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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

#651

Post by cthalupa »

sheepscreek wrote: post #29
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…

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…

Some people really love drawing 2d sprites pixel by pixel. Now people make 3d models to render down to 2d sprites. Some people really love drawing textures. Now people use Substance to make them procedurally. Some people really love doing polygon modeling for making characters for media. Now people do it with sculpting. Some people really love and took pride in creating high quality meshes that animated well with clean topology. Now remesh and retopo tools can fix all of that after the fact. Some people really love hand animating things like explosions and smoke. Now Houdini simulates all of it for you.

Every major efficiency advancement in any field is going to eliminate work that some people loved and trained for. Someone trying to do CG work for a game or movie based on the skillsets they loved and practiced 20 years ago is going to be doing something completely different if they want to be competitive today, and be buried if they don't. Does the OP lament the fact that the workflow he is a part of eliminated work that other artists would have done before them, and very likely spent as much time and love mastering as they did the 3d modeling?

I empathize with them - I've had former careers peter out like web design - but they should also recognize that they are beneficiaries of the same sort of change that is currently upsetting them. It sucks, but it is how progress has happened for a long time now.

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

#652

Post by throwawaylinux »

tlocke wrote: post #442
throwawaylinux wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I agree with a lot of what you write, but in my experience in the UK there can be instances where money from the the wealthy has been used for the common good. For example, until 1945 only the rich could afford to educate their children, but the government decided to use taxpayers' money to provide free education for every child up to the age of 16. It was a utopian idea, and when it was first suggested most people…

So I think there's a distinction between wealth and happiness. Amongst the aristocracy I'm sure there is a lot of misery. I think we've got a good chance of ensuring material abundance for everyone on the planet. Whether those people will be happy is a different question.

There is a distinction, but we already live like aristocracy. And aristocracing a bit more isn't going to change much in the social dynamic. "AI" isn't likely to be any more transformative than the the Haber process or the steam engine or the computer, as far as I can see. Some peoples' jobs will become redundant, same as always.

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

#653

Post by throwawaylinux »

tlocke wrote: post #456
mongol wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 :-)

It was a pretty weak comment that didn't address the point. The first humans certainly spent a lot of time working to get food and shelter, and stayed awake worrying about not getting enough to eat.

"Society" didn't enslave us with jobs, we already had them.

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

#654

Post by scotty79 »

zajio1am wrote: post #640
scotty79 wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%.

However it's not 2018 anymore. It's now almost 20%

Thanks for the link though. I tried to find such chart and I failed.

I guess there's no point of discussing what is and what isn't small.

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

#655

Post by scotty79 »

tgv wrote: post #452
scotty79 wrote: post #189

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.

That's argument against capitalism not against automation.

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

#656

Post by jerojero »

tlocke wrote: post #311
jerojero wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so. I think in the future we will be living pretty similarly but instead of just doing the work manually we'll be using AI to be more efficient. Just like what the original post on reddit was referring to. He was not fired or anything, his bosses just told him "now you need to do 10 times the work you were doing before because you got the AI". Although in the past it was okay for him to do 1/10th of the…

> Of course, I would love to live in the world that you dream of, I'm pretty sure that's what post-scarcity communism looks like. I just don't really see any indicators in terms of public policy or business attitude that indicates that will be the case. That's true, but let me give an example of something I've experienced in my own lifetime. In about 1996 I heard about Open Source software and after wrestling with th…

I'm all for Open Source. And Linux is a great example.

But look at what Open Source is turning into, it's being swallowed by corporations anyway. I guess I'm just not so positive, it's really hard to go against the grain and I think a world where corporations do open source is better than one where they don't. But Open Source has not changed the underlying structures of the world in any significant manner.

I mean, I think this is ultimately a political question, you don't really solve political questions with this kind of technology. We need better social and political technologies, much like when we went from having kings and feuds to having liberal democracies. I see that as a social technological advancement, what's next?

I recommend you read the book "Open Democracy" by Helene Landemore to get an idea of what I think maybe could be a good way of changing the political structures that are basically constraining us right now. And I do think Open Source plays a part in that.

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

#657

Post by medvezhenok »

elforce002 wrote: post #565
AmericanChopper wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We have 2 scenarios here: - AI will create more jobs (group 1); - AI will destroy the middle class (group 3). This is not trial and error. These are people's lives we're talking about. Families, children, etc... Let's hope this innovation won't cause any bad scenario to occur.

AI destroying the middle class will always be a political choice (i.e. the powerful have chosen some sort of hyper-extractive techno-feudalism). You could always tax the AI and redistribute the money back to the people affected.

What does have to be changed with the rise of AI is the tax laws. We basically should treat it the same as if an adversary was dumping product under cost (i.e. tax AI "work") and subsidize human workers; basically run a version of protectionism against AI - if we want human work in this post-AGI world to be viable.

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

#658

Post by antifa »

bennysonething wrote: post #323
bitwize wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Socialism. The answer is socialism. AI is a philosopher's stone that transmutes labor into capital. This is as good as lead into gold for capitalists, but the rest of us are hosed.

How many times do we have to try socialism before we're convinced it doesn't work? Or maybe you mean something like Nordic countries that are capitalist but tax more heavily and redistribute wealth more?

OP didn't say "let's make an exact copy of USSR/China's homework" so your opinion on those countries is mostly irrelevant grandstanding.

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

#659

Post by ngngngng »

elforce002 wrote: post #535
grumbel wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And then industrial revolution didn't take out jobs It absolutely did take jobs. It's just that the job loss in one area was compensated by the growth in other areas. However hoping that it'll be the same with AI is incredible naive. The job shift in the industrial revolution was possible since there were still lots of tasks left that the machines couldn't do. The areas that can't be done by a machine now are drama…

> What's left for humans? No idea. Exactly. The ramifications of this tech will brake the current system for sure. Why someone will spend 15 years of his/her life studying medicine if by that time AI will replace him/her? The more we keep going down the rabbit hole, the more we can see there's no utopia at the end of the tunnel. This is no hyperbole, we don't know what to expect if you automate everything. Just look…

> I'm a SWE but I'm trying to purchase land and invest in things that AI can't replace, like food production, hehe. Agriculture will make a strong comeback this decade. Forget airbnb, a farm is where the $$$$$ is going to be, if not, ask Gates why is he buying land and becoming the biggest "farmer" in the US.

Farms in recent years have consolidated. There are exceptionally few farmers feeding all of us today. This will likely only get worse once all their farm equipment is operated by AI as one farmer will be able to manage far more acreage than they were previously able to.

Nothing is immune.

Of course, it's unlikely we replace plumbers anytime soon, but between the incredible DIY-friendly tools in that space (Shark-bite, PEX) and the fact that no one will have any money to pay for their services, they're probably screwed too.

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

#660

Post by antifa »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #511
Epa095 wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their quality of life will increase because of all the cheap stuff we can make with ai and robots. Ahh, the old "modern poor people are better off than medevial kings since we have microwaves and supercomputers in our pockets". No matter that they are all stressed, living paycheck to paycheck and a single (treatable) disease from crippling debt.

> single (treatable) disease from crippling debt. This sounds a lot better than being a single (treatable) disease from guaranteed death? Which many, many, historical monarchs experienced. At least some fraction of such monarchs would have gladly taken the opportunity to swap places if they had known in advance.

> This sounds a lot better than

You can justify pretty much any horrible thing with "sounds better than a torment nexus"

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