I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney over night.

I am employed as a 3D artist in a small games company of 10 people. Our Art team is 2 people, we make 3D models, just to render them and get 2D sprites for the engine, which are more easy to handle than 3D. We are making mobile games.

My Job is different now since Midjourney v5 came out last week. I am not an artist anymore, nor a 3D artist. Rn all I do is prompting, photoshopping and implementing good looking pictures. The reason I went to be a 3D artist in the first place is gone. I wanted to create form In 3D space, sculpt, create. With my own creativity. With my own hands.

It came over night for me. I had no choice. And my boss also had no choice. I am now able to create, rig and animate a character thats spit out from MJ in 2-3 days. Before, it took us several weeks in 3D. The difference is: I care, he does not. For my boss its just a huge time/money saver.

I don’t want to make “art” that is the result of scraped internet content, from artists, that were not asked. However its hard to see, results are better than my work.

I am angry. My 3D colleague is completely fine with it. He promps all day, shows and gets praise. The thing is, we both were not at the same level, quality-wise. My work was always a tad better, in shape and texture, rendering… I always was very sure I wouldn’t loose my job, because I produce slightly better quality. This advantage is gone, and so is my hope for using my own creative energy to create.

Getting a job in the game industry is already hard. But leaving a company and a nice team, because AI took my job feels very dystopian. Idoubt it would be better in a different company also. I am between grief and anger. And I am sorry for using your Art, fellow artists.

iamphilrae on March 26, 2023 | next [–]

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 our work was more sophisticated and better optimized for SEO, clients often didn't see the value in paying £10,000 or more for it.

Ultimately, I realized that our trade had become commoditized, and I made the difficult decision to sell the business and move on. I transitioned to a new role as a Product Manager, and over the years, I've climbed the ranks to become a CTO at a scaling startup. Although I miss the thrill of being a developer and creating websites from scratch, I've found new challenges and fulfillment in my current position.

If you're facing a similar situation, I'd suggest exploring other avenues to keep your passion for development alive. Consider taking on side projects as a hobby, collaborating with industry friends to start an indie project, or even teaching others about web development. Just be sure to carefully review any non-compete agreements with your current employer before pursuing any new ventures. Remember, although your job may have changed, your passion for creating great websites can still thrive in new ways.

prawn on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

It's not just that the budgets are harder to justify; it's also that prospective clients consider themselves to be experts. Having your judgement and expertise consistently overruled is disheartening and you often end up just following instructions, sapping any joy from the (diminishing and cheaper) role.

I started my web business 25 years ago. 5ish years ago I started photographing and filming travel content, primarily with a drone. More fun, more interesting, better feedback, etc. When building my own web projects though, I still love it.

echelon on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

No. It's that the job to be done is to sell product.

Not build a handcrafted website. Not build a beautiful website.

Provide something that markets and sells something to customers.

And with that perspective, the client really does know better.

The web is ephemeral. Will it even still exist in twenty five years after AI provides all the answers and connections (all we use the web for anyway)?

JumpCrisscross on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

In many cases, the client is right. I remember a college buddy who designed websites complaining about a problem client. Apparently he wrote their site in Silverlight, and the restaurant wasn’t thrilled someone had to download a plug-in to see their hours.

ProllyInfamous on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

LOL my first "production" website was made around 1997/8 and it required people to install FLASH — not a hit, and no traffic either — because I just wanted it to have this certain featureset =P

kashunstva on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

> the client really does know better.

really _may_ know better.

Some have very skewed notions about UI/UX that don’t conform to how most users (and pertinently, their customers) use web apps; but they will insist on it.

deanCommie on March 28, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

You're not wrong.

That is what the web has become. A platform to selling products.

But why did it have to be so? Why couldn't it also have been a medium for expressing beauty?

It still HOSTS a lot of art - art in the form of images.

But the number of truly beautiful artistic WEBSITES - in CSS, HTML, etc, are few and far between.

Hell, I remember the heyday of Flash - before Apple smothered it. There were some INCREDIBLY gorgeous websites with absolutely incredible animations and visuals.

Of course they were dogshit for accessibility, discoverability, information presentation, etc. Not to mention the apalling security/performance of Flash. So I don't wish the whole web was like that.

But we did lose something.

prawn on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Some may know better for very specific parts of their business, but in the majority of cases, I would say they do not. More often than not, they're the ones pushing for some overwrought site with scrolljacking and needless animation or side-scrolling and the like.

The gripes about web sites you see on HN - they're the things clients insist on.

jrochkind1 on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

I think the effect on the job market of (things like) midjourney is much more drastic and steeply immediate than that historical example (not sure if it's a true story or hypothetical? not sure if it was written by chat-gpt?).

I mean, I'm sure many developers over the years have found their jobs disappear, and many contracting companies have gone out of business due to changed market. But at least through now, even with the layoffs, jobs developing websites are still plentiful. (Perhaps that won't be true in the future, sure).

I feel like OP is probably right that they are going to have a lot of trouble getting a job creating 3D art, that the job market has _drastically_ shrunken almost overnight, beyond the effect that wix/squarespace/etc had. (Although of course even in your example, it's a shrunken market)

But maybe I'm not correct?

iamphilrae on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

All I was really getting at was that it sapped the love (and money) out of the job, like the OP was suggesting for them and Midjourney. Once your art/talent has become something that either the common person or a machine can do, your only option as a career is to move on and diversify. It’s unfortunate, but has been happening for decades in all industries. Anyway, just sharing my experience of it happening to me.

pdc56 on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

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

precompute on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I don't think it was written by a LLM, the words have a warmth that generated text lacks.

Plus you can tell it's written as if it's half-spoken.

dmd on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> warmth

That shows the LLM is running on vacuum tubes.

fxtentacle on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Perfect. My next business venture is selling ChatGPT text-warming equipment to audiophile readers.

kergonath on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

And gold-plated pure monocrystalline copper connectors.

iLoveOncall on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

> the words have a warmth that generated text lacks

Reminds me of my philosophy teacher in high-school that gave me the best grade of the year and praised how "personal" it felt, for an essay I had bought online for 3 euros.

The irony of it still makes me chuckle 15 years later.

precompute on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Where's the irony?

LeonB on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

The lecturer perceived it to be “personal” implying authentic and genuine, but in truth the essay was the opposite of these things, that is ironic.

precompute on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Sure, but it was written by a human and not a LLM.

m348e912 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

I think being able to identify LLM generated text would be a nice skill to have, but unfortunately I don't think it's as easy as you think it is.

savef on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

https://openai-openai-detector.hf.space/

Using this tool on the comment yields a 77.6% fake score. To give (pretty limited) contrast, a response from ChatGPT gives 99.9% fake, and another comment from this thread gives 0.1% fake.

I assume that means the comment text was GPT-assisted, with some moderate editing from a human.

vbezhenar on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I checked this tool on some of my comments. Mostly it reported around "100% real". However https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35259575 this comment was generated by ChatGPT and it was also reported as 97.6% real. And this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35286822 was reported as 88.79% fake but I wrote it myself. So I wouldn't trust this tool too much, even from my very limited testing it wasn't very reliable.

hokkos on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

I asked chatGTP to "write a hacker news like comment on the rise of website builders effect on web design and development industry and how to found joy in other roles and keeping programming in side hobby" and it gave me a 97% real comment by the score on this site, not convincing.

mike_hearn on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Those tools are completely unreliable at the moment. Don't trust the results.

savef on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Oh, I didn't know this. Thanks.

Mistletoe on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

This is fascinating. I can’t imagine why someone would go to the trouble to do all that for a comment.

benja123 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I think it is likely the complete opposite of trouble. It helped them write their comment faster and in such a way that it was easy to understand. This is one of the best use cases for chatgpt. Rather than spend minutes trying to get the right wording, tell chatgpt what you want to say in a few short notes and get a well formed coherent text.

Now if this is a good thing, that’s up for debate - although overall I personally would say yes.

Written with zero chatgpt assistance

michaelt on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> It helped them write their comment faster and in such a way that it was easy to understand.

Right, but why not save even more time by not commenting at all?

nullandvoid on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I think the point here is that for a group of people (I would argue most) the primary goal of a comment is to broadcast your ideas, with the language being used to convey them of secondary concern, of which this part could be delegated to AI.

MonkeyClub on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

The irony of using a LLM to write a text that complains of the pervasiveness of automated tooling for web design is hard to miss.

