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AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

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Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#111
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The AI has now replaced you as an artist. The software team or management simply ask the AI - "please produce me a set of fantasy character models for my game, with these characteristics". This is essentially GPT mixed with 3D midjourney. then about 6 months in people start noticing that every game looks exactly the same

... but how much will they care? A huge chunk of games on Steam are now running on Unity and feel fundamentally the same; that hasn't stopped people using the engine. Do we play games for novel look and sound or novel experience or novel story? The answer is "All of the above."

novelty is probably the number one thing people like

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#112

I completely disagree. I'm building a business, and this business will be based on excellent software and excellent support for that software. I will refuse to use AI. But instead of AI users taking my job, I'm sure that refusing to use AI will become my differentiator as every AI user becomes more and more like each other. You may think that good AI users will not become so bland, but they will. Human laziness will…

I started a business over the last week and I

Rapidly iterated domain names with chatgpt

Did logo mockups in midjourney AI

Did website list mockups in midjourney AI

Rapidly iterated copy and cool sounding text with ChatGPT

Got font faces and style guides with ChatGPT

Got landing page code in React with ChatGPT

I can code. I would have been distracted by juggling all of the designers that I hired, so distracted that I probably would have hired a developer. Slowed down by 2-3 weeks waiting for acceptable output from the hired professionals, or discouraged and forgotten about this business idea.

I didnt lay off anybody, I also didnt hire anybody.

I looked up “prompt engineer” on fiverr just to see if that looked viable, its already oversaturated and nobody has orders in queue.

I think the “take our jobs” will start and be more pronounced with a silent lack of open positions.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#113
post #70
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the zero sum, "use AI everywhere" vs "don't use it at all" are both to be avoided. The wise path is somewhere in the middle. On avoiding it, if your competitors are getting massive productivity gains from AI tools, your hand-crafted, artisanal code is going to be expensive and your customers will vote with their wallets.

Exactly. I am absolutely no fan of the new AI products, and the only question you have to answer for yourself is: can you leverage this technology for what you are trying to do? For me the answer was "yes", and I now enjoy having copilot around to dynamically type boilerplate I'd need much longer to type and fill out myself.

Why would you be absolutely no fan of a sure technological improvement? Is it because of the personal threat to professionals? Not commenting personally on you here, but I am very surprised at programmers' lack of nose for opportunities and how, after realizing GPT could do coding even before replacing retail and industry jobs, coders are completely on the defense. Is it a threat to job availability and security? Yes, but programmers have long been to other professionals (doctors even?) what AI is now to them (I was a coder too). Well, tough luck, the world changes and fast, better to try to create and carve out a new job or business idea for yourself than stand on denial of something that, good or bad, could either make or break humanity, but humanity has no say on the inexorable progress of ideas. This actually is science right here, don't tech people embrace science, or only when the collateral damage is elsewhere and not on them?

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#114
post #10

This is a nonsense headline. This is the equivalent of "Factory automation won't steal your job, companies that buy factory automation will." Democratization of AI tools will have upsides and downsides but non researchers weren't playing around with AI text/chat generation before this last round of simple to use tools came out.

I think it’s absurd as well. Jobs won’t be stolen, different jobs will be created. At a certain point we will move past scarcity, and maybe we won’t have to labor to not die. What’s so important about a job? Humans need meaning, but meaning doesn’t have to be delivered by PayChex at the expense of the human soul.

Ultimately the whole number of jobs will decrease, in the same way that cars didn't create new jobs for horses.

I'm definitely not opposed to post scarcity. I do wonder how you feel about the replacement of social "jobs" in the world. Models like GPT roleplay a girlfriend, parent, colleague at least as well as it roleplays a developer or a scriptwriter. I don't think many people have those consequences in mind yet.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re an inspiration. I’m going to open an accounting firm and refuse to use calculators.

How often are calculators confidently wrong?

People keep saying this, pointing out the "mistakes with confidence" aspect of LLMs, but as someone who is continually amazed by ChatGPT and finds it very useful in my day-to-day, it's hard for me to take this objection seriously if presented as a reason not to use AI.

That is, for me, the output of ChatGPT or other AI tools is the starting point of my investigation, not the end output. Yes, if you just blindly paste the output from an AI tool you're going to have a bad time, but we also standardize code reviews into the human code-writing process - this isn't that different.

