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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

#211

Post by thot_experiment »

chottocharaii wrote: post #154
thot_experiment wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would much, much, rather work an Admin job than work on a farm are you aware of how taxing that work is on the body ? How isolating it is ?

What? I'm not comparing the two. The point is that we don't need to do the admin jobs, and we need fewer people to farm the same amount of food, so we can just split the extra free time and maybe some people don't even need to have a job.

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

#212

Post by Uehreka »

badpun wrote: post #163
Uehreka wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mech…

> without examining why that happened, and what aspects make 20th century mechanization and 21st century automation completely different in kind. So, what aspects are completely different in your opinion? I don't see any fundamental differences. People's wants are unlimited, so the workers no longer necessary due to automation can move to fields where automation can't be applied. There will always be plenty of those…

Part of the reason I think 21st century automation is different from 20th century mechanization is that when you mechanize jobs, that requires physical machines, and the number of factory workers and mechanics needed to build/maintain those machines scales linear-ish-ly with the number of machines needed. And so mechanized farming got rid of a lot of farming jobs, but also allowed more farms to be built, which required more and more machines, and thus created manufacturing/mechanic jobs.

Software jobs don’t scale like manufacturing jobs. If you automate a particular profession’s work, they’ll lose their jobs, but meanwhile maybe now 10x more customers can afford the service they provide. But now, scaling the automating software to serve 10x the customers won’t require 10x as many programmers, maybe just a couple good devops people to tend the flock.

You might then argue that customers will still find things to want from the newly freed up labor, but I also think we’re going to start being hard-pressed for categories of work where “the human touch” makes a difference, and also where there is room to employ large sectors of the workforce. Add in that customers “new demands” won’t necessarily correlate with the need for human workers, and it becomes easier to see a world where people keep coming up with new wants, and automation keeps swooping in and immediately satisfying the demand.

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

#213

Post by Wolfbeta »

egypturnash wrote: post #191
sircastor wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pos…

Who is supposed to feel sympathy for you not getting to stay in your flow state while making 100k?

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

#215

Post by cercatrova »

egypturnash wrote: post #190
unity1001 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could building up on what AI creates not work? For each technological advancement we had in the past 200 years had made it easier to do things at a certain level. Which enabled people to do more things and more complex things. Which just pushed up the average level of what we create higher. Can't AI be used to handle what the artists had to spent more effort to create before, therefore enabling artists to create more…

From my original reply: 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.

Then you will continue to be disrupted. The cold hard truth is adapt or perish.

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

#216

Post by cercatrova »

chii wrote: post #182
robertlagrant wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even cheaper to not have any employees at all, if that's your goal.

but then you'd have no output to sell, and no business to be had.

They actually make an interesting point if we assume they meant no other employees than oneself. If I can make something entirely on my own with the help of AI and sell it, such as my own movie from Stable Diffusion text to video, then I'd make quite a lot of profit. It's no different than one person software companies, just extended to other forms of creation.

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

#217

Post by cercatrova »

ALittleLight wrote: post #54
NotHereNotThere wrote: post #6

While 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…

This already happens, this is exactly how Midjourney (which used Stable Diffusion under the hood) works. You write a prompt, it spits back a grid of images and you mark which ones you like, then it iterates until you decide on your output image.

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

#218

Post by kranke155 »

Aqueous wrote: post #210

I think you maybe getting ahead of yourself. It’s one thing for AI to produce art that roughly aligns with a prompt, which is as you well know right now what it is capable of. It’s another to fulfill the exact vision of what a person wants. That requires a much higher level and more detailed and more intuitive understanding of what the expectations are and what the vision of the director is. AI is not capable of that…

This is true but the problem is I’m in my early 30s. I have to start planning now for what’s my next profession, and I hope I pick one that won’t get disrupted…

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

#219

Post by jemmyw »

drpyser22 wrote: post #207
jemmyw wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using these ai tools to help imagine some paintings. Previously I'd use image search. If you are drawing completely new images then I'm not sure how competitive these tools are. They're just serving a mash up of existing works. Sure they can produce something interesting, sometimes stunning, but usually not much better than what you could just find already. As for producing a physical painting, that has its…

I guess the issue is that for lot of commercial work, "good enough, cheaper" is more attractive than "better than most, at the right price". Of course that's not a rule always, everywhere, but at scale it tends to be.

I agree there'll be a market for the ai stuff. It'll have to improve though. For example, say you get an illustration done and you say "yeah it's good but can you just modify it a bit and then I want 5 variations doing different actions with the same characters". The AI tools can't do that, they'll come up with completely different images for very minor prompt changes. And if the input set doesn't contain the desired action then they cannot generate it at all.

For now I think it'll only replace some low level commercial stuff and perhaps add images where there were none before.

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