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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

#161

Post by nirvdrum »

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

What's the solution when so much knowledge work is upended at once? When manufacturing jobs were lost, we callously told people to go to college to learn to learn IT. Whether it's art, code, marketing, or other applied knowledge work, there's a mad dash to reshape all of those. And the sales pitch isn't that it's going to let us work less and equitably reap the rewards of productivity (well, I suppose if you lose your job you get to work less). It's that as a business you can do more with less to increase profitability. Quality might take a hit, but there's an inflection point for that. If sales drop but you reduce your labor costs enough, you still come out ahead.

What field are all of these nail makers supposed to switch to this time?

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

#162

Post by kmeisthax »

462436347 wrote: post #113

These AI systems will sound the death knell for the creative culture of openness and sharing that emerged during the web 1.0 era with the Creative Commons and OSI-approved licenses and sites like DeviantArt, NewGrounds, and SourceForge, and which still exists today, albeit in a less idealistic form. Once people realize that by putting something, even just a blog post, out for public consumption, especially if done so…

I don't think you actually need copyrighted data to train AI to compete with artists. The argument over copyright is interesting but kind of a sideshow. We already know that copyright protection is not a prerequisite for creativity - as it currently stands copyright only protects the rich.

The real reason why AI is going to kill DA/NG/SF/GH/etc is because of spam.

Let's say, for every piece a 100% human artist can do with no AI assistance, another artist using AI as a tool can make three. They start off with a prompt in DALL-E, SD, or Midjourney, and then tweak the output with prompts and so on to get exactly what they want quicker.

Now imagine a non-artist using the same technology. They don't care about the touchups. They just want to churn out lots of pieces all at once. So that would be nine times more output compared to the unassisted human - three times three. And there are plenty of them doing this, because they all watched the same video on how you can hustle T-shirt and poster stores by submitting lots of AI-generated pieces.

The reason why you are seeing art sites ban AI art is purely a matter of practicality. Many of those spaces are able to provide free promotion to people who post quality content because quality is itself a limited resource. Now the human trying to make their magnum opus - AI or no - is going to be buried under lots of low-effort garbage from zombie modernist grifters.

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

#163

Post by HervalFreire »

orbital-decay wrote: post #130
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…

It didn't take OP's job, though. It gave them another tool that produces better output, but which they don't happen to like (in contrast to their colleague who doesn't have issues with it).

Think about the implications of it. Don't just take it at face value.

How much longer will he be able to KEEP his job.

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

#164

Post by anigbrowl »

orbital-decay wrote: post #130
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…

It didn't take OP's job, though. It gave them another tool that produces better output, but which they don't happen to like (in contrast to their colleague who doesn't have issues with it).

It turned OP from a craftperson to a machine operator. Their less-skilled colleague (either due to lack of talent, experience, or application) is now cruising past them them because they don't care as much as OP did about the work itself. OP is still employed, but now some of the necessary grunt work has become the main task. And that, too, will be easier done by machine before long.

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

#165

Post by orbital-decay »

nmz wrote: post #156
orbital-decay wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't take OP's job, though. It gave them another tool that produces better output, but which they don't happen to like (in contrast to their colleague who doesn't have issues with it).

We never needed to be this productive anyway, we are completely swarmed with content, to the point that if we stopped producing today we would still be consuming new media after 100 years.

This process has been happening for at least a couple decades (arguably more) without any AI, though. The entertainment industry almost ran itself into the ground that way, long before those things emerged. Or rather, the demand made it to.

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

#166

Post by anigbrowl »

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…

I personally had to do this at least three times in 25 years [...] So to me it's pretty normal

Very relatable, but it seems unwise to just consider it normal. If you find yourself having to retool 3 times within 25 months, you'll be well on the way to burning out.

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

#167

Post by nirvdrum »

mrbombastic wrote: post #133
blackoil wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today yeah, but tomorrow the clients can use GPT 7 consultant who has better context with access to all the mails/data of the client. It is fast/cheap and is a polymath.

I don’t understand why people see this future as guaranteed, just because GPT4 was a great improvement on 3.5 does not imply this approach will continue accelerating at this rate. I am not saying it definitely won’t happen but I find the confidence that it will pretty baffling.

It seems unlikely to me that this technology has plateaued. The gains have been exponential. It strikes me as prudent to at least consider its continued improvement a possibility and try to work out what that means for society. The best thing on the table so far is people lose jobs and business owners make more money. Some amount of that is unavoidable and maybe even beneficial, but too much of it is unsustainable. Better to have a plan and not need and all that.

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

#168

Post by tstrimple »

ummonk wrote: post #136

The issue here is that you have to use text prompts (because the overwhelming bulk of training data out there available for AI is in the form of text). Ideally you should be able to sculpt and rig and paint manually via AI tools - the tweaks you do to a sculpture should be inputs to an AI system that can give you an intuitive and responsive system that replaces current procedural generation.

You absolutely can use these tools for this. There are stable diffusion plugins for photoshop that allow far more control over what is generated where.

https://youtu.be/nnyjQkgccnA

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

#169

Post by [deleted] »

chriscappuccio wrote: post #119
JeremyNT wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, we are not headed to such a future. The economic benefits of these LLMs will go only to the capitalists, and any labor savings will allow them to reduce wages and headcount while leaving workers unemployed or with less bargaining power. AI will be yet another tool to further wealth inequality. We won't be able to afford retiring and tending to our plants.

Solution: be a capitalist

[deleted]

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

#170

Post by anigbrowl »

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.

Very true. Much as I like AI on the technical side, I also look forward to the howls of outrage when some large model comes for the smug squad. coding, trading, management are all eminently replaceable skillsets.
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