Just giving one specific example, I find ChatGPT to my an incredibly efficient "documentation lookup tool". E.g. it's great if I'm working with a new technology or API and I want to know "what my options are", but I don't know what keywords to search for, it can help give me a really good "lay of the land", and from there I can read on my own to get more specifics.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#116
post #84

At some level it’s tautological. Initially I had a similar negative reaction other commenters had, but I think I’m deciding I like the people framing. Obviously this is not an either-or. It’s not a question of AI vs people, it’s both AI+people. But only people are making the choices. People are building AI, people who can use AI will choose to use it, and people who run businesses will choose to allow it and/or incor…

No it's not healthy in my opinion. A drug addict doesn't exactly have a choice when he uses drugs.

Aspects of human behavior in aggregate are so predictable it's basically deterministic.

If AI one day matches or surpasses human intelligence it is obvious humanity will exploit that AI as it already is doing now. There is no actual "choice" here. Just an illusion of it.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly. This is certainly a pattern that works in other industries. I am aware of a local glass company with about 50 years of operation under its belt. They have tooling, but the process is heavily manual; no aspect of it is end-to-end automated. Their primary customers are those requiring high precision for industrial applications (electrical, aeronautics). They are forever capacity-capped because their model doe…

This might be a bad comparison. But I feel like Marvel movies (and TV shows) tried to scale, and lost it. And that there was a sweet-spot, where less was more. It's way to oversimplified, but I think they tried to churn out hits from a factory after a build-up in some home runs, but then took on too much and have diluted their films & shows, where it's all a bit flat and underdelivering what audiences expected. I lik…

There is one thing that's killing them, where they could stand to automate.

Their sales and purchase-order process is also still manual; people answering emails by hand and filling out (literal carbon paper) triplicate work orders. But their aerospace customers have gone to zero-inventory kanban-style resource management, and that's a system that assumes a certain level of automation. We're talking companies placing orders by machine that then auto-generates the emails, where an email at 9AM says they need 400 of a widget by next month, an order update at 1PM says to cancel 200 of those, another update at 3PM says add an additional 500, and a final update at 6PM says cancel-whole-order, some planes just got delayed, we'll pay the $100 cancellation penalty.

None of that scales. It just runs the sales team ragged (literally; they're literally running out to the factory floor to find the third carbon copy and yank it from the production queue by thumbing through the queue).

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#118
post #79
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Instead of using a motor vehicle, I will deliver all packages by hand" I mean, yea, in places it would succeed as a boutique business, but you're not building the next Amazon that way either.

Meanwhile Amazon actually operates by people walking to pickup and deliver most packages by hand to be boxed up. People can actually get a lot of work done in an hour to the point where many things that don’t seem like they should scale end up being trivial expenses.

> Meanwhile Amazon actually operates by people walking to pickup and deliver most packages by hand to be boxed up

Given how much Amazon invests in automation that's a pretty gross mischaracterization of what they do.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#119

It's a timescale, like all technological progress. Or even evolution. So you're working in a games development studio as a visual artist. At first you're producing renderings in Blender or whatever. Then, AI is able to generate three-dimensional meshes for you. You are in the loop, deciding that these meshes are suitable, which textures work, which are the best, designing the prompts, etc. This is 3D midjourney. At t…

With the progression of the technology, you may find there are not so many "in-between" steps as you expect in your current list. It will quickly go from the current stage "employee being more productive" to "steam, I want to play a game where ". No need to generate art assets or have anything resembling a game engine, just pure interactive "imagination".

I disagree I think it will take more steps. Likely there will be phases where we learn to let the machine 'drive' so to speak with our business. I think there will be a lot of independant studios using AI with very low funding showing it's possible. However I think the big block studios are going to be very careful to rock the boat. There will be business decisions in between these steps. If anything I think AI will make things like games, music, art commodities on the value of paper napkins. :(

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#120
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a math teacher, this is such a funny comparison to keep reading. Yes, there's a difference between a deterministic outcome and a non-deterministic one. But throw humans into the loop, and it becomes more interesting. I can't count the number of times I've listened to someone argue their answer must be right because they got it from the calculator. And it's not just students; as a teacher I've always paid attention…

> I can't count the number of times I've listened to someone argue their answer must be right because they got it from the calculator. Answers from calculators are always right! But the human may have asked the wrong question.

No they are not
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