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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

#661

Post by AmericanChopper »

medvezhenok wrote: post #657
elforce002 wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hu…

Good luck amending the constitution to allow taxing speech. What a terrible idea.

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

#662

Post by ngngngng »

falsaberN1 wrote: post #207
muyuu wrote: post #52

Some people say there isn't enough empathy to go around for those creatives that are seeing their jobs either endangered or automated to a degree they've become sweatshop janitors with little prospects to be anything else. I wonder if that sort of empathy was so plentiful when the automation was shredding the prospects of farmers, miners, truckers and other blue collar workers? Make no mistake, generative AI is going…

No, there was no empathy for them. And I feel there's no real empathy for artists, either. Before the eeeevil robot came to be, no one gave much of a damn about artists or their opinion. Suddenly we are instrumental to humanity's culture, but people is too busy spreading hatred to listen to any artists that aren't in agreement, what makes me feel it's less about being an artist and more about being emotionally-charge…

> if an artist can be replaced by it, maybe that artist deserves it. I say this as an artist, 36 years of experience.

This is such an insane take to me at this point. I've used a few of the AI art generators and there is close to zero chance I will ever hire an artist or a graphic designer again (yes, I've hired artists).

I've seen the shortcomings, and sure a very expensive artist can fulfill my needs at an A+ level 100% of the time. But why would I pay so much money to a human artist when after a few minutes and a couple prompts I have a B+ or A- result? As a person with finite money, that last teeny bit of quality is not worth hundreds or thousands of dollars when compared with a very good result for essentially nothing.

People are saying the same thing about programming. That if you're set to be replaced by this you're not "very good". I cost a LOT of money. I am good at what I do. AI is essentially free at that too and learning at an insane rate.

This is absolutely going to break the world.

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

#663

Post by ngngngng »

kmeisthax wrote: post #162
462436347 wrote: post #113

These AI systems will sound the death knell for the creative culture of openness and sharing that emerged during the web 1.0 era with the Creative Commons and OSI-approved licenses and sites like DeviantArt, NewGrounds, and SourceForge, and which still exists today, albeit in a less idealistic form. Once people realize that by putting something, even just a blog post, out for public consumption, especially if done so…

I don't think you actually need copyrighted data to train AI to compete with artists. The argument over copyright is interesting but kind of a sideshow. We already know that copyright protection is not a prerequisite for creativity - as it currently stands copyright only protects the rich. The real reason why AI is going to kill DA/NG/SF/GH/etc is because of spam. Let's say, for every piece a 100% human artist can do…

We'll soon see the point where AI can generate text, video, voices simultaneously. All of the tik tok/reels style content people mindlessly scroll all day will be AI generated, delivering money to only the AI's creator, and no one will know the AI is behind it.

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

#664

Post by ngngngng »

cuddlyogre wrote: post #590

There is something to be said about how dangerous it is to offload your entire workflow to entities that you are competing with. Or have unpredictable morals. Say you start relying on some AI to build all your applications or generate all of your art, or copy. What if you start developing something that competes with the business interests of the entity that owns the AI? At that point, that entity is incentivized to…

> There is something to be said about how dangerous it is to offload your entire workflow to entities that you are competing with. Or have unpredictable morals.

Yep, this is why I stopped using Github Copilot. But now we're at the point where if I don't use it I'm going to be far less productive than my coworkers. I'm forced to use this thing that I truly believe is going to take my job within 5-10 years max.

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

#665

Post by juvvel »

HervalFreire wrote: post #629
juvvel wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I do believe programming as a profession is at risk and will change a lot, if not rendered obsolete. What I'm talking about is this idea of "just get used to the fact that there is no human skill that won't be replicable by AI in 2-10 years". It's a very bleak view of the future and our own biological complexity. We need to remember that we are the ones inventing the AI in the first place. We are limited by our i…

Not everything will be replaced, but you can extrapolate that much of what we do will be replaced. The thing that is harder to replace is the versatility of the human form. Manual labor can't fully be replaced because robotics have yet to catch up. >there's no need to reject the inherent value of humanity There's no fundamental rejection here. Capitalism simply selects the most efficient methodology. If humans arent…

Capitalism and its value system is subjective, too. It's not set in stone. I believe we can still steer away from profit as the sole driver of, well, everything, if we want to.

