I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney
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Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney
#2There were no doubt quite a few nail makers pre-industrial revolution that took pride in making consistent, quality nails. That work was utterly and completely obliterated by the industrial revolution. There may be a few remaining nail makers, producing nails with an extremely niche design, but not many. So goes those jobs our lifetime as well
Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney
#3People with a good understanding of different styles of art and framing/angles/etc should be able to create the "right" prompts for a customer much much faster and get better results than people who don't know art. Generative AI like Midjourney will completely upend the art industry (it already is). But I don't think it's the death knell for the study of art.
Here's a solid example of that in the context of creating game assets for a retro computer game: https://hpjansson.org/blag/2022/08/16/adventure-game-graphic... The author clearly has actually studied art and is able to come up with prompts and concepts that I'd never be able to dream up. They're able to get the AI to generate what they want immediately with specific prompts like:
> "mexican hacienda on a sunny day, surrounded by plains, color painting by Charles Sheeler"
I have no idea who Charles Sheeler is. But if someone knows 1,500 different artists/photographers/genres/styles and the nuances of them, they can immediately select the right look for the client. It's not a panacea that will allow artists to keep doing what they love, but it is a bright spot and something to focus on for what the future skillset looks like for those who generate art.
[0]: https://hpjansson.org/blag/2022/08/16/adventure-game-graphic...
Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney
#4LOL at the reply a couple posts down, where OP admits they work at a mobile shovelware sweatshop.
Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney
#5[flagged]
Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney
#6People with a good understanding of different styles of art and framing/angles/etc should be able to create the "right" prompts for a customer much much faster and get better results than people who don't know art. Generative AI like Midjourney will completely upend the art industry (it already is). But I don't think it's the death knell for the study of art. Here's a solid example of that in the context of creating…
This seems congruent with a thought I've had, which is that generative image models might enable people commissioning art to be more coherent about what they want. I only have FOAF-tier knowledge of commissioning artwork, but my understanding is that a major source of frustration on all sides is that a lot of work is often wasted because someone commissioning an artist has only the faintest spark of a concept or doesn't know how to communicate it effectively. I imagine a fair number of professional artists would be receptive to something along the lines of "here are my prompts/models, here's the set of the outputs I have opinions about and here's what I do and don't like about them; please use your expertise to compose this into something that actually works".
Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney
#7There were no doubt quite a few nail makers pre-industrial revolution that took pride in making consistent, quality nails. That work was utterly and completely obliterated by the industrial revolution. There may be a few remaining nail makers, producing nails with an extremely niche design, but not many. So goes those jobs our lifetime as well
The Unabomber was notable for manufacturing his own screws, so I'm not sure how many artisanal nail makers remain. In those days nails were re-used, it was such a pain to make them.
Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney
#8[dead]
Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney
#9LOL at the reply a couple posts down, where OP admits they work at a mobile shovelware sweatshop.
I don’t know why you’re downvoted (other than maybe the glibness?) because you’re right.
They’re working at a company where the goal isn’t to make good content. They were effectively there as a means to churn out stuff. It’s why their boss is making them use AI prompts to get content out as quickly as possible.
It doesn’t even matter how good the diffusion results is for that segment. It’s really just about having some representative visual as soon as possible
There’s no current model that makes acceptable 3D content for games, and cohesion isn’t good enough for 2D art for anything except visual novels. They can certainly act as a base but this persons post makes it sound like they’re barely adding anything on top.
So yes, they’re a shop that’s churning out content to make a buck as quickly as possible.
If it wasn’t generative art that replaces this person, it would be someone who could do things even slightly faster or cheaper, even if the quality was worse.
This is the most vulnerable part of society to any form of automation. The level where they’re effectively an operator.
This person would be miserable in this place regardless of AI because their boss doesn’t value them or the work. They would have a more fulfilling career in another studio, where generative art may still be used, but as a tool not a factory to generate things to rush out the door.
Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney
#10There were no doubt quite a few nail makers pre-industrial revolution that took pride in making consistent, quality nails. That work was utterly and completely obliterated by the industrial revolution. There may be a few remaining nail makers, producing nails with an extremely niche design, but not many. So goes those jobs our lifetime as well
Back in the day, I'd call in someone from the secretarial pool to take this sentence down and type it in for me...