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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

#191

Post by egypturnash »

sircastor wrote: post #138
egypturnash wrote: post #22

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 may also be useful to try and get your professional associations to bring some suits against these things for playing fast and loose with “fair use”. I understand your livelihood is being threatened, and that’s very scary. Can we please avoid using the legal system to kill nascent competitors? Surely there are better responses than this.

Sure, I’ll just politely roll over rather than use the legal system. I don’t need to put food on my table anyway, it’s just a luxury, I have infinite time and money available to go learn to do something that pays more and makes me absolutely miserable. I’m not already constantly fighting the way all the social media sites have stolen the ability to serve ads alongside my work by building systems that suppress any post with an outgoing link, as well as posts with words like “commission” or “Patreon”. I can just bend over and take it a little harder when all these image generators based on megacorps scraping the entire internet for a use nobody thought of when defining “free use” make it harder for me to earn a living, and more importantly when they make it a lot harder for a beginner artist to get to that happy place where they get to spend the majority of their workday drawing, and enjoying the feedback loop of getting a little better and faster at drawing a thing every time they do it.

Burn it all down.

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

#192

Post by robertlagrant »

badpun wrote: post #166
orbital-decay wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or it will enable things that are currently impractical due to the amount of manual work involved - driving easy to produce stuff out, again.

We might be seeing AI-generated ilustrations instead of stock photos in web content. I for one would really prefer it.

Yes. I can see this being a killer (or killer app) for content libraries more than for replacing artisans.

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

#193

Post by robertlagrant »

kranke155 wrote: post #180
robertlagrant wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Driving is certainly a more significant workforce than image generation, but that seems to be a completely separate area of research.

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

#195

Post by ihuman »

iExploder wrote: post #181
chii wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

its actually exactly the same thing, the ai doesnt "synthetize" anything, its following its programming and data based on training sets if anything I would argue that human taking code from multiple places and making it compile into something more useful is much more synthetiz-ing than AI...

There's already an AI that does that: https://github.com/features/copilot

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

#196

Post by kranke155 »

jmpeax wrote: post #170
kranke155 wrote: post #88

Earlier 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.

You would use a smart contract to settle a bet rather than hiring an arbitrator?

Seems easier and cheaper.

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

#197

Post by galdosdi »

tengbretson wrote: post #29
egypturnash wrote: post #22

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…

This really resonates with me. I used to enjoy working as a 35mm film projectionist. Now that everything is digital the opportunities for making money doing it have basically disappeared. Am I supposed to be excited that now I can just push a button and focus more of my attention on selling popcorn? Fortunately I enjoy writing code.

Hey, I did that too in high school and college! I think I must have been one of the very last ones (late aughts). What a cool and fascinating piece of machinery the "modern" (now obsolete) three platter tree and "brain" system is, isn't it?

I still remember splicing together There Will Be Blood and enjoying looking at some of the beatiful still frames.

My boss at the time spliced together Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse, and somehow fucked up and spliced an entire reel out of order... and nobody ever noticed (because Grindhouse was full of intentional fake projectionist mistakes, being an homage to an old era). He ended up noticing on his own on the second day of showings and fixing it overnight!

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

#198

Post by galdosdi »

> There’s loads of work that ad agencies will just hire an AI prompt guy to generate for ads.

I am really skeptical of the idea that soon, working with image AI will involve purely prompt writing. I bet it will involve some prompt writing but still plenty of original art creation, and even more photoshop combining, as now.

Think about how much more time a modern employed artist spends fucking around with photoshop tools, as opposed to literally having their pen on their wacom tablet. It's just a continuing trend in that direction -- or at least that's my educated guess which could be wrong.

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

#199

Post by kranke155 »

chii wrote: post #183
navane wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The OP's argument is that prompt engineering to produce the trash won't pay the same, and so they will suffer an economic decline.

The idea that prompting images will pay the same as taking 2-3 days to produce an image through a skillset that takes half a decade to a decade to build up… seems pretty much incredible to me.

There is an upper limit to how many images in still or moving form the world needs. We’re operating at that limit already - entry level jobs in the arts are often not paid or extremely poorly paid, signifying that demand for the jobs outstrips supply.

Basically there are always more aspiring film directors in the world than there are actual film directors - meaning the field is ultra competitive. Same with YouTube creators and other artists. The idea that making it easier to produce images will somehow make more work - it won’t since we already exist in an visual content oversaturated environment (there is now more content than anyone will ever watch). What it will do is collapse the incomes of artists.

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

#200

Post by kranke155 »

robertlagrant wrote: post #193
kranke155 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Driving is certainly a more significant workforce than image generation, but that seems to be a completely separate area of research.

Certainly. What I mean is - I didn’t expect image generative AI to get good this quickly. Before DallE I didn’t expect it to happen at all - I had no idea it was possible until it happened and I was forced to face it.

Driving seems like a tough nut to crack, but what if we suddenly start obliterating multiple areas of human employment one after the other? Ones we haven’t even thought of?

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