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

#666

Post by wwweston »

jayd16 wrote: post #270
vasco wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If performing a job is even just 10% faster, you can fire 1 person out of a team of 10 (or need to hire in the first place). This should be obvious.

First, this argument applies to everything from WFH adding efficiency to computers themselves being faster than ink and paper. But that's not how the economics works out. The business can simply choose to sell 10% more content.

At some point, you saturate the market for whatever’s being produced and then prices drop and you have diminishing marginal returns for production so the economics of making more doesn’t make sense.

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

#667

Post by AmericanChopper »

MSFT_Edging wrote: post #585
AmericanChopper wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tech people so obviously loath creatives, its so sad. This isn’t what I’m saying at all. His job changed. You know who else has their job change sometimes? Everybody. I remember going to work one day and being told that I was going to be using Angular from now on. On that day all satisfaction, creativity, and joy was sapped out of my job. But I didn’t go and cry about it on Reddit. > Zero meaning left except for th…

> But I didn’t go and cry about it on Reddit. Perhaps you should have. I think people deserve to feel loss. Alienation is a real issue. Automation breeds Alienation. I much rather feel meaning at work than have a cheaper TV or yet another data mining website that requires yet another account for little benefit. > Luddites say this about every single technological innovation that they whinge about. Possibly because it…

Ah, the alienation of labor, I wonder where I’ve heard about that silly idea before…

Having a job isn’t about finding the ultimate fulfilment in life. It’s about two parties exchanging value, that’s it. If you’d prefer to go back to a time before technological innovation made the necessities of life so cheap to produce that they’re accessible to basically everybody, then I’m sure you could find a country that hasn’t yet gone through that stage of development to live in. I’m almost certain that you don’t actually want that though…

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

#668

Post by cuddlyogre »

ngngngng wrote: post #664
cuddlyogre wrote: post #590

There is something to be said about how dangerous it is to offload your entire workflow to entities that you are competing with. Or have unpredictable morals. Say you start relying on some AI to build all your applications or generate all of your art, or copy. What if you start developing something that competes with the business interests of the entity that owns the AI? At that point, that entity is incentivized to…

> There is something to be said about how dangerous it is to offload your entire workflow to entities that you are competing with. Or have unpredictable morals. Yep, this is why I stopped using Github Copilot. But now we're at the point where if I don't use it I'm going to be far less productive than my coworkers. I'm forced to use this thing that I truly believe is going to take my job within 5-10 years max.

I just can't wrap my head around the time saving thing.

Do your coworkers really understand what it is that they are putting into the codebase? If not, that's terrifying and recipe for disaster.

If they do understand it, they have to be taking the time to review it to ensure is right. Which cannot save so much more time that it's worth the risk.

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

#669

Post by medvezhenok »

revelio wrote: post #613
zokier wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory yes, in practice that'd require some way to channel the profits from the tech back to society, which has proven tough nut to crack. Notoriously Keynes predicted 15 hour workweeks due the productivity improvements of 20th century. Well, the improvements happened but work weeks didn't get shorter

They got shorter in practice. Especially post-lockdowns lots of people are phoning it in to well paid jobs whilst working from home with Netflix on, taking long lunches, playing with the kids and then doing unchallenging work like meetings with other people who are also phoning it in. Yes they "work" 40 hours a week in theory but this sort of work would have seemed completely alien to someone in Keynes' era.

Another thing to note is the length of retirement has increased significantly since Keynes' time. So if you look at a person's whole life, the amount of time at work certainly has decreased.

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

#670

Post by medvezhenok »

tlocke wrote: post #278
throwawaylinux wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've needed "jobs" to support ourselves since we descended from the trees. Actually before that too. "Society" came about because we invented tools and techniques to make our jobs easier so people could spend more time on different things. "AI" is some more steps down that same path. > In the next era we'll probably live like aristocrats, but instead of the work being done by servants, it'll be done by AI. Not in th…

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 s…

Government exists to solve the collective action problem (i.e. prisoner's dilemma). In an unregulated market, at times the winning move has lots of unaccounted externalities, so government steps in to realign incentives.

In this case, free education was possible if everyone collectively decided on it, but the market was unable to coordinate those people effectively. Government stepped in and tada - you have free education.

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