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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

#21

Post by dimaor »

runnerup wrote: post #3

People 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…

I think the point is missed here. the post was made by an artist who really likes his craft, and now with the generated models coming to the picture he feels like his work diminished to simply polishing after them.

I am a coder who really likes coding, getting results quicker will not make me happier.

it is different in a work environment, but still, a lot of people simply enjoy the path and not only the outcome.

Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

#22

Post by astrange »

al2o3cr wrote: post #4

LOL at the reply a couple posts down, where OP admits they work at a mobile shovelware sweatshop.

Yes, if your boss requires you to pretend to be a checklist instead of a human, then you're not any better at your job than an animated checklist would be.

Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

#23

Post by jackblemming »

On the other side of the fence, I'm extremely grateful tools like Copilot can automate the mundane process of looking up magic incantations to get some (usually poor) library to do what I want. I have no sympathy for programmers who saw it as a point of pride to memorize hundreds of built in functions and annoying minutiae.

Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

#24

Post by thrill »

andrewflnr wrote: post #16
runnerup wrote: post #3

People 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…

The market of people who care enough about those aspects to pay an expert is, I'm guessing, much smaller than the market for people who will be fine with whatever they can come up with themselves.

The market will decide if those "good enough" people are right.

Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

#25

Post by ghaff »

andrewflnr wrote: post #16
runnerup wrote: post #3

People 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…

The market of people who care enough about those aspects to pay an expert is, I'm guessing, much smaller than the market for people who will be fine with whatever they can come up with themselves.

How many of those people would actually have paid an expert vs. downloading some stock photo or artwork and going close enough?

Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

#26

Post by paxys »

> I am now able to create, rig and animate a character thats spit out from MJ in 2-3 days. Before, it took us several weeks in 3D. The difference is: I care, he does not. For my boss its just a huge time/money saver.

This is the crux of it. The bottom line is that you are free to practice your craft and love it, but don't expect a company to pay you big bucks for it for no reason when they can find cheaper and better ways to accomplish the task. Automation eating away jobs (including ones that had a quality of romanticism associated with them) has been a constant in human history, and it is silly to expect that it won't apply to you for whatever reason.

Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

#27

Post by markles »

The lack of empathy the HN community has really shines through in many of these replies:

> There were no doubt quite a few nail makers pre-industrial revolution that took pride in making consistent, quality nails.

> And nothing of value have been lost.

> LOL 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

#28

Post by culi »

jackblemming wrote: post #23

On the other side of the fence, I'm extremely grateful tools like Copilot can automate the mundane process of looking up magic incantations to get some (usually poor) library to do what I want. I have no sympathy for programmers who saw it as a point of pride to memorize hundreds of built in functions and annoying minutiae.

This seems like a poor use of Copilot. At least in the JS ecosystem, pretty much every library has TypeScript support now. No need to guess or look anything up. Copilot can still be wrong, especially if the API changes over different updates

In my experience Copilot's value add is simply autocompleting simple/boiler-plate-y lines for me. Definitely wouldn't wanna trust something as fuzzy as an AI to "memorize" APIs on my behalf

Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

#29

Post by sheepscreek »

runnerup wrote: post #3

People 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…

I think the OP wasn’t disappointed about the end result, which is now higher quality by their own admission. They can certainly use their skills and experience to engineer prompts that will return the highest quality work, no doubt.

What made them sad is they no longer have the joy and satisfaction of developing those models in a 3D rendering software. This is what they trained for.

In many ways, this is like the initial trauma of becoming a manager. Learning to be content with the end result and the success of the team, than your direct individual contribution. The difference here is they didn’t ask for it.

I fully empathize with them. It makes me sad to think what they’re going through. My advise to them will be to look for other ways to get that satisfaction - either through a hobby or considering a different role/profession. For better or for worse, the world is changing rapidly and I can’t see it going back to what it was.

Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

#30

Post by sportslife »

idiotsecant wrote: post #2

There 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

To complete this idea, old nails are better at holding than modern nails in at least some applications and are required for some restoration work. I remember reading (but can't find) a church-restoration project report mentioning it, but more can be read here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30421682
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