But perhaps it’s just that the author has internalized copywriting formulas to a degree that their text appears machine generated?

sokoloff on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

The GPT-detector is fascinating (and seemed to work pretty well on some inputs I tested)

On the other hand, this next paragraph is scored as 84% fake and I'm quite sure Churchill didn't have Chat-GPT to help:

> We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

IMO, we must not be too quick to conclude that any given text was created/assisted by an LLM based on a scoring algorithm alone. (A low GPT likelihood is probably reliable [for now, until that starts being gamed].)

If you offered me even odds, I'd wager that the subject comment was 100% hand-written.

Applejinx on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats' feet over broken glass In our dry cellar

TeMPOraL on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Or Reddit. Let's not forget what LLMs are trained on. It's not just Wikipedia and some official text corpora, it's Reddit dumps and other regular Internet conversations. If you learned how to write English on-line, there's a chance you've internalized a style similar to how LLMs often respond.

(In fact, I often feel like I sound too much like ChatGPT myself.)

sunny--tech on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

I ran a 5000 character essay that was mainly generated by GPT4 and lightly edited by me through that and it reported 99.98% human lol

fortyseven on March 28, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

So this is the future we want, eh? Everybody paranoid, running everybody else's responses through an AI detector. One that isn't even trusting itself.

And the bitch of it is, people ARE going to be using AI generated responses in arguments.

The decade is turning out to be truly fucking terrible.

iamphilrae on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

100% truthfully, I wrote it all myself, but tweaked the opening paragraph with ChatGPT to improve my grammar slightly. It’s a great tool, and one that should not be dismissed, just like spell checkers and the grammar checkers of old in the likes on MS Word. Maybe it does come across a bit ChatGPT-like which is unfortunate I suppose.

As for the suggestions of me asking it to write the comment from prompts, then I’m afraid that’s 100% wrong.

have_faith on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

I’ve noticed a large amount of responses from chatgpt start the second/third paragraph with “however, “ or a similar adverb. It will always strive to provide a “balanced” view, even on heavily one sided subjects.

figassis on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I use however a lot

eega on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Same

biztos on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

However, it’s usually more covering its digital ass against the pitchfork-wielding critics than actually balancing the view.

PartiallyTyped on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Imho 9:1 written entirely by human.

lamontcg on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

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

lisp-pornstar on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

30%, take your bets

flerovium on March 28, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

This feels different because we engineers are being eaten by our own young, but an artist never wanted or bargained for it.

Programming is fun, but humanity has always existed with art. We are slowly crushing something that is good and important.

devoutsalsa on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

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

rafaelero on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

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 live knowing that everything we do will eventually be better reproduced by AI.

_ktx2 on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

AI won't take a thought workers job. It just sucks the life out of it. Like the person who wrote this post, I make bespoke software. I tinker, I experiment, and I produce high quality results in reasonable timelines. Executives could not give a shit about that, except that those qualities in me are a good signal that I am dependable. Now, if most companies allow AI bottom performers will speed up and their quality will likely slightly increase. As with most things, those on the top end of the spectrum will need to regress to the mean to compete. The result will be that mediocrity takes over because the AI will be in charge of the boilerplate, which is often the foundation for the rest of your code. You can either find enjoyment in the boilerplate being rote and finding places to spend your time in a higher level of abstraction or you can let what used to be your passion sail away like a little red balloon on a windy day.

rafaelero on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> 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.

_ktx2 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

What jobs have been totally replaced thus far?

coldtea on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

First, of all, why it has to be "totally replaced"? It's enough for positions to be dramatically reduced, and most such "though workers" tasks getting done automatically, e.g. under the final supervision of much fewer people.

Second, why it has to be "thus far"? If it happens in 1 or 5 or 10 years does it disqualify it?

Because above you claimed it will "never take thought workers' jobs". Suddenly the goalposts moved so that it has to have happened "totally" and "thus far" to qualify as taking their jobs?

CommanderData on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I'm witnessing engineers on my team and myself saving a lot of time in development and in operations (scripting).

I have no doubt in my mind it is reducing the need for more engineers and has probably already contributed to a reduction of them and I think it's just getting started.

saurik on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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 competitors who are willing to put in the effort to build a modern fancy reactive single-page whatever's-hot-now web app.

The reality is that companies are going to continue allocating a similar percentage of their budget to tech that they were before, and what we DO might change a ton; but, frankly, I've been doing this now for decades, and the stuff I used to do 25 years ago (omg: a full quarter of a century of professional software development ;P) already often just isn't a thing anyone does anymore. Every time my job gets easier, the expectations for the products I architect also increase, because we're all in a rat race attempting to compete for the same customers to defend our margins.

Hell: I remember when the first step to deploying a new service--even if you were a company that only had a handful of people--was to attempt to predict how much capacity you needed and then buy a ton of parts so you'd be able to sit around and build machines for your server room to run your new product. I was involved in a project back in like, 1998/1999, for a company with all of maybe five people, and someone's job was just sitting around building the server room... that specific task is now a few lines of YAML configuration and a couple of accounts (AWS and Twilio <- back in the day, we had to have custom T1 lines brought in not for data but for bulk parallel phone service to hook up to the Dialogic boards we needed to simulate phone lines ;P).

The concept of cloud-computing entirely changed that part of the business--having a small handful of companies manage all the servers at scale and run numerous jobs on shared hardware, in some sense reducing the cost to the point where you can both outsource this and pay less--to the point where doing that almost sounds insane; and yet, I'm sure there are more people getting paid more to deploy and manage ever more virtualized servers in the cloud than there ever were people (including me!) literally screwing around with screwdrivers in the ubiquitous server rooms. You could argue that my job got "replaced", with all of the skills I had to deal with IRQ balancing and automated power backup systems being for naught... but, somehow, I'm apparently still relevant.

I'll also admit that I honestly kind of enjoyed doing that work?... and yet, I also was quite happy to never have to do it ever again. I'll never forget the day I took the first real-world server I was in charge of and just like, uploaded it to 1&1 where I had an early software-based hypervisor-like stack I was experimenting with (UML, aka User Mode Linux, which is no longer something people bother with due to the advent of Xen/KVM/etc.); it just worked and I was like "omg I'm never building another server again, am I? that was it: it's over". (It then turned out that I did build another complex hardware solution in 2016 to start doing work with GPUs, but there was only a small window of time there before cloud services caught up.)

So like, sure: at some point the AI is going to entirely replace what we do--not the specific frustrating coding tasks we do today, but the entire concept of our jobs--but, the issue at that point isn't going to be me figuring out what I'm going to do next to make ends meat... it is going to be that I'm not a serviceable warrior in the war against the machines as the world devolves into some kind of Terminator-inspired hellscape; because, if you can manage to do my job in its totality, then you frankly can also do the job of everyone who has ever hired me and you can do the job of every investor who has ever given us money to do those things... we are all obsolete and, if AI actually gets as good as so many people here fear it will, at best we all become pets :(.

atchoo on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> companies are going to continue allocating a similar percentage of their budget to tech

I think your argument requires a paradigm shift like teletype -> web to soak up the new productivity. I don't think we have that today. For how many purposes have we reached peak consumer software capability? i.e. global reach to publish text, images, video and make purchases is the entire use case of most media and commerce businesses. If you gave every company double the amount of dev resources tomorrow, do they even have anything to build? Even for those with deep feature roadmaps, how much of that stuff is just nice-to-have things that won't move the revenue needle anyway?

Maybe we will get that new platform from AR or direct brain interfaces... but without it, the situation looks more like how the human role of "computer" just vanished... sure we then got programmers, but they weren't necessarily the same people.

chimprich on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

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.

ben_w on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Is Jernau Morat Gurgeh the Player of Games, or a mere pawn moved by Minds beyond his comprehension?

The Culture appeals to me, but there are literary critics who find even The Culture, let alone the grander environment beyond it, to be dystopian. And I definitely don't want to wake up dead with my mind in one of Joiler Veppers' simulations.

gaganyaan on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

He's definitely a pawn. But I'd sign up for being kept around as a pawn/pet/whatever in an instant if it meant living in the Culture.

saurik on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

I honestly don't like how we treat our pets (and especially so here in the United States). I keep imagining that the situation will end up feeling--at best--like this episode of (The New) Outer Limits. :(

https://theouterlimits.fandom.com/wiki/The_Human_Operators

coldtea on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

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

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

_ktx2 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

> Suddenly the goalposts moved so that it has to have happened "totally" and "thus far" to qualify as taking their jobs?

