written in no code. A wordpress kind of app, sure. A complex web ui for a complex backend nah.
You missed my point and are stating the obvious. The problem is that that is a just a tiny tiny tiny fraction of all websites. The vast majority of websites are websites. Which leaves all web devs fighting over the few web app gigs.
Re: Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you genuinely asking for advice on what to do? It seems like your options are embrace the new tech, find a niche where you can outcompete it, or find a new way to support yourself that you like better. HN can't tell you which of those to choose. Personally I think there's a good chance you're overestimating the the extent to which your day-to-day job will actually change by incorporating AI. Machine learning was…
I am just answering what seems to be a common suggestion, which is become an AÍ prompt person. I have two objections to this idea 1. I don’t think this is a well paid job with a moat of a skillset Thats built over years of experience - I assume there will be a race for good UX/UI in AÍ generation of images. The other thing is it doesn’t interest me simply because I don’t see it as a craft of imagemaking. Making a goo…
> AÍ imagemaking doesn’t compare really to spending 10 hours agonising over lighting a shot which is what I love
I sympathize with you a lot here.
But it's not really a new problem that great art usually doesn't have commercial value commensurate to effort or quality.