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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

#391

Post by Applejinx »

MonkeyClub wrote: post #376
Mistletoe wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fascinating. I can’t imagine why someone would go to the trouble to do all that for a comment.

The irony of using a LLM to write a text that complains of the pervasiveness of automated tooling for web design is hard to miss. But perhaps it’s just that the author has internalized copywriting formulas to a degree that their text appears machine generated?

We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats' feet over broken glass In our dry cellar

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

#392

Post by echelon »

prawn wrote: post #373
iamphilrae wrote: post #312

The rise of website builders like Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify has drastically changed the web design and development industry. As a co-founder and lead developer of a small design/development team, I loved my job and was passionate about creating beautiful and functional websites. However, as more and more clients turned to these DIY platforms, I found it increasingly difficult to justify our higher prices. While o…

It's not just that the budgets are harder to justify; it's also that prospective clients consider themselves to be experts. Having your judgement and expertise consistently overruled is disheartening and you often end up just following instructions, sapping any joy from the (diminishing and cheaper) role. I started my web business 25 years ago. 5ish years ago I started photographing and filming travel content, primar…

No. It's that the job to be done is to sell product.

Not build a handcrafted website. Not build a beautiful website.

Provide something that markets and sells something to customers.

And with that perspective, the client really does know better.

The web is ephemeral. Will it even still exist in twenty five years after AI provides all the answers and connections (all we use the web for anyway)?

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

#393

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

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…

I suspect this comment won't age well.

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

#394

Post by anonyfox »

ChatGTP wrote: post #375
anonyfox wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about striding for one of the core societal values that make many advanced democraties (including the European nordics) so much better/happier than the US? It’s called Equality. Insert strong progressive taxes, especially on wealth, and use it to fund a strong public sector, so _everyone_ has as access to basic goods and services for free, like education/health/transport/… . I think you vastly underestimate how m…

I can’t describe how much better Europe, specifically Netherlands felt due to the social safety nets provided, and do not tell me that The Dutch aren’t hard working people, because they are. People are so much more relaxed there. 99% of the concern about AI is because we’re living in a cut throat capitalistic society, if we knew that AI didn’t mean starving or losing our homes, we’d be way more relaxed about it, and…

I cannot imagine being rich and be surrounded by homeless people, crime, drugs and the like.

The only „solution“ that still avoids realizing the problem is to try to escape into gated communities and shoot those plebs coming too close, ideally robots so no human is at fault conveniently. Or what useful is having that mercedes when most others want to steal or at least damage it?

I, for one, prefer to treat other humans as, well, humans. And by making everyone around me better off, my quality of life also improves.

For simple striking example, how about giving homeless people housing for free, so they can get their stuff together again? You can argue about how „they„ don’t deserve this all day long or simply do it and eliminate a problem https://world-habitat.org/news/our-blog/helsinki-is-still-le... - and even save a lot of money in the process as a society!

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

#395

Post by krona »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #386
jeppester wrote: post #354

This very well sums up the anxiety I have about how this is going to affect programming. That any creativity and understanding will be sucked out and replaced with prompt engineering. I still think you will have to be a good developer to understand if the solution you get is good, but is that even going to matter when you can just ask again and try again? I think there will be lots of code bases that no-one really un…

I agree with the loss of understanding being a bad thing, but I cannot mourn the loss of creativity. Programming is a core part of our society and infrastructure, yet it's still one like a craft rather than engineering. Creativity should not be part of infrastructure efforts on a level beyond embellishments and experiments.

> Creativity should not be part of infrastructure efforts on a level beyond embellishments and experiments.

You could say the same about architecture, but only modern architects think that way, because they were brainwashed by fashion.

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

#396

Post by iLoveOncall »

precompute wrote: post #333
pdc56 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious - on a scale out of 10, how much of that was written by ChatGPT? No offense intended - if the answer is zero, my apologies

I don't think it was written by a LLM, the words have a warmth that generated text lacks. Plus you can tell it's written as if it's half-spoken.