I was asking a question. I don't think anyone can confidently quantify the effects of AI at this point so I was seeing if I was missing something. What I said is just some word vomit about what I'm seeing on the ground as an engineer. I'm happy to accept a refutation as we gather more concrete data. The reason I asked the question the way I did is because as I stated there is no doubt AI will impact our jobs, but I'm understandably more concerned about less jobs because of AI. I also have the experience of writing a lot of automation, and hearing this same style of rhetoric when we started doing that heavily. For all the scare around automation, it did end fact end up creating more jobs and typically made lives easier.

Jumping to "shifting goalposts" over that is pretty trash conversation.

happytiger on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

I have seen at least one outsourced programming job slow down to the point where it’s effectively no longer outsourced. Previously there were two engineers working, and now there is one as the work isn’t needed anymore.

That in a very real way is a replaced job.

The remaining job is running large scale data loading for a startup and really now is just eyeballs to make sure errors are caught. No longer requires much skill either.

I think some degree of low end engineering work in the outsourcing world is at risk.

jay_kyburz on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

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.

bruce511 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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 still exist. But they're pretty rare.

So yes, alot of job descriptions and job titles will change. Making indie games just got a lot easier. But where you see loss, many others see opportunity.

omnimus on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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.

ericd on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

You don’t think we can make it come up with variations, and use people’s feedback on what’s interesting to figure out what new avenues are promising? It’s not that hard to do this sort of exploration, it’s not limited to just mimicking what it’s seen. If anything, I think we’ll see an increase in the pace of evolution of art as it becomes economical for normal people to get personalized art.

1attice on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

> 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.

AJ007 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

If we can steal all human work (images) and compress it down to 2gb, then we should be questioning what artists have really been creating.

FranzFerdiNaN on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

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.

OOPMan on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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...

bruce511 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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.

jay_kyburz on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

I was just pointing out one job that I could see in my industry. I for one welcome the wealth of interesting new indies games with great looking graphics we'll soon see.

People will be able to take more risks and do more interesting projects. It will be awesome.

whateveracct on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

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.

jay_kyburz on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

You are wrong, I have worked for many years as an artists and level builder in video games. Bioshock is the most famous game, and Void Bastards the most recent.

spoiler on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Could you instead use AI to reduce drudgery in your work, or to iterate faster between ideas until you settle on a final peace? What if you have something in mind that is hard to prompt for, or the tool just refuses to generate what you had in mind? I would try to lean into it as a tool to speed up some of the tedium, instead of fear it, if possible

jay_kyburz on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I'm not in the camp that fears it, I think it will be an awesome tool and I can't wait to use it in my next game. I've been playing with Midjourny a lot already, but have been watching Stable Diffusion and the control net stuff closely as well.

coldtea on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Whether you have experience or not, game companies already use AI for concept art.

lunfard000 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

not only art, Obsidian is using already for voices[0]. The future is here.

0:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YajBa5PO1Hk

lozenge on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

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.

ericathegreat on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

There are still professional, high quality hand knitters in the world.

Of course, having people hand knit garments used to be the only way to get a knitted garment at all.

Then we invented industrial knitting machines, and those hand knitters found their roles had changed. Instead of knitting a whole garment, they would be closing up the toe on the socks, or doing finishing work on a sweater. Of course, companies didn't need anywhere near as many knitters under this system, so a huge proportion of them lost their jobs.

Then the knitting machines got better. They could close the toes on the socks themselves, could do most of the finishing work automatically. Some of the remaining knitters became industrial knitting support workers, but most of the actual knitting jobs dried up.

But there are still professional, commercial hand knitters, even today! They test hand knitting patterns for the hobby market. Make the samples up for photographing, and make sure that all the sizes come out right.

They number... Dozens? Maybe? And most of them treat it as a side gig, despite being the absolute pinnacle of hand knitting talent, since it pays terribly.

A job doesn't have to have been totally replaced to be effectively replaced. As we find ways to hand over larger and larger pieces of the work to an automated system, the number of real roles in that field diminishes, until it eventually becomes infeasible as a career choice.

This is what a lot these digital content creation jobs are heading. Gradual obsolescence.

vasco on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

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.

cthalupa on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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 these things had changed, and everyone was still doing nearly everything themselves, with a limited subset of libraries in use, writing everything in C, we would have all of these applications, services, pieces of software, etc? That all of these viable businesses employing people would still exist?

I doubt it. And like the poster from the reddit link, a lot of software devs truly did enjoy a lot of that work that they did. I've talked to plenty of greybeards who will wax nostalgic over spending months writing things that a pip install and import solve in a few seconds now.

If we double the efficiency of a team, do we fire half of them? Or do we double the amount of products we're releasing? Or double the amount of features for one product?

I think we have far more software devs today because of the advent of higher level languages, large library selections available with package managers, feature-rich IDEs, etc.

Is this always the case, for every industry? Obviously not. There are a lot fewer people making furniture by hand today than there was before automated manufacturing, and any individual only needs so many chairs. But there is, of course, still demand for hand built furniture using traditional joinery techniques.

"Art" is a big space, and I don't think that the impact will be universal across every part of it. For games in specific, I think we'll see something more like the software development side - people will make more and more unique assets vs. reusing them, we'll see the artwork be more detailed and "populated" in general. We'll see more and more smaller studios putting out work with higher quality and more art assets. Same thing for other media-related positions. And the people who are reliably selling prints for people to hang on walls, collect, etc., I think are also likely quite safe. I think people relying on twitter/instagram/etc. commissions to draw people's D&D characters or anime waifu are likely in a lot of trouble.

vasco on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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".

cthalupa on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

>which in both cases mean you spend less of your revenue on labor, which means "less jobs".

You can't view things in the void like this, though. Reducing the overall cost of doing something makes it viable for more businesses, which means more jobs. We have more jobs in software development overall now because of how much more productive it is today, which opens up so many more viable use cases for it. We have more CG artists for movies, games, etc. now in large part because more efficient workflows and more powerful software have increased productivity.

Will it be the same thing with generative AI? I think so, at least for the foreseeable future.

Zvez on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

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.

raincole on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

I'm sure most programmers work more than 10% faster with syntax highlighting and autocomplete. But no one says IDE replaced humans' jobs.

TeMPOraL on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

They did, and so did high-level languages, and not to mention the entire profession is first and foremost about automating other peoples' jobs away. Thing is, nobody is really tracking how improvements for software developers are replacing people, because this only manifests at slowing the absurdly high growth rate in this industry.

vasco on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Yes they did, what are you thinking would have happened if all we had was assembly? To build any meaningful software you'd need armies of people and it'd take way longer and it wouldn't be as good.

jayd16 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

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.

wwweston on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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.

code_witch_sam on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

paralegals seem like they're very much at risk

fxtentacle on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Didn't all major companies do mass-firings recently?

What do you expect will happen if an entry-level software engineer becomes 2x as productive? You need 2x less, so you fire half the team.

spoiler on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

A smart company will realise it's better to be 2x productive for the same money than to be at the same productivity for half the money.

jokethrowaway on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Wrong, there's just so much a company can dedicate itself too, otherwise you'll start doing little useless experiments that go nowhere like google

spoiler on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I think Google has a weird pathological case maybe. So, I'm not sure I would use them as a forecast.

I think R&D is good in any company. Sure, the nature of R&D is that most of it is failure; that's just the way it is.

AI makes the R&D iteration shorter and cheaper, IMO. The more you try, the more likely you're to succeed (aside: I should listen to my own advice sometimes lol).

Pandabob on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

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

rafaelero on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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.

rakejake on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Amen. AI will make us all "managers" of some sort. Goodbye to getting in flow state and trying to build something yourself, and say hello to a gazillion meetings from morning until evening figuring out what to build and what prompt to feed to the AI.

AI is going to make our bullshit jobs even shittier.

paweladamczuk on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Instead of grinding away over a piece of code, I will get to talk to people more?

Doesn't sound like such a bad deal to me.

I get your point, of course. I just think communication can be like a craft, challenging and rewarding. I try to frame things positively, it helps me stay motivated at work.

rakejake on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I appreciate your attitude, and it is something we all have to pick-up eventually. When you pose it as "talk to more people", that does sound better. But I see it as a job with more pressure and tension, more politics, and less freedom to experiment.

Think about the average day of a manager/management consultant/VC (whose job it is to talk to people, make deals etc). I always looked at their careers and walked away thankful that a programmer career exists.

dsego on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

> Instead of grinding away over a piece of code

crafting

> get to talk to people more

about KPIs and OKRs

MachineBurning on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

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 produced to not remain constant either the studio would have to go for increased art quality, or scale up the rest of the business to keep up with the new art productivity. It's not clear they'd make that decision over cutting their art department spending in two. At the very least their job is at risk.

washadjeffmad on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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 prompting or designing more advanced embeddings and LoRA or training models. I'm seeing this a lot right now - people don't want to share their prompts because they don't want everyone to know how much the model carried them and how little any actual "prompt engineering" went into it.

