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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

#191

Post by thorncorona »

nomilk wrote: post #179
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 dis…

> 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.

What can we do? Hope to save enough to not go into more debt for a second degree?

Hope that second degree isn’t obsoleted either?

As AI becomes more advanced the minimum education and likely IQ required to even get a job that pays above minimum wage will increase.

What are we gonna do about the ever increasing N+1% of people who won’t be cost effective versus an AI?

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

#192

Post by dukeofdoom »

nomilk wrote: post #179
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 dis…

Endless amount of things that need improving.

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

#193

Post by CommanderData »

coldtea wrote: post #157
kodah wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What jobs have been totally replaced thus far?

First, of all, why it has to be "totally replaced"? It's enough for positions to be dramatically reduced, and most such "though workers" tasks getting done automatically, e.g. under the final supervision of much fewer people. Second, why it has to be "thus far"? If it happens in 1 or 5 or 10 years does it disqualify it? Because above you claimed it will "never take thought workers' jobs". Suddenly the goalposts moved…

I'm witnessing engineers on my team and myself saving a lot of time in development and in operations (scripting).

I have no doubt in my mind it is reducing the need for more engineers and has probably already contributed to a reduction of them and I think it's just getting started.

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

#194

Post by scotty79 »

kmeisthax wrote: post #148
markles wrote: post #27

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.

/r/stablediffusion is arguably worse. Lots of people on there who have active disdain for any human (non-AI-assisted) artists who complain about AI. It's like watching 17th-century Parliament winge about machine breakers.

> It's like watching 17th-century Parliament winge about machine breakers.

It's really hard to avoid this because nearly everything about it the same each time.

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

#195

Post by orbital-decay »

HervalFreire wrote: post #176
orbital-decay wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

> 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.

This is the opposite of what I see in reality right now. The hard part is to make the artists do exactly what you want, down to the subtle but meaningful details. That happens because the high-level instructions don't have enough capacity to deliver the full meaning. This is the same with generative models: extremely hard to control with the "prompt engineering" gimmick, it's only fine when you are OK with random output. Besides, they are purely functional and lack feedback mechanisms the creative director usually employ with artists.

That's why people are trying to make techniques more complex - large animation houses experiment with training their own model architectures and software. This is the way 3D CGI was born - simple at first, and yes it got plenty of doomposting at first (we are getting replaced by computers!), until it was clear that the field becomes extremely technical and complex, so it even has dozens of specializations inside it.

All entertainment is ultimately based on novelty, as human brain is really good at distilling meaning from the ocean of information. If you start with little meaning (your example - "a cowboy with blue skin with a laser cannon riding a unicycle through the grand canyon with a dwarf chasing him"), people get bored - no matter how much randomized artsy-looking stuff you add around it.

If you think that AI can generate all meaning that is relevant to people, I don't buy it, as it doesn't have the same training material. It's trained on the result and is forced to reverse engineer what moves people; reverse engineering is a fundamentally more costly and opaque task.

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

#197

Post by krembo »

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…

Yet, giving a prompt has a much lower barrier than actually being an artist.

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

#198

Post by scotty79 »

6177c40f wrote: post #98

What's really the point of AI? Is perfect efficiency and maximized profit really the end goal we've been trying to achieve this whole time?

The whole point of all progress is democratization of the product/service through making the production process cheaper.

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

#199

Post by CommanderData »

markles wrote: post #27

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.

It frightens me but some are just devoid of the ability to be empathic, even if it's to be empathic against their future selves.

People really do argue themselves aggressively into points that exploit themselves without any benefit.

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

#200

Post by trafficante »

justrealist wrote: post #141
gwbrooks wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> This is exactly the type of conversation we need to have as a society. Comments like this always make me wonder: How would that happen? Here in the U.S., there's relatively little appetite for job-saving labor protections and, once you leave the regulatory sphere, everyone -- employers, employees, consumers of products and services -- is consistently self-interested. Not saying that sort of societal conversation i…

It doesn't even really matter what the US regulations are. If a firm in the Philippines can run Midjourney for pennies to generate content that would take hundreds or thousands of dollars in illustrator costs, there's simply no way to mandate labor protections in the US that would keep customers from outsourcing the work. The gradient is just too strong, and you can't keep a pedigree on every image you publish that o…

We’re creating a new global average standard of living with disastrous consequences.

The poor areas rapidly gain wealth but at great cost to the environment and the whole thing is dependent on a never-ending fire hose of capital and tech transfers from the “wealthy” areas.

The wealthy areas, already unable to offer many citizens the ability to raise a family, are desperately engaging in extreme financialization, ludicrous political distractions, and “make work” shell games just to present an increasingly unconvincing veneer that society is still functioning and fully worthy of participation.

Western civilization is the metaphorical Biblical statue from Daniel: After spending decades replacing the support structures with ever cheaper materials, we’re now finally in the “feet of iron and clay” stage, and it’s likely AI will complete the metaphor by representing the boulder that smashes into the weakened base and topples the entire statue.

I realize this all sounds hilariously alarmist, but I have yet to see a positive spin on the impact of AI that isn’t ultimately the same old decoupled Pete Peterson style nonsense of “it’s gud because worker productivity number goes up”: as if we don’t already have two generations of human beings that grew up in an age of massively increased productivity yet cannot afford a family nor a home to put them in - a state of existence that even some medieval serfs would pity.

My weirdly accelerationist hope is that AI advances quickly enough (and management stays short-sighted enough) to cause a meaningful political coalition to form between the already-marginalized blue collar workers and the newly disrupted paper-pusher/cubicle class.

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