Live data from Hacker News

Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

joincolossus.com

261–270 of 377 posts

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#261
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>is actually a net positive result for those disciplines. This is an argument based in Luddism. Looms where not a net positive for the craftsman that were making fabrics at the time. With that said, looms where not the killing blow, instead an economic system that lead them to starve in the streets was. There are going to be a million other things that move the economics away from scarcity and take away the profitabi…

> There are going to be a million other things that move the economics away from scarcity and take away the profitability. What we’re really talking about here is the consolidated of power under a few tech elites. Saying it’s a luddite argument is a red herring.

A whole lot of what I use every day especially for images and audio is open source. The open source AI video is getting pretty good these days as well. Better than the sora that I pay for anyways. Granted not nearly as good as veo3 yet.

So long as Nvidia doesn't nerf their consumer cards and we keep getting more and more vram I can see open source competing.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say this but I see ai generated ads, graphics, etc. daily nowadays and it doesn't seem like it affects at all people going or not going to buy what these people are proposing.

In the context of the hole digging analogy, it seems like a lot of holes didn't need to be carefully hand-dug by experts with dead straight sides. Using an excavator to sloppily scoop out a few buckets in 5 minutes before driving off is good enough for dumping a tree into. For ads especially no one except career ad-men give much of a shit about the fine details, I think. Most actual humans ignore most ads at a consci…

> For ads especially no one except career ad-men give much of a shit about the fine details, I think.

You think wrong.

This stuff is easy to measure and businesses spend billions in aggregate a month on this stuff. It’s provably effective and the details matter.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#263
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you copy an artists style with extreme precision without their consent, yes.

I don’t think that’s what we were talking about here - it was using AI to replace graphic designers at startups

Which is an issue. I dont think you understand the whole point.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#264

AI made me this summary (I’ve grown quite weary of reading AI think pieces) and it seems like a really good comparison. >The article "AI Will Not Make You Rich" argues that generative AI is unlikely to create widespread wealth for investors and entrepreneurs. The author, Jerry Neumann, compares AI to past technological revolutions, suggesting it's more like shipping containerization than the microprocessor. He posits…

Did you read the article or you just relied on the AI generated summary? Lots of people argue that this kind of shortcut will make us dumber and the argument does make sense.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#265

I think the interesting idea with “AI” is that it seems to significantly reduce barriers to entry in many domains. I haven’t seen a company convincingly demonstrate that this affects them at all. Lots of fluff but nothing compelling. But I have seen many examples by individuals, including myself. For years I’ve loved poking at video game dev for fun. The main problem has always been art assets. I’m terrible at art an…

Yeah, that's how I feel about it as well.

For a large chunk of my life, I would start a personal project, get stuck on some annoying detail (e.g. the server gives some arcane error), get annoyed, and abandoned the project. I'm not being paid for this, and for unpaid work I have a pretty finite amount of patience.

With ChatGPT, a lot of the time I can simply copypaste the error and get it to give me ideas on paths forward. Sometimes it's right on the first try, often it's not, but it gives me something to do, and once I'm far enough along in the project I've developed enough momentum to stay inspired.

It still requires a lot of work on my end to do these projects, AI just helps with some of the initial hurdles.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#266
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if you had to hire a designer if you wanted to build a web application or mobile app, at a cost of perhaps thousands or even tens of thousands. Would we be better off? I doubt it.

Do you consider designers part of “we” or is it only the computer people that count? It’s definitely not better for the general public. Designers can’t even be replaced by AI as effectively as authors. They make things sorta ’look designed’ to people that don’t understand design, but have none of the communication and usability benefits that make designers useful. The result is slicker-looking, but probably less usab…

> Do you consider designers part of “we” or is it only the computer people that count?

Well you're not going to build a web application if you're a designer, at best you can contribute to one.

Of course that's changing in their favour with AI too - and it's fantastic if they can execute their vision themselves without being held back because they didn't pursue a different field or career choice, without having to go on a long sidequest to acquire that knowledge.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#267
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue a game developer should make their own art assets, even if they "aren't an artist". You don't have to settle for it looking bad, just use your lack of art experience as a constraint. It usually means going with something very stylized or very simple. It might not be amazing but after you do it for a few games you will have pretty decent stuff, and most importantly, your own style. Even amateurish art can be…

This is a financial dead-end for almost everyone who tries it. You're not just looking for "market fit" you're also asking for "market tolerance", it's a very rare combination.

