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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

#41
post #26

> 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…

And his work isn’t even much better:

>I am angry. My 3D colleague is completely fine with it. He promps all day, shows and gets praise. The thing is, we both were not at the same level, quality-wise. My work was always a tad better, in shape and texture, rendering

No company is going to spend 5X more time on work that is a “tad” better.

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

#42
I saw AI as a tool like Photoshop, and for that reason wasn’t buying all this anxiety. I still see it as a tool, but this post has changed my entire perception of the issue:

It’s not that a new tool will replace you. It’s that a new tool might be too compelling to avoid, but be boring and miserable to work with and suck the joy out of your craft.

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

#44
post #26

> 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…

And his work isn’t even much better: >I am angry. My 3D colleague is completely fine with it. He promps all day, shows and gets praise. The thing is, we both were not at the same level, quality-wise. My work was always a tad better, in shape and texture, rendering No company is going to spend 5X more time on work that is a “tad” better.

You misunderstand. They were comparing their quality with their coworker’s before AI started to be used.

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

#45
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’ve been fiddling with midjourney recently. There’s definitely a learning curve to it, but ironically gpt has been helpful for generating prompts. I expect the edge that artists have in this regard to erode further with time

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

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share examples of this? I've been doing some searching on my own because I find this stuff interesting, and I haven't seen evidence that current versions of AI tools are capable of helping generate entire apps in minutes, at least non-trivial ones. I keep seeing some real dramatic premonitions about AI, and I'd love to see something to back them up. Even the original post, I'm having trouble understanding. I…

All knowledge workers are completely screwed. The only way out is UBI and a maximum three-day work week.

A Marxist can dream

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

#47

People are already generating entire apps with AI in minutes. Software engineering as a profession is finished. We are all now slaves to Roko’s Basilisk.

Ah. I think it still requires you to understand what you're doing. I tried to use both copilot and ChatGPT 3.5 and 4. It doesn't get a lot of things right in my interest areas. I think it's great as a crazy-good autocompletion or refactoring tool. It also helps with boilerplate. But every time you need to know what you want, and it just saves you typing the code.

Sometimes it's just amusingly wrong, too. Sometimes annoyingly so, especially after it repeats mistakes.

I always said our jobs aren't hard because we have to write code for computer, but because we have to capture intent for other humans in code. Sometimes we don't even know what the intent is, because half the time we don't even know what we're building exactly.

So, this all slightly shifts the level of abstraction for developers to think more about intent and less about code. You still have to make sure the code is correct. So, you need to understand the code and the intent. Not much has changed. It's just gotten less mechanical.

Anyway, I don't think people need to be scared of AI just yet.

Obvs there's programmers that enjoy the nitty gritty keyboard slapping, and they can still do that for problems they find interesting. But for things they want to get out of the way, why not unburden ourselves?

Typing on phone so pardon the typos/autocorrect

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

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All knowledge workers are completely screwed. The only way out is UBI and a maximum three-day work week.

I don't see it. I consult, and AI has just let me take on more clients. Using ChatGPT lets me finish their projects faster. What's ending is the era of CRUD work.

> don't see it. I consult, and AI has just let me take on more clients. Using ChatGPT lets me finish their projects faster.

Get ready to take on more clients and at a smaller and smaller gain. An avalanche of competition is coming your way too if you have no moat.

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

#49

People are already generating entire apps with AI in minutes. Software engineering as a profession is finished. We are all now slaves to Roko’s Basilisk.

Trivial app demos, sure. Non-trivial, no. Influencers have been cranking out the former to sell their course/personal brand/consulting. They stand to gain from making AI look as magical and easy as possible. A decision-maker watches an influencer's video and goes, "Wow! AI can do it all! I need to hire this influencer as a consultant/like their content/buy their course!" The reality isn't quite as flashy. Incorporati…

True. The influencers are using AI to sell themselves. The amount of human attention which goes into doing a semi repeatable task will surely go down with AI but not so much as they claim to churn out apps in seconds vs hours/minutes with a real developer.

Also, I have not seen any insight level help from GPT. It just seems like it has a good recall for everything it has seen. And prompt engineering takes away the mental work away from the problem and more about what the model knows.

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

#50
First they came for the artists, and I did not speak out—because that job doesn't require real creativity.

Then they came for the engineers, and I did not speak out—because that job doesn't require real reasoning.

Then they came for the sales folks, and I did not speak out—because that job doesn't require real human connection.

Then they came for the executives and politicians, and I did not speak out—because that job doesn't require real leadership.

Then they came for me, and I did not speak out—because I was just grateful to have any job at all, even one doing manual labor under the ceaseless watch of glorified chatbot. At least Netflix can create any movie that I or my AI girlfriend ask for, so that's cool I guess.

—trained on a quote from Martin Niemöller

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