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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

#601

Post by Julesman »

luckylion wrote: post #287
Julesman wrote: post #124

We are going to be seeing so much of this. It is sad. Start up culture at times seems to insist that all progress must be good, as though progress itself will be thwarted by reflection or honesty. Something is lost and something is gained, but that doesn't make the losses painless or irrelevant. We can be pragmatic and have empathy at the same time. What I don't think we should do is act like every change is inherent…

You can replace "Startup culture" with "Modernity" and it reads like many conservatives' feelings about progressive culture. I don't think anyone has ever cared about that, and I don't see why that should be changed because it now affects different people.

Not a solid read on my comment, but it's an interesting point. Sensitivity to those left behind as conservative defense of tradition.

I want every coal miner to lose their job. Every last one. That would be a fantastic thing and a necessary thing. That doesn't mean I want those people to suffer. We can help them out. We can give them assistance and job training.

In other words we can embrace the future without being cruel. That's not a conservative sentiment at all. And yes, many people would like to move forward in a thoughtful way that doesn't leave people in the dust.

As far as affecting different people, LLMs are about to squish the middle class. You can be quite sure that the impact will be very different than when similar changes affect the working class.

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

#602

Post by revelio »

jacquesm wrote: post #458
Applejinx wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's how France historically tried to deal with too much inequality, except it was a complete failure and after staggering levels of evil, bloodshed and oppression they simply ended up with a new elite that had absolute power. No inequality was solved.

Other countries didn't go down that road and none regretted it.

Yet it's amazing how quickly some will still exploit any new technology or change to justify reaching for violence. Some never learn.

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

#603

Post by revelio »

anonyfox wrote: post #252
peyton wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re taking a central planner’s view of a decentralized system. You can’t say “here’s a problem; let’s just make it go away.” We are going to print so much money. I don’t see how bumping up capital gains taxes are going to change anything. People will plow extra help into speculative bubbles. Casino thesis.

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…

>> so _everyone_ has as access to basic goods and services for free, like education/health/transport/…

Access? UK tries this. High taxes and high borrowing to fund a large public sector. Result:

- People can't reliably see dentists or get doctor's appointments because the nationalized health system can't manage capacity properly.

- People can't reliably move around the country because the public sector transport workers are constantly going on strike, despite Tube drivers earning £56k/yr, only a bit less than that of a software engineer.

Putting the public sector in charge doesn't guarantee access to anything, it can easily lead to the opposite, which is why the USSR was constantly being wracked by bizarre shortages especially for anything that mattered to the general public like consumer goods. And now the UK suffers massive healthcare shortages. Same problem.

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

#604

Post by 1attice »

omnimus wrote: post #307
bruce511 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When electric sound amplification came along, it put most professional musicians out of business. Instead of an orchestra all you need is a band of 3 or 4. Making music expanded though. In the sense that more people played, there was more variety, and indeed more professional musicians today than 100 years ago. (the bar for entry is also lower, and most are permantly broke - take that as you will.) Some orchestras st…

Amplification allowed for more original creation. AI is opposite of human creation. Its definition of anti-creation. Its a spell that locks visual culture to year 2025. And it can only do this by illeagly stealing all the human work.

> Its a spell that locks visual culture to year 2025.

What a fantastic way of putting it.

I'm constantly reminded of _the Matrix_, with Agent Smith telling Neo that 1999 (the apparent year inside the Matrix) was the peak of human civilization.

Our own Matrix will use the year 2025.

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

#605

Post by dagmx »

Quiark wrote: post #406
dagmx wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know why you’re downvoted (other than maybe the glibness?) because you’re right. They’re working at a company where the goal isn’t to make good content. They were effectively there as a means to churn out stuff. It’s why their boss is making them use AI prompts to get content out as quickly as possible. It doesn’t even matter how good the diffusion results is for that segment. It’s really just about having so…

Yes but are there enough jobs at those higher standard studios?

That’s not the point I’m making.

I’m saying that people extrapolating this to the full spectrum of artists (both on HN and the Blender Reddit) are missing the context.

