201–210 of 713 posts
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
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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.
Whether you have experience or not, game companies already use AI for concept art.
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I won't be able to afford a plot of land without a job. I feel like we're on the verge of cataclysmic unemployment and I have absolutely no desire to wait in squalor for legislation to catch up with the nifty little UBI idea floating around which seems like should have been sorted yesterday.
An acre of farmland costs $2000 in North Dakota. You need 5000 of them to make a living growing wheat, but an acre should be enough to feed a family, maybe a few more if you want meat.
Man is it hard not to feel a little schadenfreude. For decades the white collars watched the blue collars lose their jobs to machines and said "well I'm so sorry for you, but you really should've realized the purpose of a human being is to use their mind and create, they can never take that from us". This is going to do for art what YouTube did for video production: obliterate the grind. Now what counts is your genui…
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…
Before the eeeevil robot came to be, no one gave much of a damn about artists or their opinion. Suddenly we are instrumental to humanity's culture, but people is too busy spreading hatred to listen to any artists that aren't in agreement, what makes me feel it's less about being an artist and more about being emotionally-charged "useful idiots" for anti-AI agendas.
Have you seen AI outputs carefully? I have for the last seven months, and if an artist can be replaced by it, maybe that artist deserves it. I say this as an artist, 36 years of experience.
The worst is that this will be considered a hot take and mean-spirited by the immensely biased HN crowd, but lifeless art can be replaced by lifeless art, and that's the artist's fault for just coasting from check to check without putting much effort, therefore producing empty, emotionless art. We all know this, we all call it out when it happens, but for some reason this entire AI topic is making people forget it's a thing.
This is no different from that lazy guy at the office that just does the bare minimum to not get fired. Getting rid of them may give a more talented and unique but less popular artist a chance to get a job.
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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 you…
Universal basic income is always the answer. Since progress bringsuch unpredictability to labor market we need to detach survival from labor so people can survive while they are figuring the stuff out.
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…
Your take is interesting, but I'll provide an alternate point of view from my experience.
I have spent my career working in a low-code environment. There's a boiler plate framework into which people add code.
Since most of all programs are similar (data in, data stored, data processed, data out etc) this allows for high productivity because almost all time is spent on things that are unique to the domain space, not programming the common stuff. It means individual programmers, and very small teams, have written and maintain huge systems.
But what's interesting to me is the boilerplate code. My career has been spent improving the underlying boilerplate, and extending it to new feature areas. This turns out to be a great lever. Improve the boiler-plate and _existing_ programs get better, with minimal effort. Sometimes no effort.
It's kinda like the way I get TLS 1.3 support simply by upgrading my OpenSSL libraries. But at a source level. Which is then retro-applied to existing source code.
Instead of being mediocrity the goal is to always keep improving the boilerplate because that in turn improves a lot of programs.
I say this not to tell you nothing will change. It will change. But change in programming is fun. It stretches the mind, and opens up new horizons. The AI can write code, but that just becomes the next tool, like IDEs were, like code complete, online help or Stackoverflow. I didn't have any of those things growing up, but their introductions allow me to dream bigger, be better, make more.
AI is an opportunity for those with eyes to see.
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>> 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…
I don't think the conversion we need to have is about how to stop it, its about what we do with all the unemployed artists, accountants, journalists, truck and taxi drivers. Do we pay half of them to dig holes, then pay the other half to fill them? We just need to keep the economy wheel turning while everybody finds new meaningful work.