There’s been no market discussed here, the discussion up to here has been about a hobby project, there is no reason to find market fit or market tolerance.

You can have awful art and develop a good gameplay loop, during play testing with friends/testers you can then get feedback that what you are doing is actually worth spending some money on assets and at that point you have a much better understanding of what that should even look at.

Having an AI available to generate art seems a lot more like shaving the yak than an enabler. You never needed good art to make a good game, you need it for a polished game and that comes later.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#268
post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the context of the hole digging analogy, it seems like a lot of holes didn't need to be carefully hand-dug by experts with dead straight sides. Using an excavator to sloppily scoop out a few buckets in 5 minutes before driving off is good enough for dumping a tree into. For ads especially no one except career ad-men give much of a shit about the fine details, I think. Most actual humans ignore most ads at a consci…

Sometimes the AI art in an advert is weird enough to make the advert itself memorable. For example, in one of the underground stations here in Berlin there was a massive billboard advert clearly made by an AI, and you could tell noone had bothered to check what the image was before they printed it: a smiling man was standing up as they left an airport scanner x-ray machine on the conveyor belt, and a robot standing n…

> Unfortunately, like most adverts which are memorable, I have absolutely no idea what it was selling.

A friend of mine liked to point out that if you couldn't remember what the brand was or what was being sold, then it wasn't effective advertising. It failed at the one thing it needed to do/be.

And there's a lot of ineffective advertising. Either people don't notice it or they don't remember it. Massive amounts of money are poured into creating ads and getting ad space, much of which does very little in the getting you to buy sense.

By this measure, advertising is generally very inefficient. Large input for small output. The traditional way to make this more efficient is to increase the value of the output: things like movement of digital billboards (even just rotating through a series of ads) to draw the eye and overcome lack of noticing it among miles of billboards. There's another way: decrease the cost of the input. If I can get the same output—people don't see the ads (bad placement) or people don't remember the product/brand (bad stickiness)—by not using human creatives and using genAI to make my ads, I've improved efficiency.

Unfortunately, this doesn't make advertising more effective or more efficient as an industry and does flood the market with slop, but that's not any individual's goal.

The people who are creating ads that don't work, despite getting paid, are in Bullshit Jobs (in the David Graeber sense). Replacing bullshit jobs with genAI, where the output doesn't seem to really matter anyway. It would be great if people/companies didn't commission or pay to place ads that don't work, but since they do, they might as well spend the least amount possible on creating the content. The value of the input then approaches the (low) value of the output. No one is going to remember the ad anyway, it impacts no buying decision, why bother spending to make it good?

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#269
post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If more value is being created more efficiently, in the end it’s just a question of coming up with taxation system designed for the new economy.

Government gets x% of your processor time?

That sounds very Black Mirrory.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#270
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you consider designers part of “we” or is it only the computer people that count? It’s definitely not better for the general public. Designers can’t even be replaced by AI as effectively as authors. They make things sorta ’look designed’ to people that don’t understand design, but have none of the communication and usability benefits that make designers useful. The result is slicker-looking, but probably less usab…

> Do you consider designers part of “we” or is it only the computer people that count? Well you're not going to build a web application if you're a designer, at best you can contribute to one. Of course that's changing in their favour with AI too - and it's fantastic if they can execute their vision themselves without being held back because they didn't pursue a different field or career choice, without having to go…

You think vibe coding web apps, and by proxy most other coding, will pay anything more than whatever the cheapest developer in Vietnam is willing to charge for it? I definitely don’t think so. AI is killing the labor market for all of these skills. Right now it can only actually replace the lowest end of both fields, but as people upskill trying to outrun it (and then those above them, and then those above them,) and the tools get better, most of the market will get flooded and all of our pay will drop off a cliff. If ideas are so cheap to execute that anyone can do it, and everything is apparently fair use if you pass it through an NN somehow, then anyone can copy it, just as easily, and that will be a FAR more profitable business model. If that’s true, then once again, the only people with successful products are the ones that have the money for giant marketing expenditures. So pretty much exactly like today except a fraction as many people get paid to do it.

I haven’t spoken to a single developer that doesn’t believe they’re too special to have to worry about that. There’s going to be a lot of people that think they’re in the top 5% of coders at their totally safe company that suddenly realize door dash is their best bet for income.

The idea that having more web apps is always a benefit to people assumes a never-ending demand for more web apps. The economy and job market aren’t jibing with that assessment at the moment. Fewer people getting paid for this stuff is just going to mean that the people on top will just get paid more.

Post reply on HN