> the words have a warmth that generated text lacks

Reminds me of my philosophy teacher in high-school that gave me the best grade of the year and praised how "personal" it felt, for an essay I had bought online for 3 euros.

The irony of it still makes me chuckle 15 years later.

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

#397

Post by iLoveOncall »

jeppester wrote: post #354

This very well sums up the anxiety I have about how this is going to affect programming. That any creativity and understanding will be sucked out and replaced with prompt engineering. I still think you will have to be a good developer to understand if the solution you get is good, but is that even going to matter when you can just ask again and try again? I think there will be lots of code bases that no-one really un…

> prompt engineering

Sounds like coding to me.

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

#398

Post by Applejinx »

jeppester wrote: post #354

This very well sums up the anxiety I have about how this is going to affect programming. That any creativity and understanding will be sucked out and replaced with prompt engineering. I still think you will have to be a good developer to understand if the solution you get is good, but is that even going to matter when you can just ask again and try again? I think there will be lots of code bases that no-one really un…

A lot of what we do as programmers, writers or artists IS 'prompt engineering'. All that AI is replacing (generalizing? automating?) is execution. Prompt engineering is the 'what' of the 'how'.

"They should have sent a poet"- not NASA, but a screenplay written by some sort of poet.

If there's a singularity it will be in this: you speak of real programmers doing the work to make this AI, but it seems like a hell of a lot of this 'real programmer work' is not poetry. Someone put together the ideas that make code resonate with how people think (for good or ill) and then a lot of real programmers groveled over tedious Python code or whatever, to make it happen at scale.

That tedious groveling and scale is what took the effort, but it's that which can be replaced by machine learning.

Art is prompt engineering. 'Always has been'. We don't master penmanship in the age of the keyboard. People still buy very expensive pens and write in longhand for the beauty of it, but it ceased to be a requisite chore many years ago.

Value the correct side of the balance. If you can't beat the guy with poorer execution by having a better eye and better prompt-imagining, you're not the better artist, you just have better penmanship.

Same for programmers. Best put your effort into trying to understand… because that's going to be a seller's market. You're right that most people won't keep up with understanding, and that's going to directly set their value.

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

#399

Post by ben_w »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #397
jeppester wrote: post #354

This very well sums up the anxiety I have about how this is going to affect programming. That any creativity and understanding will be sucked out and replaced with prompt engineering. I still think you will have to be a good developer to understand if the solution you get is good, but is that even going to matter when you can just ask again and try again? I think there will be lots of code bases that no-one really un…

> prompt engineering Sounds like coding to me.

Not from my current experience.

I'm intending to try it out a lot more — perhaps turn my old Java/OpenGL desktop shareware games into browser based JavaScript freeware — but so far, it's like messaging a junior dev and having them write code for you: 98% of the code works fine, 2% is total rubbish that you spend a normal amount of time (i.e. ages) debugging.

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

#400

Post by rakejake »

paweladamczuk wrote: post #214
rakejake wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amen. AI will make us all "managers" of some sort. Goodbye to getting in flow state and trying to build something yourself, and say hello to a gazillion meetings from morning until evening figuring out what to build and what prompt to feed to the AI. AI is going to make our bullshit jobs even shittier.

Instead of grinding away over a piece of code, I will get to talk to people more? Doesn't sound like such a bad deal to me. I get your point, of course. I just think communication can be like a craft, challenging and rewarding. I try to frame things positively, it helps me stay motivated at work.

I appreciate your attitude, and it is something we all have to pick-up eventually. When you pose it as "talk to more people", that does sound better. But I see it as a job with more pressure and tension, more politics, and less freedom to experiment.

Think about the average day of a manager/management consultant/VC (whose job it is to talk to people, make deals etc). I always looked at their careers and walked away thankful that a programmer career exists.

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