The smart thing for their boss to do would be to scale projects and have one of them focus on managing and filtering the new volume of assets. Since it sounds like they like working from scratch, even adding external time to "research tooling and methods" would probably keep them happy until they find the challenge in their new duties.

Hoasi on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> people don't want to share their prompts because they don't want everyone to know how much the model carried them and how little any actual "prompt engineering" went into it.

Right. Because this whole "prompt engineering" is just another job title, not an applied science, and then again, prompts can and will be automated away.

Deegy on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

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.

the_lonely_road on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

The majority of managers would jump at the opportunity to reduce their number of direct reports? Owners might want to cut salaries but managers want to increase direct reports.

bruce511 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

>> The result will be that mediocrity takes over because the AI will be in charge of the boilerplate, which is often the foundation for the rest of your code.

Your take is interesting, but I'll provide an alternate point of view from my experience.

I have spent my career working in a low-code environment. There's a boiler plate framework into which people add code.

Since most of all programs are similar (data in, data stored, data processed, data out etc) this allows for high productivity because almost all time is spent on things that are unique to the domain space, not programming the common stuff. It means individual programmers, and very small teams, have written and maintain huge systems.

But what's interesting to me is the boilerplate code. My career has been spent improving the underlying boilerplate, and extending it to new feature areas. This turns out to be a great lever. Improve the boiler-plate and _existing_ programs get better, with minimal effort. Sometimes no effort.

It's kinda like the way I get TLS 1.3 support simply by upgrading my OpenSSL libraries. But at a source level. Which is then retro-applied to existing source code.

Instead of being mediocrity the goal is to always keep improving the boilerplate because that in turn improves a lot of programs.

I say this not to tell you nothing will change. It will change. But change in programming is fun. It stretches the mind, and opens up new horizons. The AI can write code, but that just becomes the next tool, like IDEs were, like code complete, online help or Stackoverflow. I didn't have any of those things growing up, but their introductions allow me to dream bigger, be better, make more.

AI is an opportunity for those with eyes to see.

steveshurley44 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

SAP?

candiodari on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

If you look at it from the bottom, then yes. SAP/Salesforce/IBM DB2/Oracle/OpenERP are ways for company departments to all work on one common set of data.

coldtea on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

>AI won't take a thought workers job. It just sucks the life out of it.

It already has started taking them.

Also note that it sucking the life out of them doesn't preclude this, since nobody cares for quality anyway. Neither the companies, who prefer profit, nor most consumers, who will eat up whatever mediocre shit.

eternalban on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

> allow AI bottom performers

Starting in early '00s, it was getting annoying to have to sit in tech meetings with workers who barely had any actual experience designing systems debate technical decision empowered by wikipedia and some randos blog on hype du jour. Before the internet they would keep quiet since they actually knew zip. It is going to be absolutely awful now.

How all this will affect the youth in context of education, higher learning, students' drive, teachers' domain authority etc. is a more critical issue than labor transitions.

It is interesting and important to note that AI (as it is today) disempowers humans in every dimensions except capital.

globalise83 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Question is: would a 2x or 3x developer paired with an AI be more productive than a 2x or 3x developer paired with a team of several 1x and 0.5x developers? Cutting out coordination costs while still getting the grunt work done by someone else seems like it would lead to much higher and more coherent output.

danjac on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

There was a fear that nanotechnology could accidentally turn everything into gray goo.

AI is that, but for intellectual output.

riwsky on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

“Reasonable timelines” are not absolute quantities. They’ve always been an equilibrium of whatever the market can bear. It was simply easier to ignore this before, when things changed much more slowly.

anoy8888 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

This statement is a bit arrogant considering the current pace of AI progress. I bet it won’t age well in a couple of years

nomilk on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

> 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 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.

jzb on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

This is what I would call toxic positivity. Maybe with a side of survivor bias. Lots of people don’t get awesome new jobs. They struggle, they fall out of the workforce.

People don’t want to “accept” that’s some thing they have trained to do and gotten good at is going to just go away. It’s a reality, but it’s also pretty fucking awful.

My father used to make a very good living doing sign painting until the late 80s when vinyl signs became cheap and fast to make. They weren’t as good, they didn’t last as long, but they were cheap. And so his good living went away, and he spent the rest of his working years doing jobs that were not well paid. (The full story is more complicated, but the larger point stands.)

deepsquirrelnet on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

When faced with the reality of capitalism, maybe toxic positivity is all there is. I’d like to think that there’s a way that we could plan our society better, and evaluate tech against social costs, but the reality is that in the US we have never done that.

I disagree with your point. The problem is that people will gladly accept changes brought by technology up until the point that it affects them personally. The people that bought a cheap vinyl sign were not forced to purchase them, and yet they did.

This is not a problem with tech, it’s a problem with us. If you like liberty, then you know the choice that people will make, and that’s what is terrifying.

onion2k on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

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.

In the past jobs took a while to disappear. People had time to retrain, to change career, and to come to terms with things ending. The difference now is that it seems like you could be in a high demand role today, and the whole industry you work in might not exist any more in a few years time.

The suggestion that this is just like it was in the past ignores that massive difference.

thorncorona on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

> 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 even get a job that pays above minimum wage will increase.

What are we gonna do about the ever increasing N+1% of people who won’t be cost effective versus an AI?

Turskarama on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

The solution is the same one we should have had from the start: take some of the responsibility from peoples careers off individuals and place it on society. As mentioned above, this has always been a problem it's just that now it's a problem for intellectual careers and not just laborers.

Education (and re-education) should be at least affordable if not completely free. Unemployment benefits should be enough to live on (if not well) and be freely available to anyone getting an education. If that is "too expensive" then limit it to specific educations which are currently in short supply.

And lastly, tax income from investments exactly the same as income from labour. This part is actually necessary because if automation is a future we actually want (and we should!) then this will increasingly become the _only_ form of income.

peyton on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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.

anonyfox on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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 much money is the rich have siphoned from society, what do you think that printed money goes to? The change impact would be _massive_, suddenly people would have disposable money instead of crushing debts, nd actually stimulate the economy!

Applejinx on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Yup. One of the things that's going to become starkly obvious is this: being in ownership of the money machine doesn't entitle you to power and compensation matching the output of that machine.

Feedback loops set in. If you need X amount of power and Y amount of resources to get it going, but it pays you enough for X times 2 power and Y times 5 resources, the first person to get the machine cranking becomes a human version of that AI paperclip maximizer.

And this has obviously already happened…

So now it's just a matter of, how obvious does this need to get before all the world is paperclips with one idiot sitting there, in his limited human perception, thinking he's won.

It really is Star Trek Future or bust. We don't have the luxury of steampunk attitudes towards power and societal structure anymore. Machine assistance and its multiplier effect are too big, and the runaway feedback effects are too obvious.

Do we have to wait until it's no longer Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg, who are at least very aggressive ambitious idiots paying high prices for their goals, and instead it's some feckless Sam Bankman-Fried who ends up holding the bag? What's it going to take to illustrate the scale of the problem?

jacquesm on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Morally comparing order of magnitude I don't really see the difference between any of your examples. They're all structurally lacking in empathy and every one of those would sell their mother if it got them ahead in the game.

Applejinx on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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 requirement for dominating the world is adjacency to AI, the gameplan is still exactly the same but now the work and thinking is what you turn over to machines as a force multiplier. Without that, where is the justification for producing individuals who dominate the world? It becomes, not arbitrary, but purely a factor of who is adjacent to the AI at the right time.

jacquesm on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

There is always the French Revolution option... That's how historically we've dealt with too much inequality. It may well get to that.

revelio on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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.

anonyfox on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

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.

Applejinx on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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 ends, because that has been the history for the last decade or two. The only thing AI brings to the equation is, perhaps, making the process more obvious and providing a toy version of it that anyone can play with.

Before that, we played with the zeitgeist through marketing, big business… and politics. The only difference is that now we can use it to draw pictures or have it talk back to us like it was a person. The billionaires have been 'prompt engineers' for as long as I've been alive.

anonyfox on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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.

revelio on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

>> 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.

SideburnsOfDoom on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> 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.

enjoy-your-stay on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

In the UK dentists are mostly private, it hasn't increased the quality or availability in the least.

Public transport is actually a fairly small part of the nation's transport, the UK is very car-centric so the strikes largely inconvenience commuters and drive even more people onto the roads, unless they can WFH.

