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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

#451
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The person who wrote the post says that they can produce the same quality content in "2-3 days" instead of "several weeks", and that there are two people working in essentially the same position. If the amount of content to be produced remains constant, then from a purely financial point of view the company should be looking at cutting one of them. AI would have then taken their job. For the amount of content to be p…

Oof. Firing isn't free, comrade. Reducing redundancy to a single point of failure has two major effects: the latency penalty becomes quadratic as workload scales, and if any person quits, you lose the whole team.

In general, creative roles like artists are the sum value of their education and experience, not just their measured output. If you don't possess art history vocabulary, you're going to be very limited in prompting or designing more advanced embeddings and LoRA or training models. I'm seeing this a lot right now - people don't want to share their prompts because they don't want everyone to know how much the model carried them and how little any actual "prompt engineering" went into it.

The smart thing for their boss to do would be to scale projects and have one of them focus on managing and filtering the new volume of assets. Since it sounds like they like working from scratch, even adding external time to "research tooling and methods" would probably keep them happy until they find the challenge in their new duties.

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

#452

This reads as if floor sweeper is complaining that a company bought a machine to do the sweeping. And now he has to ride the machine all day and it took all the joy of his job because he really liked the hand motions and walking around and was very good at it. His colleague doesn't mind and is no longer slightly worse at sweeping than him. And boss sees it as a huge money saver because floors are vast.

More money for the boss, less (jobs and thus) money for the rest. Such a wonderful prospect.

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

#453

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…

It will probably end up being more "test driven development"-like. Write your tests/expectations and the tooling automatically prompts/writes the code to meet the tests.

That sounds pretty miserable, because test writing is one of the least fun aspects of my job

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

#454

The discussion is creating 3 groups: First group is sure AI will be an enabler and it won't replace them; The second group is saying AI won't replace them at least in the near future (1~10 years); Then we have the third group, which is basically the sentiment the op is living rn: AI is taking away their hopes, dreams, and livelihood. Now, I think we'll see the strongest counterculture in human history against AI and…

And then industrial revolution didn't take out jobs, rather created more. So did computers in the 80s and 90s. I remember typesetters in our locality were protesting in the 80s that computers were taking off their jobs. They started something like "burn the computers" movement. More people were later employed as composers than there were typesetters.

Those typesetters were likely right, tho. Sure, Industrial Revolution and computer revolution ended up creating more jobs than they took out - but what everyone conveniently doesn't mention is, those new jobs went to different people.

These kinds of transitions are large scale wealth redistribution. Your random typesetter 20 years into their career, with experience, good pay, and whole life built around economic conditions they spent those decades working hard to achieve, is not going to jump into a role of senior offset printer specialist, or DTP team manager. They're going to become a junior designer at best, most likely fall out of industry and into a junior whatever role. With commensurate drop in salary.

If you're over 30, imagine dropping down to whatever you earned when you were 20, and tell me that people protesting automation don't have an argument. And remember: it's only your career that resets; your health and obligations and remaining years to live do not.

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

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. One of the things that's going to become starkly obvious is this: being in ownership of the money machine doesn't entitle you to power and compensation matching the output of that machine. Feedback loops set in. If you need X amount of power and Y amount of resources to get it going, but it pays you enough for X times 2 power and Y times 5 resources, the first person to get the machine cranking becomes a human v…

Morally comparing order of magnitude I don't really see the difference between any of your examples. They're all structurally lacking in empathy and every one of those would sell their mother if it got them ahead in the game.

I don't disagree, but there's a profound difference in effort (most notably seen in Bezos vs. Bankman-Fried). This changes the result, and I think it also significantly changes the framing.

Bezos started in the days of Windows 3.1, and already was positioning himself near Microsoft as a force multiplier even though, in those days, he and other humans had to do vast amounts of work and thinking.

If the only requirement for dominating the world is adjacency to AI, the gameplan is still exactly the same but now the work and thinking is what you turn over to machines as a force multiplier. Without that, where is the justification for producing individuals who dominate the world? It becomes, not arbitrary, but purely a factor of who is adjacent to the AI at the right time.

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

#456
post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've needed "jobs" to support ourselves since we descended from the trees. Actually before that too. "Society" came about because we invented tools and techniques to make our jobs easier so people could spend more time on different things. "AI" is some more steps down that same path. > In the next era we'll probably live like aristocrats, but instead of the work being done by servants, it'll be done by AI. Not in th…

> We've needed "jobs" to support ourselves since we descended from the trees Do you think the lion's job is to hunt? And the zebra's job is to eat grass? A job is something you do in exchange for something else as payment. If you go as far back as to when our ancestors descended from trees, you will need to explain what kind of jobs were around then, who worked them and who paid.

I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted for this. Surely most people would think it's a bit of a stretch to say that lions have jobs in the same way that 21st century humans have jobs?

I can't imagine walking up to a lion in the savannah and asking what their job was :-)

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

#457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the key point. The single unified market with 300+ million people speaking the same language is the advantage that will make all the other ones more or less irrelevant.

This factor is dimishing in importance with the absurdly increasing wealth gap. Who cares about this big majority of people that can’t afford stuff?

Sorry? You think the American economy is so broken that people 'can't afford stuff' anymore?

That there is an absurdly increasing wealth gap is a fact, but that doesn't mean that - for the time being - US households as consumers are still spending lots of money. And if you're in the B2B side of the market then it's even easier.

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

#458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Morally comparing order of magnitude I don't really see the difference between any of your examples. They're all structurally lacking in empathy and every one of those would sell their mother if it got them ahead in the game.

I don't disagree, but there's a profound difference in effort (most notably seen in Bezos vs. Bankman-Fried). This changes the result, and I think it also significantly changes the framing. Bezos started in the days of Windows 3.1, and already was positioning himself near Microsoft as a force multiplier even though, in those days, he and other humans had to do vast amounts of work and thinking. If the only requiremen…

There is always the French Revolution option... That's how historically we've dealt with too much inequality. It may well get to that.

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

#459
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If performing a job is even just 10% faster, you can fire 1 person out of a team of 10 (or need to hire in the first place). This should be obvious.

I'm sure most programmers work more than 10% faster with syntax highlighting and autocomplete. But no one says IDE replaced humans' jobs.

They did, and so did high-level languages, and not to mention the entire profession is first and foremost about automating other peoples' jobs away. Thing is, nobody is really tracking how improvements for software developers are replacing people, because this only manifests at slowing the absurdly high growth rate in this industry.

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

#460

People are already generating entire apps with AI in minutes. Software engineering as a profession is finished. We are all now slaves to Roko’s Basilisk.

If this is indeed so simple then why chatGPT (meaning web app not LLM) was so buggy ? Did OpenAI use their LLM to make the app or not ?
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