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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

#551

Post by flippinburgers »

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…

Naively positive. People whose jobs are outpaced by technology end up working "dead end" jobs that nobody else wants or fall into poverty if they are not lucky enough to be able to retire. Turning around in your 40s, 50s, or 60s to find new employment in a new field? This is exceptionally challenging.

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

#552

Post by HervalFreire »

juvvel wrote: post #496
HervalFreire wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Well, seems like this argument is aging badly. This is a nice way of putting it. It just shows how people have a tendency to deny a reality that may replace everything they stand for. What you will see as AI continues to get better along the obvious trendline is these "denial" arguments become more and more specific. First the AI will "never" replace jobs, then it will "never" replace specific jobs involving "progra…

Comments like this always read as "we can already extrapolate that everything we do will be done better by a machine soon". Pushing back against this argument isn't just ignorance or avoidance of change. It just asks the relevant question of whether we can be so sure that AI does everything "better". But how dare we challenge the hubris of tech bros, right?

Naw there are many possible futures. There is nothing saying the trendline is absolute. However...

The future predicted via extrapolation of a trendline is unfortunately more probable and more realistic then a future predicted via mistrust of AI.

Artists have already formed lawsuits against companies that own LLMs, this one in the article already involves an artist complaining about his job being more or less replaced.

You have to be next level delusional not to consider the extrapolation to programming.

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

#553

Post by megaman821 »

fxtentacle wrote: post #247
thorncorona wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Accept that professions come and go. 2. Expect jobs to disappear every decade or so and plan accordingly. 3. Look forward to an awesome new job after your current one is made obsolete. That goes for all of us. What can we do? Hope to save enough to not go into more debt for a second degree? Hope that second degree isn’t obsoleted either? As AI becomes more advanced the minimum education and likely IQ required to…

> What are we gonna do about the ever increasing N+1% of people who won’t be cost effective versus an AI? Fairly tax companies' profits. And then you can afford to just feed 10% of society even if they don't contribute a thing. Also, free world-class education seems to do wonders in Europe ;)

Low corporate tax is fine. Fairly tax the recipients of those profits. Warren Buffet should pay more on his share of Apple's profit than some retiree with Apple in their portfolio. A large corporate tax ends up being regressive.

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

#554

Post by elforce002 »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #538
elforce002 wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is that if AI matches the hype around it, there won't be any more jobs left. The economy depends on the middle class working, earning a living, buying things. The government collect taxes from businesses and its citizens. At risk and low-income people depend on the government to assist them with basic things. If AI destroys the middle class, then the whole system collapses. No middle class = no spending = l…

Yes I’m sure AI will be the very first technology to match its own hype. The technology that destroys the middle class has finally arrived. The days of falsely prophesying that a technology is about to destroy the middle class are over.

C'mon man. It's not that far fetched. I'm not saying that this will happen tomorrow but if ai gets "there", we don't want to see desperation on a global scale.

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

#555

Post by CamperBob2 »

kbelder wrote: post #134
CamperBob2 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why bother issuing such a challenge? You'll win today, but lose decisively in only a few more years.

We'll have self-driving cars by next year, right?

Those are a tougher nut to crack because the entire road transportation infrastructure is designed for human drivers. Lots of so-called "wicked problems" that don't exist in the art world.

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

#556

Post by Deegy »

washadjeffmad wrote: post #451
MachineBurning wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

Even if we agree that your strategy is optimal, it would require the manager acting in a significantly pragmatic manner.

I would wager that the majority of managers will rather reactively jump at the chance to cut an entire salary from their cost structure.

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

#557

Post by flippinburgers »

quonn wrote: post #472
grumbel wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even prompt engineering is just a short term problem, that'll get solved and largely disappear within a couple of years, if not months. Making sense of natural language is after all what LLM are already really good at, they just haven't made their way into image generators yet. Another big issue that gets overlooked is that a lot of the problems that programming is used to solve today will disappear and no longer be…

> People today are thinking of ChatGPT as making it easier to build websites, software and such, but real the power of AI is that it makes all of that obsolete. Why bother browsing the Web when ChatGPT can just give you what you are looking for in whatever format you desire, without ever touching a website? I don‘t think it will play out like this. Companies currently build systems to make the data robust/structured,…

There is nothing stopping companies from offering AI oriented apis. If they no longer have to develop a frontend but just have a "here is our logo" etc endpoint, then... goodbye react! Goodbye FE developers! And at that point AI will probably be developing the very endpoints that it consumes.

Honestly it doesn't sound crazy to me.

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

#558

Post by HervalFreire »

orbital-decay wrote: post #195
HervalFreire wrote: post #176

Earlier 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…

> A creative director simply comes up with high level instructions (like the one above) THEN the ultra hard part is making that high level instruction a reality. That is HARD and as of now it looks like both skills are being replaced by AI. This is the opposite of what I see in reality right now. The hard part is to make the artists do exactly what you want, down to the subtle but meaningful details. That happens bec…

Train the AI exclusively on well lauded texts. Then you can get a generative AI that moves people.

The problem with "reverse engineering people" is that you don't need to, the things they like in any era follows predictable and generic patterns. These patterns can be encoded into AI provided we find enough curated training data.

> The hard part is to make the artists do exactly what you want, down to the subtle but meaningful details.

This is because the artist can't read your mind. It has nothing to do with your skill or the artists skill level. That feedback loop you are alluding to is more a reflection of the unclarity of your instructions or your imagination.

You thought what you imagined looked good but the artist in following your directions created something that showed you how flawed your imagination was.

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

#559

Post by AmericanChopper »

elforce002 wrote: post #554
AmericanChopper wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I’m sure AI will be the very first technology to match its own hype. The technology that destroys the middle class has finally arrived. The days of falsely prophesying that a technology is about to destroy the middle class are over.

C'mon man. It's not that far fetched. I'm not saying that this will happen tomorrow but if ai gets "there", we don't want to see desperation on a global scale.

The idea that technological innovation is going to destroy the middle class isn’t exactly far fetched, it’s more just blatantly stupid. No economy has ever destroyed its middle class through technological innovation. This will never happen. Technological innovation is one of the primary factors that led to the rise of the middle class to begin with…

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

#560

Post by rafaelero »

Pandabob wrote: post #545
rafaelero wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Lots of reasonable people seem to hold this view. Sam Altman himself mentioned believing this in the Lex Friedman podcast. Here are tweets from famous HN users Simon Willison[0] and Patrick Mckenzie[1] endorsing the viewpoint as well. [0]: https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1639692312585572352 [1]: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1639787193580519424

I hope they are right. But one thing that seems to be conflated in this debate is the comparison of AI with previous disruptions. The tools we have built before were taking some specific parts of the process and making it more productive. They were not trying to mimic human cognition in a way that can be applied to so many different processes at the same time.
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