Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 225 posts

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

#171

Post by smallerfish »

badpun wrote: post #165
smallerfish wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maintaing code written by such AI must be truly nightmarish...

Imagine that it only had black box testing - you can verify the ins and outs, and don't care about the middle. The AI's responsible for the entire codebase for that particular API.

I don't believe this will scale to all software anytime soon, but the type of thing that junior engineers work on is vulnerable.

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

#172

Post by navane »

smallerfish wrote: post #97
notjustanymike wrote: post #52

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…

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.

If junior software engineers are obsolete in five years, where would we get senior software engineers from in fifteen years?

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

#173

Post by chii »

shakabrah wrote: post #50
exolymph wrote: post #48

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.

> That is the key concern with automation replacing jobs is that it is a zero sum game.

it's not zero sum, because the resources that used to be spent paying you now could be spent on something else. This increase in efficiency means more goods/services could be produced!

Of course, that newly saved money would be spent on someone else, instead of the person being made redundant by automation. It is thus a societal responsibility to retrain/reskill that person, and the training perhaps also partially be paid for by the entity benefiting directly from the automation.

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

#174

Post by chii »

thot_experiment wrote: post #136
throwaway5959 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people work on farms as a percentage of the population now as they did 100 years ago? We still eat, but now almost no one farms. Most everyone is still employed. We’ll figure something out.

Ok but that's exactly the problem, the situation we've "figured out" is kinda trash. A bunch of rich people own all the farms and we gave everyone bullshit admin jobs because we can't admit to ourselves that almost nobody farms and we still all eat and maybe that means a good portion of the population could just chill out.

> that means a good portion of the population could just chill out.

so you're asking those people who farm (using huge machines and automation to do so extremely efficiently) to give you free food? Why would they want to do that?

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

#175

Post by chii »

princeb wrote: post #131
dragontamer wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. ------- Another few examples: 3D animation has killed a lot of tweening artists (the people who smo…

> 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. together with the previous comment on mechanics and stablehands, i wonder how many people in history grew up training and wanting to be a mechanic, only to be told, sorry we just don't ha…

the pace of technological progress is fast - but not so fast that people being trained in art must move within a year!

I think retraining to an adjacent field is definitely possible - the only thing i see disagreements in is the cost, and who bears that cost.

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

#176

Post by chii »

P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #162
nonima wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then what was it saying? It said that humans can take inspiration from outside art, from the real world. You can do the same thing with AI by training it on pictures from the real world.

Bill Clinton has stated he was inspired to be president after a trip to the white house in his youth. People have been inspired to write about subject matter because of their experiences. AI takes lots of things that currently exist and mixNmatch. It's not nearly the same thing.

> It's not nearly the same thing.

why not? Just because people take in experiences slowly, via senses, doesn't mean that an AI isn't replicating that learning via a fast method.

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

#177

Post by navane »

kranke155 wrote: post #146
orbital-decay wrote: post #137

No offence, but all this moral panic induced by a spectacular AI demo looks really myopic. It puzzles me how many creative professionals are unable to see their edge somehow. The main value of your work is always conceptualization, even if you see yourself as a pixel pusher (if that's the case, it's most likely wrong), and it's not easy to master. Maybe you're just not aware of the current state of these tools, and t…

Because you’re not a creative professional you’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg. Here’s the truth about creative work - most of is trash. You make a lot trash. Unimaginative, boring trash. You use that to pay your bills. The creative stuff that people love and share on Instagram is 10% of the work. The stuff you don’t share nor do you talk about is 90% of your income. The problem in this forum is people dont hav…

> 90% of the work is sludge, trash, unimaginative, boring trash. This pays the bill for the 5% you're proud of.

So; learn prompt engineering to do the trash job, which will free up a lot of time to put in the 5% you're proud of.

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

#178

Post by chii »

Jevon23 wrote: post #122
lbarrow wrote: post #25

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? I am not a lawyer but I don't really see the "it's not fair use" argument.

If I can take copyrighted images and feed them into an AI, why can’t I take any code I find online and ignore the license terms and feed it into a compiler? How do you justify the existence of something like the GPL?

> why can’t I take any code I find online and ignore the license terms and feed it into a compiler?

a compiler is not transformative. You translating a book into another language doesn't make it a new work.

But an AI that takes billions of images, and uses it to synthesize something different and new, is fairly transformative under my eyes, and deserves new copyright. Unless the AI generated image is largely composed of a small number of works, i don't see why anyone should have copyright ownership of such an output!

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

#179

Post by chii »

yrgulation wrote: post #113
cercatrova wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 convin…

> it definitely cant create human emotion.

nor does the art that humans create - the emotion comes from the human viewing/experiencing a work. The "source" that work is perhaps irrelevant, if the human viewing it is being evoked.

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

#180

Post by kranke155 »

robertlagrant wrote: post #169
kranke155 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average height of Englishmen actually went down during the industrial revolution (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. Ir could be we are looking at something similar at the moment with the digital revolution. Yes eventually we all retrain an…

I used that giant example a bit comically, perhaps. We're not talking about rapidly retraining a huge, illiterate, agriculture-focused workforce, with utterly game-changing technology. We're talking about things that can be eased into, by white collar workers. And the numbers affected are nothing like the industrial revolution's either.

Im not sure for how long that will hold up if we end up automating all vehicle driving, image generation and robotising large parts of our workforce.
Post reply on HN