Strikes are also a very recent phenomenon, just in the last 6 months or so, so this is quite a new thing driven by inflation.

Problems with the NHS are very much poor management by the last run of governments where there is a quite a growing suspicion they are deliberately trying to run down the NHS in order to make a case for to privatise it, following e.g. America's disastrous model.

anonyfox on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

This is a forced imageproblem try to get privatizations look better than state run, by defunding public sectors and claiming all kinds of weird stuff upto straight lies some people want to believe.

Don’t buy into that propaganda, look at the US how privatization ends up: still lots of tax money, additionally people can’t afford stuff, and a few assholes getting insanely rich in the process by siphoning money out of the society.

Try to ensure appropriate money is used to make the NHS effective again, including wages that allows people to live where they work (<1h commute).

Most communist shortages came from being cutoff from international trades with wealthy countries, and having to start from ruins or nothing at all btw. These are different problems, and you might learn in the process why capitalism is going to end soon. :-)

ChatGTP on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

I can’t describe how much better Europe, specifically Netherlands felt due to the social safety nets provided, and do not tell me that The Dutch aren’t hard working people, because they are.

People are so much more relaxed there. 99% of the concern about AI is because we’re living in a cut throat capitalistic society, if we knew that AI didn’t mean starving or losing our homes, we’d be way more relaxed about it, and imo we’d take out time a bit more and think about safety.

It’s the American race to the bottom attitude which is IMO no longer compatible with a highly automated world.

To start with, if the economy breaks, AI breaks. I saw Microsoft is winging because other search engines are stealing ChatGPT responses, get used to it M$, you own nothing.

anonyfox on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I cannot imagine being rich and be surrounded by homeless people, crime, drugs and the like.

The only „solution“ that still avoids realizing the problem is to try to escape into gated communities and shoot those plebs coming too close, ideally robots so no human is at fault conveniently. Or what useful is having that mercedes when most others want to steal or at least damage it?

I, for one, prefer to treat other humans as, well, humans. And by making everyone around me better off, my quality of life also improves.

For simple striking example, how about giving homeless people housing for free, so they can get their stuff together again? You can argue about how „they„ don’t deserve this all day long or simply do it and eliminate a problem https://world-habitat.org/news/our-blog/helsinki-is-still-le... - and even save a lot of money in the process as a society!

jrochkind1 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> The only „solution“ that still avoids realizing the problem is to try to escape into gated communities and shoot those plebs coming too close, ideally robots so no human is at fault conveniently. Or what useful is having that mercedes when most others want to steal or at least damage it?

You say this like it shows how it's not a plausible outcome or shows the error of this path, but unfortunately that's exactly the American plan. Yes, that. Is what is literally already happening in USA. It is pretty nightmarish. The rich don't seem to think it's a problem, or don't seem to think there's any available option more desirable to them.

anonyfox on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

The great thing about fascism (the extreme form of conservativsm when going more rightwing) is that it’s always a matter of in-group vs out-group, THE stereotype of thinking of the right-wingers.

Like, we have the true values and they are immoral. This thinking naturally Leads of subselects within the in-group that are even more true than the others… and it gets recursively smaller going towards fascism.

So ultimately you end up with a tiny in-group (the führers are now some billionaires), that still want to backstab the others secretly, who become paranoid over time, isolate themselves to minimize contact with these lesser human beings left behind… and loose touch with reality.

this is where it ends, usually, one way or another.

But the important part is that it actually DOESNT MATTER what they think - at some point people are frustrated enough and simply take it all away from them… the tipping point is when even public security staff (like police) is willing to let it happen - mostly to reduce suffering from family/friends/… .

tekknik on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> The great thing about fascism (the extreme form of conservativsm when going more rightwing)

Stopped reading after you asserted that fascism is a right only attribute.

jrochkind1 on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Self-righteousness, violence, or tendencies to authoritarianism can be found on both left and right. But fascism means a certain kind of far-right populist politics, not just these attributes in isolation.

anonyfox on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

words do have definitions. every political direction can have authoritarian traits, still fascism is the extreme form of conservatism. So is communism as the extreme form of socialism, to compare it with left-wing words. The third political direction is liberalism that ultimately leads to anarchy (no state at all). Both American parties are in the area of liberal-conservative… as a European it simply looks like slightly rightwing (dems) and bordering fascist (reps).

Political classification is a complex topic though, it needs multiple dimensions to somehow get to something useful as a mental model.

I am „green“ first and foremost, and while the solarpunk or eco-socialist movements surely have socialist aspects, the „green“ main focus isn’t even covered in previous models. Green is neither left nor right nor liberal, it’s… future oriented? Dunno.

ChatGTP on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

When you think about it, All wealth, every single bit of it has come from the same earth we’re all born on. This is the one truth which binds us all, including the AI, it’s too a child of this Earth, which means all people should have fairly equal access to at least basic protections the Earth provides us with. That’s all there really is to say about it.

jacquesm on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Yes! The world where you end up in a random position with zero influence over the outcome if you could pick it before you were born is the one you should strive to create. That one has true equality.

ChatGTP on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I like that idea, but I don't even think it has to be "perfect equality", just if you're not inclined to strive for more, or you lose your job to a computer, you don't have to go home and tell your family that there live is about to get much worse.

jokethrowaway on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [30 more]

lwhi on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Distribution of capital.

fxtentacle on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

> 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 ;)

megaman821 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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.

fullsend on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

That is step 6. Step 1 is “fundamentally change how modern Capitalism considers making money the only moral good.” It will collapse first.

asah on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

What about jobs that take years of training? We need them done...

bitwize on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

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.

bennysonething on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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?

RGamma on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy

antifa on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

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.

broken_thesis on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

That magical Nordic system is called "social democracy", it's of course rooted in socialism, and it's so old that one of the first dark memes amongst left-wing groups ("You killed Rose Luxemburg!) is about them.

TheOtherHobbes on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

It's strange how those who say the Nordics aren't really socialist will be the first to dismiss their policies as socialist when they're suggested for the US.

bennysonething on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

They have free markets and businesses, doesn't sound like a socialist system to me.

IX-103 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

You're thinking of Communism. Socialism doesn't imply government ownership and control of the economy.

bitwize on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Neither does communism. Communism implies ownership and control of the economy by the people at large, but the presence of a state is, supposedly, a transitional phase.

jokethrowaway on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

> What are we gonna do about the ever increasing N+1% of people who won’t be cost effective versus an AI?

Their quality of life will increase because of all the cheap stuff we can make with ai and robots. They will coexist and compete with robots. Upward mobility should be better, given the access to advanced technology.

Worst case scenario, they can all band together outside of the advanced civilisation, grow their food and live a separate life.

There is no need to make high iq people to pay for low iq to live in a high iq society.

We're already seeing a divide of cities for rich people and cities for poor people. It will just be more pronounced.

Epa095 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> 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.

MichaelZuo on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> 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.

antifa on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> This sounds a lot better than

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

MichaelZuo on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

What's a 'torment nexus'?

TheOtherHobbes on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

By the same logic there's also no need for high IQ AIs to pay for low IQ humans.

It's all fun and games until suddenly you're the one on the outside, wondering how you get there.

OOPMan on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Right...we make stuff cheaper than ever before...but because all these people don't have jobs they can't afford it anyway...

danjac on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

3. Look forward to an awesome new job after your current one is made obsolete.

You do realize that "awesome new job" will require years of training and experience?

Enjoy working at the Amazon Fulfilment Center in the meantime (until of course that's automated too).

7speter on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Don’t forget all the people who laugh in your face and tell you you don’t actually know your newly learned skills, and reduces you to a bartender fraudulently entering their field.

Dma54rhs on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Its been like that forever. Factory workers had to adapt when the jobs went to Asia. I don't see how comfortable office guys should get any other treatment.

It used to be learn to code then maybe learn to weld or plumb it something that is harder to automate away.

jstummbillig on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

While fundamentally true, this comment is astonishingly tone deaf in light of the entirely unprecedented amplitude and timescale at which the shift is happening this time.

"Just prepare" does not work when years become days.

flippinburgers on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

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.

TheOtherHobbes on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

I suspect this comment won't age well.

tekknik on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

> 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.

You don’t feel like you should quote some data for this claim?

dukeofdoom on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Endless amount of things that need improving.

borissk on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

The things that are easy to improve have been improved long ago.

dukeofdoom on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Not really, have a closer look at anything outside. The Sun and rain and weather constantly erode the condition of human creations.

Try fixing some roads and bridges to start with. They're in terrible shape in most of the US. Any city could probably employ 10 times as many gardeners to take care of the plants and build nicer things.

