Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you think about it, All wealth, every single bit of it has come from the same earth we’re all born on. This is the one truth which binds us all, including the AI, it’s too a child of this Earth, which means all people should have fairly equal access to at least basic protections the Earth provides us with. That’s all there really is to say about it.
Yes! The world where you end up in a random position with zero influence over the outcome if you could pick it before you were born is the one you should strive to create. That one has true equality.
I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney
541–550 of 713 posts
Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney
#542Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the OP wasn’t disappointed about the end result, which is now higher quality by their own admission. They can certainly use their skills and experience to engineer prompts that will return the highest quality work, no doubt. What made them sad is they no longer have the joy and satisfaction of developing those models in a 3D rendering software. This is what they trained for. In many ways, this is like the ini…
> What made them sad is they no longer have the joy and satisfaction of developing those models in a 3D rendering software. This is what they trained for. I think the point is that this artist can still experience that joy, but they just can’t get paid for it anymore. That is indeed sad, but that’s life. On the other hand, maybe in a post scarcity society, this artist won’t have to work to survive, and they can do al…
The scary part to me is that there’s scant evidence that a post-scarcity society will be allowed to develop. It seems more likely that those at the top will reap the entirety of the fruits of productivity gains enabled by employing AI, much as they’ve been doing for the more incremental (but still massive) productivity gains of the past several decades. Very little of the pie will be shared with the working class.
Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney
#543That's the risk of participating in a completely new industry... You don't know how long it's going to last; it has no track record. It reminds me of my own career as a software developer. I self-taught myself coding since I was 14 in 2004. I'm from a relatively small town and nobody in my family had a tech background or even knew anyone with a tech background. So it was quite a stretch/unlikely for me to become a de…
Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney
#544People with a good understanding of different styles of art and framing/angles/etc should be able to create the "right" prompts for a customer much much faster and get better results than people who don't know art. Generative AI like Midjourney will completely upend the art industry (it already is). But I don't think it's the death knell for the study of art. Here's a solid example of that in the context of creating…
> People with a good understanding of different styles of art and framing/angles/etc should be able to create the "right" prompts for a customer much much faster and get better results than people who don't know art. When the Bing image creator released a couple of days ago, I used ChatGPT to craft a prompt for it. > In one sentence describe the art style of impressionism Then used that in my prompt for the creator:…
> okinawa street on a rainy night. Impressionism style
Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney
#545Earlier 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…
> AI won't take a thought workers job. I don't understand how you can hold this position considering not only where we are but also the rate of progress in AI. It has been taking thought workers job and it will increasingly do so in the future until the surplus cognitive workers offer is just so minimal that it's not worth to automate it.
Here are tweets from famous HN users Simon Willison[0] and Patrick Mckenzie[1] endorsing the viewpoint as well.
Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney
#546I saw AI as a tool like Photoshop, and for that reason wasn’t buying all this anxiety. I still see it as a tool, but this post has changed my entire perception of the issue: It’s not that a new tool will replace you. It’s that a new tool might be too compelling to avoid, but be boring and miserable to work with and suck the joy out of your craft.
But come on, how it moving polygons around and snapping verts together really all that fun. Bringing characters and worlds to life is what artists really dream about, and AI tools make that easier.
But actually this is a great point. You are right. Even in software development, the joy is building something excellent. The joy isn't usually in defining random util functions to help you get there.
With these advances we could be about to reach a point where extremely small groups of people could build phenomenal things. How nice it would be to be capable of building AAA games with a team of 2-3 people.
Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney
#547Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're not being cynical. You're being overly optimistic here about creative professionals. The creative professional IS a target for replacement. What LLMs do best is specifically what the "creative professional" does. Better than coding or mathematics, LLMs excel at creative English text. This is because creative output is trivial when compared with technical skills. I don't think the "creative professional" will g…
I think you're conflating imagination and creativity with taste. Your example might be cute and funny, but as you yourself alluded: it's completely bland and tasteless. It's maybe good enough for a "meme dump" but that's all. Maybe I'm not sure what point you're trying to make either? All fiction writers suck? I don't know how much fiction you read, but it's incredible varied. There's a lot writers need to think abou…
Difficult in terms of effort. Not difficult in terms of skill. Make no mistake the quality of a movie is more the sum of the quality of the parts then it is the creative director. Who wrote the script? Who did the digital effects? Who did the lighting? Who did the editing?
The director did the hard work of picking the people and issuing orders.
>I think it's natural for humans to reduce and simplify things we don't engage with every day, or our brains would be overloaded. So we just handwave it off. We do it to other people too unfortunately... Remember how complex your life (internal and external) is; other's lives are equally complex and nuanced.
Except I am more or less a director. Not one for movies but for a company.
There is a difference between handwaving something off versus being delusional about your own role within the world. Directing is hard work, management is hard work. But none of these things are skilled work.
>All fiction writers suck? I don't know how much fiction you read, but it's incredible varied. There's a lot writers need to think about and control in the reader (and account for multiple profiles) outside of just an idea. But the ideas themselves need to be coherent. own position.
It is certainly easier to create an entire space opera in writing then it is to do it via a movie. Writing is skilled work in terms of one skill only: your ability to write. Every other aspect of it is hard work but, unfortunately, unskilled work.
I realize there are complex plots, paradoxical stories and imaginative settings and the pacing of a story is important as well. But all of this doesn't really require skill just time and deep thought to come up with. Plenty of the most popular authors never had a writing background or talent.
I would say again that these director positions while in principle are easily replaceable they are not in practice due to politics. A director or CEO is where he is mainly due to politics. Politics is unfortunately a skill with aspects that not only need to be imitated by AI but imitated by robotics as well, and it's simply a gateway into the role with no relation to the actuality of the job requirements.
Its hard to imagine a computer issuing the same exact orders as a director. But with LLMs computers are really close to doing that in principle. The issue is as I mentioned the social and political aspect of directing that cannot be replaced yet.
Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney
#548Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
This is what I would call toxic positivity. Maybe with a side of survivor bias. Lots of people don’t get awesome new jobs. They struggle, they fall out of the workforce. People don’t want to “accept” that’s some thing they have trained to do and gotten good at is going to just go away. It’s a reality, but it’s also pretty fucking awful. My father used to make a very good living doing sign painting until the late 80s…
I disagree with your point. The problem is that people will gladly accept changes brought by technology up until the point that it affects them personally. The people that bought a cheap vinyl sign were not forced to purchase them, and yet they did.
This is not a problem with tech, it’s a problem with us. If you like liberty, then you know the choice that people will make, and that’s what is terrifying.
Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney
#549Earlier 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?
Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney
#550Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> warmth That shows the LLM is running on vacuum tubes.