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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

#631
post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could say this about every efficiency improvement in any field ever. If everything still had to be written in C and we didn't have fancy IDEs and access to a vast ocean of libraries, cheap services doing the work for you and returning results over an API, etc., we would need many many many times over more software devs to have everything software based in the world that we do now. But do you think if none of thes…

Do you think it takes as many people to build whatever software you want today vs in the 80s? I agree more software can be built with the improvements, but per unit of functionality, way less people are needed, or they can do it much faster, which in both cases mean you spend less of your revenue on labor, which means "less jobs".

their point is simple: during the last 20-30 years we had efficiency improvements by orders of magnitude. Still we didn't have developers jobs reduction in any way. We evolved into doing more and more high-level and high-scale jobs. So no, -10% of time needed to build the same unit of functionality won't lead to -10% reduction of workforce. It will change the scope of said workforce.

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

#632
post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compilers and high-level languages assuredly reduced the number of engineers needed, right? No: we just started making much more complicated things and the basic level of "this isn't even a serviceable solution" has gone up so high that if you sat around and wrote a trivial program designed to be used over a teletype--which is got much easier as you can do it in C instead of assembly--you'd lose in the market to your…

Would being the pet of an AI-run civilisation be so bad though? Iain M Banks's Culture novels explore basically this concept, and his vision of utopia is quite appealing.

>Would being the pet of an AI-run civilisation be so bad though?

Only for people with dignity. So, in general, no!

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

#633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies are slow to move on things, but I think "video game concept artist" is done. An art director can now sit down in front of Midjourny and pump out years and years of a concept artists work in just an afternoon.

This feels like a comment written by someone without practical experience with concept art (creator or consumer) - correct me if I'm wrong though! Like personally, I think I will still draw concept art instead of asking a GAN. Feels like that greases my creative wheels more. Just me though.

I could see drawing a couple of characters and getting an AI to extend the style to more. Especially if you can give it feedback. But the idea that you could get years of concepts in an afternoon is silly. That's like saying I can generate hundreds of business plans using ChatGPT.

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

#634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About time. I am willing to disgruntle some dozens of billionaires in exchange for massive QoL improvements for the billions of people. Just waiting for enough momentum, will happily join/support.

You'd best have good implementation or they'll be using ChatGPT to aim your guillotines towards their business rivals, further consolidating their power. This is the challenge. Anything we've got, people like this have tenfold, or a thousandfold, or a millionfold. As long as we're still running on 18th and 19th century societies. Mind that you're not literally being steered by the billionaires to accomplish their end…

The „aiming problem“ for me isn’t really an issue. The goal must be that no one can have too much power over others, no matter why/how. So yeah, the first victims might be tricked targets, but it doesn’t end there.

This might sound totally absurd when you hear it first, but I am fully in favor for randomized rulings in short/limited durations! Lottery style, a bit tweaked to have good entropy.

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

#635

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…

Good points. Understanding what and how it really works will be valueble.

Explaining the AI needs the knowledge of what can be done. For example, you cannot say AI "build systems that process the data". You need to explain AI what "kind of processing should be done". That by itself requires knowledge of what kind of processing exist and when to use which. Also, explaining to AI what should be done takes time and effort which should not be underestimated. Sometimes when I am exlaining someone which way data should be cleaned in many cases I think that it maybe faster to do it by myself and explainig to AI will most likly be a harder than to AI. So, the question about is it easier to implement by myself than explain what I need to AI is a valid and important question.

Also, with data important part even without AI is to verify how well system works. Does it correctly handles differents types of data and different use cases? Just having a system that processes data but you are not sure what output can be is in most cases useleless data system.

So, in any serious data systems understanding of what they can be done and how code and data systems are working are important and I think will become even more important than now.

Also, someone needs to creat AI and systems around them.

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

#636

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…

It is NOT taking artists job in OP though. What happens is that it changes the job into something different.

Yes, it changed his job in to something a 6th grader could do with little to no training. In other words, it’s now a meaningless, low-value job that won’t pay well.

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

#637
post #332

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…

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 wonder how much of the original reddit post was written by ChatGPT, it seems to tick a lot of boxes.

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

#638
post #250

I do work in tech. Almost 25 years. As a traditionally trained artist, my advantage over the years always was the knowledge of composition, color and my drawing skills when producing the visual part of the products. I focused early in my company (2005) on UX and UCD processes, and with the time realized that people don't care about craftsmanship or maximizing the quality. We are approaching a time of generative desig…

"Trained on stolen data" This is emotionally charged wording with a clear confrontational bias and a dark intent to discredit.

As someone with over 30 years of experience with art and artists, do you realize how many influences are present in any given artist? Do you know how many artists use "reference images" heavily? Do you know how many artists trace images (specially in 3D modeling)? By your logic, every piece of art is stolen, if not from other artists, from reality itself. You are insulting every artist present in this forum with your bias. Thanks for that.

Also, art made by commission or contract is technically property of the one who paid. Only the top recognized artists get to retain ownership of a specific piece or design done for a company, and even that is rare. How many cases are there where artists jumped ship off a property and needed to make lawyer-friendly pastiches of the characters, because they didn't own the rights?

And, the Unet does not store images. This is not a photobasher nor a extreme compression algorithm. You'd know this if you had bothered to try. Which I have. I have trained it on my own artwork and in fact I maintain one of the largest guides about how to train Stable Diffusion using Low Rank Adaptation. You can't just "take out" an image in any exact capacity, and a lot of "proofs" are fabricated using img2img or models trained so aggressively on a single image that it's going to resemble it no matter what (and yet it'll never be reproduced 1:1). People fueled by strong emotions are not incapable of deceit. In fact, it's the stuff you MUST double-check, precisely because fueled by emotions.

I'm so disappointed in "tech people" lately.

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

#639
post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s nice that the barrier became lower but people still need jobs to afford food and rent. I doubt that UBI will come anytime soon so less jobs that pay enough is a serious issue.

Agreed. It feels like a lot of the people burning hard on AI seem to think that when the jobs are gone some benevolent benefactors (who exactly?) will decide to institute UBI for all because....why exactly? It seems much more likely to me that all that will happen is there will be a lot more poor people...

it's not like "all jobs" will be taken by Robots and AI. That will be of little consolation though to modern-day buggy-whip-makers.

Jobs are a way of "adding value" to society. But over the last 120 years we've figured out how to add a Lot of value with minimal people. 95% of people used to grow food. Now it's like 2%.

People moved to factories, where today robots and automation rule. People moved to hi-tech, and leveraged that tech. Now AI is moving into that space.

In truth, we now create way, way, more value than we need. We need to figure out how to distribute the value created. Somehow I doubt that the US will be the leader here; things like UBI are too far against the "American Way".

When we see UBI emerge, in whatever form that takes (basically basic human needs met) it'll likely come from places that value community over individuality. Places that rate their success by their poor, not their rich. Places that celebrate achievements which don't require the exploitation of others.

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

#640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

According to :

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

It is about 12% in Poland (2018) and in most countries from the link it was less than 10%.

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