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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

#171

Post by a_t48 »

akudha wrote: post #34
a_t48 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author is also losing out on a lot of opportunities to improve themselves and aim for a higher standard.

What do you mean by this? The author seems good at what they do, seems to love their craft and enjoys their work. The tragedy here is that AI doesn't need to be better than humans (at least in many cases like art, writing etc). It just needs to be "good enough", maybe 80% as good as a human. Since humans can't compete with software on speed or cost, they are gonna lose. How exactly can the author improve to a higher…

We agree I think - I just poorly phrased what I meant

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

#172

Post by riwsky »

kodah wrote: post #105
rafaelero wrote: post #78

When DALL-E 2 was released, I remember reading lots of people here in HN saying it would never take the jobs of artists. Well, seems like this argument is aging badly. This is exactly the type of conversation we need to have as a society. Instead of deluding ourselves that our skills are impossible to be reproduced by a machine, we should strive to build a system with values in which we can find a way to build a good…

AI won't take a thought workers job. It just sucks the life out of it. Like the person who wrote this post, I make bespoke software. I tinker, I experiment, and I produce high quality results in reasonable timelines. Executives could not give a shit about that, except that those qualities in me are a good signal that I am dependable. Now, if most companies allow AI bottom performers will speed up and their quality wi…

“Reasonable timelines” are not absolute quantities. They’ve always been an equilibrium of whatever the market can bear. It was simply easier to ignore this before, when things changed much more slowly.

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

#173

Post by rakejake »

sheepscreek wrote: post #29
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 ini…

Yes, this is exactly how I am thinking about this. We are all going to become "managers". The drudgery of work is about to increase a whole lot.

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

#174

Post by tspike »

chii wrote: post #100
thomascgalvin wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just wish I was part of the first generation to benefit from post-scarcity, and not the generation that is going to have to go through the turmoil of getting to post-scarcity.

the generation that went thru the industrial revolution would have said the same thing, except they'd wished they were in your position today. People just don't realize how good today is compared to the past - and of course, how good the future would be (nuclear war notwithstanding).

Any time this argument gets trotted out it's using a baseline of European post-agrarian feudalism. There were definitely peoples in the past who enjoyed a high quality of life for many generations, but they tended to be small groups concentrated in areas of abundance, and were usually among the first to be exterminated by outsiders.

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

#175

Post by jay_kyburz »

whateveracct wrote: post #146
jay_kyburz wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies are slow to move on things, but I think "video game concept artist" is done. An art director can now sit down in front of Midjourny and pump out years and years of a concept artists work in just an afternoon.

This feels like a comment written by someone without practical experience with concept art (creator or consumer) - correct me if I'm wrong though! Like personally, I think I will still draw concept art instead of asking a GAN. Feels like that greases my creative wheels more. Just me though.

You are wrong, I have worked for many years as an artists and level builder in video games. Bioshock is the most famous game, and Void Bastards the most recent.

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

#176

Post by HervalFreire »

orbital-decay wrote: post #149
nirvdrum wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't take the job in the sense that the OP is still employed. It changed the job into something that barely resembles what the OP was hired to do. It's not quite constructive dismissal, but many people choose fields for reasons of maximizing income. It's hard to stay motivated doing something you hate, especially when a week ago your job had you doing something you love. And that says nothing about the OP's ethi…

The reality is that an artist in a mobile games company is hired for their technical skills, with very little creative freedom. The real artist is usually the art director or a similar position responsible for stylistic/creative/conceptual decisions. If your job is mostly technical, be ready to re-learn and reshape your skills when your tool goes the way of cel animation. I personally had to do this at least three ti…

You're not being cynical. You're being overly optimistic here about creative professionals.

The creative professional IS a target for replacement. What LLMs do best is specifically what the "creative professional" does. Better than coding or mathematics, LLMs excel at creative English text. This is because creative output is trivial when compared with technical skills.

I don't think the "creative professional" will get replaced though. Because usually the task is so trivial that positions like these largely only exist because of politics. You convince people around you and yourself that your "creativity" has no peer.

It amounts to this: I want a photo-realistic animation of a cowboy with blue skin with a laser cannon riding a unicycle through the grand canyon with a dwarf chasing him. A creative director simply comes up with high level instructions (like the one above) THEN the ultra hard part is making that high level instruction a reality. That is HARD and as of now it looks like both skills are being replaced by AI.

But like I said, the directors' position is in actuality largely political. Thus his position is safe even though the actuality of what he does is EASY and therefore a prime target for replacement.

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

#177

Post by david2ndaccount »

muyuu wrote: post #52

Some people say there isn't enough empathy to go around for those creatives that are seeing their jobs either endangered or automated to a degree they've become sweatshop janitors with little prospects to be anything else. I wonder if that sort of empathy was so plentiful when the automation was shredding the prospects of farmers, miners, truckers and other blue collar workers? Make no mistake, generative AI is going…

This has been happening for centuries, see the legend of Johny Henry.

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

#178

Post by barbariangrunge »

8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #126

I imagine portrait painters and later photographers all experienced a similar transition. They had built their livelihoods around a certain visual asset generation technique, and a new technology disrupted that process and pushed them into the nice-to-have luxury corner. The same train will come for prompt engineers eventually too in the usual cycle.

The term prompt “engineer” is tedious to professional engineers everywhere

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

#179

Post by nomilk »

rafaelero wrote: post #78

When DALL-E 2 was released, I remember reading lots of people here in HN saying it would never take the jobs of artists. Well, seems like this argument is aging badly. This is exactly the type of conversation we need to have as a society. Instead of deluding ourselves that our skills are impossible to be reproduced by a machine, we should strive to build a system with values in which we can find a way to build a good…

> This is exactly the type of conversation we need to have as a society.

Jobs have been disappearing at a high rate for at least a couple of generations now, and have steadily been replaced with new ones, often high paying ones.

We can't control which jobs are in high, low, and no demand, so we're best off swimming with the current, whichever way it flows. 1. Accept that professions come and go. 2. Expect jobs to disappear every decade or so and plan accordingly. 3. Look forward to an awesome new job after your current one is made obsolete. That goes for all of us.

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

#180

Post by nullsense »

antibasilisk wrote: post #32

Yeah I feel similarly about programming, honestly even the existence of compilers makes me feel this way to a lesser extent, but AI is absolutely crushing any sort of enjoyment out of anything and further turning it into a mediocre slurry of content.

I'm enjoying programming more than ever because of it.
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