Elderly need taking care of, and young people teaching. Houses need cleaning. Shoes need shinning. Endless list really.

borissk on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

What are you talking about?

Stop the traffic on a road to fix it without local administration permission? Do you think getting such permission is easy? How are you going to pay for the materials to do the repairs? Do you think it's easy to get a job as a gardener?

bbor on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I think you need to read other’s thoughts more charitably. I doubt he was suggesting bored artists and call center workers grab a hard hat and pick a road. The point is that AI makes it easier for humans to do work, and there’s an endless amount of work we as a society want done. Avandon capitalist frameworks of wages/capital/“deserved poverty” for a minute, and just consider a group of humans and a pile of tasks that need to be done.

gwbrooks on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

>> This is exactly the type of conversation we need to have as a society.

Comments like this always make me wonder: How would that happen? Here in the U.S., there's relatively little appetite for job-saving labor protections and, once you leave the regulatory sphere, everyone -- employers, employees, consumers of products and services -- is consistently self-interested.

Not saying that sort of societal conversation is impossible; just saying I don't have the imagination to see how it could happen with actionable results in the 2023 version of the U.S.

justrealist on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

It doesn't even really matter what the US regulations are. If a firm in the Philippines can run Midjourney for pennies to generate content that would take hundreds or thousands of dollars in illustrator costs, there's simply no way to mandate labor protections in the US that would keep customers from outsourcing the work.

The gradient is just too strong, and you can't keep a pedigree on every image you publish that originated from a design firm.

trafficante on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

We’re creating a new global average standard of living with disastrous consequences.

The poor areas rapidly gain wealth but at great cost to the environment and the whole thing is dependent on a never-ending fire hose of capital and tech transfers from the “wealthy” areas.

The wealthy areas, already unable to offer many citizens the ability to raise a family, are desperately engaging in extreme financialization, ludicrous political distractions, and “make work” shell games just to present an increasingly unconvincing veneer that society is still functioning and fully worthy of participation.

Western civilization is the metaphorical Biblical statue from Daniel: After spending decades replacing the support structures with ever cheaper materials, we’re now finally in the “feet of iron and clay” stage, and it’s likely AI will complete the metaphor by representing the boulder that smashes into the weakened base and topples the entire statue.

I realize this all sounds hilariously alarmist, but I have yet to see a positive spin on the impact of AI that isn’t ultimately the same old decoupled Pete Peterson style nonsense of “it’s gud because worker productivity number goes up”: as if we don’t already have two generations of human beings that grew up in an age of massively increased productivity yet cannot afford a family nor a home to put them in - a state of existence that even some medieval serfs would pity.

My weirdly accelerationist hope is that AI advances quickly enough (and management stays short-sighted enough) to cause a meaningful political coalition to form between the already-marginalized blue collar workers and the newly disrupted paper-pusher/cubicle class.

bruce511 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

>> The poor areas rapidly gain wealth but at great cost to the environment and the whole thing is dependent on a never-ending fire hose of capital and tech transfers from the “wealthy” areas.

While I sympathize with your angst at the coming future, a future where the US isn't the highest, I see that for most of the world your prediction is both highly desirable, and inaccurate.

Firstly, let's dispel the great-cost-to-the-environment myth. The US has done, and continues to do great harm to the environment. Indeed many developing nations are skipping the harmful phase and embracing new tech like solar , better urban planning and so on.

Also, while it's fun to posit that thd globe depends on US capital, there's a bigger picture in play. TikTok is developed without western capital, suddenly its a surveillance risk (because Facebook and Google wouldn't spy on me).

Sure there's environmental cost to development, but complaining about the environment of others is a bit rich for the US (as it approves drilling in Alaska). The US accounts for 25% of global emissions, and about 5%ish of thd World population.

So yeah - you want your job yo be remote? Be careful what you wish for.

maeil on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I agree with most of your comment but comparing Facebook or Google with Tiktok remains a classic "both sides" false equivalency that takes away from other valid points that you make. Yes, US social media companies too have to comply with government requests, which have at times been abused. No, the scale and impact that this has is in no way comparable to Chinese tech companies and their relation to the government.

whitemary on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

FWIW you are not crazy. I completely agree with every part of your comment.

DecoySalamander on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

There is an "easy" solution - a regulation that would remove copyright protection from AI-generated art, or perhaps even art that has an AI-generated output somewhere in the pipeline. Art could still be AI-generated for efficiency, but large studios would be forced to keep humans on a payroll for accountability.

tekknik on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I mean if you’re creating regulation just require a human to oversee any job done by AI. Instead of just protecting copyrighted works.

jay_kyburz on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

I don't think the conversion we need to have is about how to stop it, its about what we do with all the unemployed artists, accountants, journalists, truck and taxi drivers.

Do we pay half of them to dig holes, then pay the other half to fill them?

We just need to keep the economy wheel turning while everybody finds new meaningful work.

coldtea on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Who is "we"? The rich will decide, and probably that they can do without most of the "we".

Radim on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I agree with that sentiment, just a small correction:

It's not the rich who will decide; it's the powerful. In the classical sense of "capacity to impose will" – up to and including the capacity to turn off {machines, humans, institutions}.

There's a strong correlation between wealth and power, but those groups are not identical. And neither are their staying prospects in the coming years.

Radim on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

On seconds thoughts, interestingly, that difference between "wealth" and "power" also becomes relevant when quantifying your "most" in They can do without MOST of the "we".

Like, how many people do the wealthy/powerful actually need? What level of automation will allow maintaining their lifestyle, including:

1. Biological needs: Food & a sufficiently diverse pool of mates for themselves and their children.

2. A social hierarchy large enough to flex their power beyond mere biological survival (very important to primates). I'd expect this number to be strictly smaller than for 1), so likely not a concern: as long as there are enough people to biologically sustain a population, there are enough people to subjugate.

3. Technological scaffolding to produce, maintain and bootstrap (in case of calamities) said automation. Currently humans are a necessary physical substrate for the continued inflow of energy that automation needs. I don't have the numbers but the footprint to run even a single power plant must be tremendous: a large and complex society, once you include 2nd order effects. Without energy, the machines don't go "VRRROOM" and neither does AI.

And if the human population drops too low to interfere with any of these points, the automation was self-defeating. It doesn't matter how rich or powerful you were.

I mean, I'm sure someone somewhere ran the numbers and has a plan ready, while the rest of us wax lyrical about "just find a new job LOL" and UBI. Although to be fair, there are also preppers, who've taken the above analysis to its logical conclusion.

IX-103 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

The true limit is item 2 on your list. Eventually AI can take care of the food production portion of 1 and most of item 3. The fact is that energy and secure storage are much less of a problem for AI and robots than people.

For population replacement, you can get by with a couple thousand people. That's really only about a dozen large tribes. If the tribes are kept suitably insular and antagonistic (with either ritualized external marriage or slave-taking to ensure proper genetic circulation) that society might even be stable. The trick would be keeping the population stable.

lazyeye on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

They just move into the more AI resistant sectors of the economy (putting a big downward pressure on wages for those remaining jobs of course).

borissk on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Who's going to pay for those remaining jobs?

E.g. currently mostly the middle class pays for home improvements, which creates jobs for construction workers. Remove the middle class and there's a lot less demand for construction workers - so what are the IT people turned into construction workers going to do?

whitemary on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

The low wages cannot go any lower. As it stands, poor workers in the US already don't make nearly enough to survive. They just keep increasing their debt until they either climb the ladder or die of an overdose or some other tragedy.

herbst on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

That's a process that didn't start with AI but now it became obvious very fast that it gets to late to ignore.

There is no model that works in a purely capitalistic setting. The reality this this issue will hit us hard, everywhere and faster every day.

orbital-decay on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

It didn't take OP's job, though. It gave them another tool that produces better output, but which they don't happen to like (in contrast to their colleague who doesn't have issues with it).

nirvdrum on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

It didn't take the job in the sense that the OP is still employed. It changed the job into something that barely resembles what the OP was hired to do. It's not quite constructive dismissal, but many people choose fields for reasons of maximizing income. It's hard to stay motivated doing something you hate, especially when a week ago your job had you doing something you love. And that says nothing about the OP's ethical quandry about IP laundering.

I might be too cynical, but given the reported productivity gains, it's quite possible the company decides they can do with a single artist. Or if less skilled artists can generate similar results with suitable AI prompts, it'll probably drive wages down, making the OP expendable. I'd imagine at the very least it sets a ceiling on advancement.

orbital-decay on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

The reality is that an artist in a mobile games company is hired for their technical skills, with very little creative freedom. The real artist is usually the art director or a similar position responsible for stylistic/creative/conceptual decisions.