I already acknowledged that the people at this low end of the spectrum are vulnerable because they’re basically just used to churn stuff out, without any value for their work.

The point is, this persons job has always been one level of automation or efficiency away from being just an operator. If it’s not generative art, it’s other forms of automation or outsourcing or some new high school dropout who’s good enough.

Midjourney here is a symptom not a cause. Though it’ll be a symptom that’ll affect the most vulnerable roles: the people who are largely just a factory operator

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

#606

Post by devoutsalsa »

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…

Is it common to use website builders like SquareSpace with a backend API?

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

#607

Post by scotty79 »

zajio1am wrote: post #492
scotty79 wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> minimum wage was not sustainable I'm not sure what do you intend this word to mean. Minimum wage is sustained in many countries for many years. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/minimum-w... > looking as how even $15/hr isn't enough to cover rent basically anywhere where they actually pay $15/hr That's a bit different problem. What UBI could do is let people migrate away from very expensive places…

Minimum wage is sustainable because it is usually set based on economic reality of each country to a value that affects just a small percentage of laborers.

In Poland it's nearing 20% of laborers. In US statewide minimum wage of 15$ would be and improvement for 1/3 of the labor force.

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

#608

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

revelio wrote: post #603
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…

>> so _everyone_ has as access to basic goods and services for free, like education/health/transport/… Access? UK tries this. High taxes and high borrowing to fund a large public sector. Result: - People can't reliably see dentists or get doctor's appointments because the nationalized health system can't manage capacity properly. - People can't reliably move around the country because the public sector transport work…

> People can't reliably see dentists or get doctor's appointments because the nationalized health system can't manage capacity properly.

Not accurate in the slightest, this is due to the current administration deliberately funding the NHS less than it needs to function effectively.

> People can't reliably move around the country because the public sector transport workers are constantly going on strike

Only currently true because of similar reasons, it's not structurally true of that sector.

> Putting the public sector in charge ... And now the UK suffers massive healthcare shortages. Same problem.

Not accurate at all.

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

#609

Post by orbital-decay »

HervalFreire wrote: post #558
orbital-decay wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 m…

> 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.

That only works to a certain degree. For the infamous example, try making GPT output the correct number of asterisks, you will get mixed results. You don't have any problem with typing exactly 1589 asterisks because you run the stateful counting algorithm in your head. GPT has no idea about the algorithm - it has to reverse engineer it from the text, and can only extract the vague correspondence between a number and a string about this or that length. You don't give humans examples to reverse engineer, you teach them to count.

This is a simplest example, it might even learn to count eventually, as it's far more capable in certain aspects. But as the dimensionality of the task grows, the amount of resources and training data required to reverse engineer it grows much faster.

Sure, it can spot some patterns and that can look good, but some things are just plain invisible in the result - you will have a hard time making it learn higher level concepts because they highly depend on hardwired things like the dumber part of neural circuitry and biochemistry in humans, which the model doesn't have.

It's like trying to make a photo in a dark room - no matter how you improve the sensitivity of your camera, you might not have a single photon in it.

> This is because the artist can't read your mind.

Yes, this is what I mean by the limited capacity of a simple textual description. It's a fundamental limitation - natural language is just poorly suited for the detailed conceptualization. A sketch, or a conceptual diagram, or other higher order control methods have far more capacity to explain your intent, and that's the direction those models move to. At which point their usage is nothing like "type something simple and receive the result".

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

#610

Post by runnerup »

MildlySerious wrote: post #417
runnerup wrote: post #3

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. 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:…

The point is you knew to use "impressionist" as a concept. ChatGPT probably wouldn't have helped you with that kernel. It's not clear whether GPT added any value at all in your use case as you just replaced "impressionist" with "{synonym of impressionist}". How would you repeat this for:

> okinawa street on a rainy night, in the style of fauvism

> okinawa street on a rainy night, in the style of constructivism

> okinawa street on a rainy night, in the style of De Stijl (Neoplasticism)

> okinawa street on a rainy night, in the style of later Expressionism, e.g. George Grosz and Otto Dix

If you weren't aware of these stylistic options at the time?

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