If your job is mostly technical, be ready to re-learn and reshape your skills when your tool goes the way of cel animation. I personally had to do this at least three times in 25 years, not entirely from scratch of course, but I had to relearn the vast majority of my skills. And I think I'll need to do more of it to stay relevant. So to me it's pretty normal.

The work of a creative professional is to deliver meaning. If you can't separate this from your tools and are only able to enjoy one specific tool, you have to question yourself what you're doing in the field. (yes, I'm also being too cynical)

spoiler on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I've had to do something similar in a much shorter career as well (about 10 years or so). I think the rate of change is much quicker these days too. It was still always within the tech field, but for better or worse my career has been incredibly diverse. Not sure if I'll be able to keep up when I'm older (entering my 30ies now) or not, but so far I've always seen it as personal growth opportunities.

anigbrowl on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

I personally had to do this at least three times in 25 years [...] So to me it's pretty normal

Very relatable, but it seems unwise to just consider it normal. If you find yourself having to retool 3 times within 25 months, you'll be well on the way to burning out.

orbital-decay on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

25 years, not months; it wasn't that hard. It wasn't just retooling though - aerospace engineering to SE in gamedev, to the management in the unrelated creative area, to ML.

anigbrowl on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Yes, I know you said 25 years. I was trying to point out that with the accelerating technological capabilities, you could find that need to retool happening faster and faster.

HervalFreire on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

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 get replaced though. Because usually the task is so trivial that positions like these largely only exist because of politics. You convince people around you and yourself that your "creativity" has no peer.

It amounts to this: I want a photo-realistic animation of a cowboy with blue skin with a laser cannon riding a unicycle through the grand canyon with a dwarf chasing him. <<This sentence is trivial to come up with, ANYONE can come up with thousands a variations and tweak the sentence in various ways. No special talent needed here.

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.

But like I said, the directors' position is in actuality largely political. Thus his position is safe even though the actuality of what he does is EASY and therefore a prime target for replacement.

orbital-decay on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> 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 because the high-level instructions don't have enough capacity to deliver the full meaning. This is the same with generative models: extremely hard to control with the "prompt engineering" gimmick, it's only fine when you are OK with random output. Besides, they are purely functional and lack feedback mechanisms the creative director usually employ with artists.

That's why people are trying to make techniques more complex - large animation houses experiment with training their own model architectures and software. This is the way 3D CGI was born - simple at first, and yes it got plenty of doomposting at first (we are getting replaced by computers!), until it was clear that the field becomes extremely technical and complex, so it even has dozens of specializations inside it.

All entertainment is ultimately based on novelty, as human brain is really good at distilling meaning from the ocean of information. If you start with little meaning (your example - "a cowboy with blue skin with a laser cannon riding a unicycle through the grand canyon with a dwarf chasing him"), people get bored - no matter how much randomized artsy-looking stuff you add around it.

If you think that AI can generate all meaning that is relevant to people, I don't buy it, as it doesn't have the same training material. It's trained on the result and is forced to reverse engineer what moves people; reverse engineering is a fundamentally more costly and opaque task.

HervalFreire on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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.

orbital-decay on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> 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".

HervalFreire on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

The asterisks thing is another issue. LLMs don't need to do this to replace directors.

>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.

Except LLMs can accept sketches as input. The higher order methods of communication are covered by encoders.

spoiler on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

I think you're conflating imagination and creativity with taste. Your example might be cute and funny, but as you yourself alluded: it's completely bland and tasteless. It's maybe good enough for a "meme dump" but that's all.

Maybe I'm not sure what point you're trying to make either?

All fiction writers suck? I don't know how much fiction you read, but it's incredible varied. There's a lot writers need to think about and control in the reader (and account for multiple profiles) outside of just an idea. But the ideas themselves need to be coherent.

Creative directors suck? It's incredible difficult being s creative director having to organise multiple people to perform coherently, and even much harder for whole teams.

I think it's natural for humans to reduce and simplify things we don't engage with every day, or our brains would be overloaded. So we just handwave it off. We do it to other people too unfortunately... Remember how complex your life (internal and external) is; other's lives are equally complex and nuanced.

HervalFreire on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

>Creative directors suck? It's incredible difficult being s creative director having to organise multiple people to perform coherently, and even much harder for whole teams.

Difficult in terms of effort. Not difficult in terms of skill. Make no mistake the quality of a movie is more the sum of the quality of the parts then it is the creative director. Who wrote the script? Who did the digital effects? Who did the lighting? Who did the editing?

The director did the hard work of picking the people and issuing orders.

>I think it's natural for humans to reduce and simplify things we don't engage with every day, or our brains would be overloaded. So we just handwave it off. We do it to other people too unfortunately... Remember how complex your life (internal and external) is; other's lives are equally complex and nuanced.

Except I am more or less a director. Not one for movies but for a company.

There is a difference between handwaving something off versus being delusional about your own role within the world. Directing is hard work, management is hard work. But none of these things are skilled work.

>All fiction writers suck? I don't know how much fiction you read, but it's incredible varied. There's a lot writers need to think about and control in the reader (and account for multiple profiles) outside of just an idea. But the ideas themselves need to be coherent. own position.

It is certainly easier to create an entire space opera in writing then it is to do it via a movie. Writing is skilled work in terms of one skill only: your ability to write. Every other aspect of it is hard work but, unfortunately, unskilled work.

I realize there are complex plots, paradoxical stories and imaginative settings and the pacing of a story is important as well. But all of this doesn't really require skill just time and deep thought to come up with. Plenty of the most popular authors never had a writing background or talent.

I would say again that these director positions while in principle are easily replaceable they are not in practice due to politics. A director or CEO is where he is mainly due to politics. Politics is unfortunately a skill with aspects that not only need to be imitated by AI but imitated by robotics as well, and it's simply a gateway into the role with no relation to the actuality of the job requirements.

Its hard to imagine a computer issuing the same exact orders as a director. But with LLMs computers are really close to doing that in principle. The issue is as I mentioned the social and political aspect of directing that cannot be replaced yet.

linkjuice4all on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Jobs change and hopefully peoples’ skillset changes and gets better when they do.

This job was different 5 years ago and this entire animation process would be unrecognizable 50 years ago. Tweening didn’t ruin animation it just lowered the barrier of entry. This too will lower the barrier of entry so our future will be more high quality animation. Some of it will be lasting and some of it will be appreciated for mere seconds for throw away content such as ads.

Maybe when everyone gets home from their boring prompt engineering jobs they can go back to hand rolling animation stacks or whatever other workflow is currently getting destroyed by AI for the “fun” of it.

7speter on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Everyone isn’t going to be lucky enough to have a prompt engineering job

anigbrowl on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

It turned OP from a craftperson to a machine operator. Their less-skilled colleague (either due to lack of talent, experience, or application) is now cruising past them them because they don't care as much as OP did about the work itself. OP is still employed, but now some of the necessary grunt work has become the main task. And that, too, will be easier done by machine before long.

quonn on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I‘m hoping, perhaps unreasonably, that the work in the short to medium term actually gets better. I‘m currently working on something very interesting after having worked an complete shit a few months last year: Shit where a designer draws up the exact thing and then it is redundantly implemented on mobile by overpaid developers. Let that be done by the AI. Good riddance.

tekknik on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Good riddance to what? Those developers have a job in this scenario, soon they will not.

nmz on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

We never needed to be this productive anyway, we are completely swarmed with content, to the point that if we stopped producing today we would still be consuming new media after 100 years.

orbital-decay on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

This process has been happening for at least a couple decades (arguably more) without any AI, though. The entertainment industry almost ran itself into the ground that way, long before those things emerged. Or rather, the demand made it to.

herbst on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

I have to agree. If I get hired somewhere and one day I get suddenly forced to use Mac or Windows to run the Adobe suite I would hate the situation but most people would argue that's just the Industrie standard

HervalFreire on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Think about the implications of it. Don't just take it at face value.

How much longer will he be able to KEEP his job.

thomascgalvin on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

I just wish I was part of the first generation to benefit from post-scarcity, and not the generation that is going to have to go through the turmoil of getting to post-scarcity.

thot_experiment on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Oh don't worry my guy, the odds that we make it to post-scarcity at all are not super high. Just vibe with the slide down the slippery slope, it's all you can do.

chii on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

the generation that went thru the industrial revolution would have said the same thing, except they'd wished they were in your position today.

People just don't realize how good today is compared to the past - and of course, how good the future would be (nuclear war notwithstanding).

tspike on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Any time this argument gets trotted out it's using a baseline of European post-agrarian feudalism. There were definitely peoples in the past who enjoyed a high quality of life for many generations, but they tended to be small groups concentrated in areas of abundance, and were usually among the first to be exterminated by outsiders.

borissk on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

The fact that the industrial revolution created better life for most people doesn't prove an AI revolution will do the same.

The classical counter-example are horses - the industrial revolution increased the demand for horses, but once the cars became cheap horses numbers and jobs drastically decreased.

chii on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

But in this scenario, the horses had no agency to become anything else.

I refuse to believe humans don't have agency.

TeMPOraL on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Agency is only half of the equation. The other half is opportunity. With Industrial Revolution, horses had neither. With AI revolution, people may retain agency, but I doubt there will be many opportunities available.

coffeebeqn on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

I guess we can get AGI and that will lead to great and numerous inventions. Of course how power works in that world is extremely uncertain. Most likely power would flow to a corporation or an authoritative government unfortunately. Not to the people.

nec4b on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

>> 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.

And yet nobody lost his job. He wasn't fired. He is unhappy because automation equalized the playing field and mediocre artists became good enough with the right tools. The technology enabled him and other artists to be more productive. It feels similar to the best ditch digger getting angry at the invention of excavator, because he doesn't stand out anymore.

cyrialize on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

He's also angry because now his job has completely changed. He enjoyed spending his time making 3D models. Now that expectations have shifted because of these tools he has to use them. He went from making things from scratch to writing prompts instead.

ModernMech on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Okay so? Back in the day people trained up for 2D art, and then suddenly not long after 3D graphics came around. Imagine working on Final Fantasy 6, and then being told you now have to do 3D art for Final Fantasy 7.

Amazingly, despite 3D graphics, in the year 2023 there are now more employed 2D pixel artists than there were in the 90s. They are still making new games for the NES!

So while I’m sad for this person’s loss of love for their current job, I’m sure they will be able to find work.

cyrialize on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I understand where you're coming from. I don't think this person really fears losing their job. It's more that their current job, and probably all future ones, will be done in a way that they dislike. That is a valid complaint.

There are probably some employed pixel artists that liked creating things pixel by pixel and are disliking the fact that their job is radically changing since these tools create an expectation for faster output.

I apologize if I came across arguing with anyone.

I just wanted to call out that to me - it doesn't seem like this person thinks they are going to lose their job. They did their job in a way that they really enjoyed. That's changed.

Does that happen all the time in other industries? Yes. Is it valid to point out that this has happened before? Yes. Will this person be able to find work? Yes.

This person is just expressing their frustration. With the way all these tools are progressing, I imagine we are going to be seeing posts like these more in the future.

Laaas on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

They could fire him and only keep the other artist though. It's likely they have more capacity now than needed, which if they halve, they can spend more money on a good developer.

ChatGTP on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

Interesting development, these machines have little value but for economic gain. No one employed, means no one will pay to keep the machines alive which means we go back to where we were before the machines? AI art is just as “worthless” as human art. So at the moment these machines depend on an economy.

Art was actually never worth anything until we put a price tag on it ? People were never paid for cave paintings. Maybe what we’re actually going to witness is the end of the idea of money , which I know sounds absolutely absurd, but what else happens ?

If machines become sentiment, that’s cool, but at that stage they’re no longer “our property” to force art generation upon, so then what to do we do ?

Completely fascinating.

blackoil on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Player does not care if graphics or code of the game are created by a person or AI. For them it matters how much fun they are having and for companies how low the cost are.

chii on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

> No one employed

i highly doubt no one will be employed even in the advent of a true AI singularity. Just differently employed - there will be reasons why someone would pay for your labour.

ChatGTP on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Yeah, my theory is there will just be more shit to do, more startups, more tech, more than ever before. More ways to scale your business, spend your free time, yada yada yada.

Also most western countries have severely aging populations, there’s are big problem there which automation can help with, if it’s applied right.

rebuilder on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

I still would argue against AI being able to do art better.

There’s a line of thought that art is specifically meaningful because it’s humans thinking about things, but let’s leave that aside for now.

Generative models are revealing how many jobs in e.g. entertainment are essentially mechanical, from management’s POV. So far, they’ve just happened to require an artist’s education to do well. Now, the craft part is going out the window, and artistic creativity, if it was ever required, is being pushed out of production roles.

This is going to change the type of person who works in entertainment. I expect, while by technical metrics we will probably see quality stay the same or even improve while output increases, we’re also going to see a kind of McDonaldsification of entertainment, even more than we already see, because we’re pushing creative people out of the industry.

TL;DR: Process matters. Art is notoriously difficult to manage and predict what will or will not be successful , in large part because it’s a classic greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts thing. Devalue the process, devalue the end product.

Hoasi on March 27, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

> 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.

And yet, the more I play with these image models, the less I worry they might replace all artists.

Granted, it will commoditize some skills, such as photo bashing, mockups, and visual exploration.

It is a "creative" tool in a way, in the sense that a prompt can give unexpected results, such as associations that were uncalled for. But as much as you can replace higher-paid video game concept artists, you'll still need people to operate these text-to-image tools. We are past the initial discovery days, where all the results look incredible, and even the public will grow more discerning. Artists can't ignore these tools. As tools for the individual, they can be a lever. As a full-time, corporate job? Not so much. That is to say, as a job, this is not different from many other bullshit jobs. Prompting all day long is as fun as filling boxes in Excel. That will probably attract a new crowd of less specialized workers, and artists will have no choice but to adapt.

Digital artists could find new ways of expression using traditional art (a luxury), diversify, and engage in content creation. There are many alleys to confront pessimism, despair, and the fear of becoming obsolete.

Artists thrive in adversity and uncertain situations because they are problem-solvers first. Imagination is their job.

Photography made portrait artists redundant, but it didn't eliminate artists. It will change the nature of an artist's job and kill some of the joy in some cases, but it will trigger creative responses, too.

coldtea on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

It's like how Dropbox would never replace running SFTP and rsync or something to that effect...

karmasimida on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

It is NOT taking artists job in OP though.

What happens is that it changes the job into something different.

s__s on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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.

tekknik on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

There’s too many people in this thread claiming this. This artist did not lose their job, correct. This artist is currently underemployed. Most of us can predict the rate of AI improvement, and realize soon his job will be entirely replaced once they can bridge the gap.

My wife and I were recently talking about hiring some artists to do some work for us. However with generative AI, we decided to instead have her do the work using the AI tools instead. The result, less artists hired.

This is how it’s going to be from now on. The only hope is if humans find more opportunity with this power.

Zetobal on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

He is not an artist he is an operator.

melagonster on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

unfortunately, we have capitalism. in our society, if people and their kids starving and dying, we think this ia justice.

ChatGTP on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

That’s because it’s a minority of people in that situation, once it’s > 50% facing prospects like that, it all changes in the blink of an eye.

No one gives a crap until it’s your own child, then it’s probably too late.

ben_w on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Second sentence yes, first sentence… well, the potato famine comes to mind.

Change happened, yes, but it's not necessarily fast even in such situations.

xdennis on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

This is childish. People are starving more in non capitalist societies.

kentrado on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I think the ones you are referring to are still capitalist as companies are owned by an elite "capitalist" and the workers have no say in their workplace.

melagonster on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

yes, their kids are starving. but our kids will starve. this is our problem.

HervalFreire on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

>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 "programming skills" or "skills related to what I do" until eventually when the reality of it all is too all encompassing the arguments will evolve into attacks at AI for being "low quality" or something along those lines.

But if AI progresses to the point where the quality of the output becomes undeniably superior to human output the "denial" arguments will inevitably shift to the REAL argument. The heart of it all. What is the purpose of being alive if AI is doing everything? Should we ban it for the sake of the economy for purpose?

These arguments of course only occur based off the assumption that the technology will progress so quickly that the repercussions will be hitting everyone like a freight train. If the progression slows down enough then there won't be much opposition. Only acceptance as it slowly assimilates into our society without people noticing the change.

If you in your heart are one of these people who has no worry about AI taking over jobs because AI is simply too "stupid" perhaps consider the fact that my description above fits you. Are your arguments evolving along a similar trendline? If so, consider shifting your perspective a bit.

juvvel on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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?

HervalFreire on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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.

juvvel on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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 imperfect ability to understand ourselves. It will get better, sure, there will be emergent properties, but there's no need to reject the inherent value of humanity even if it happens to produce less economically viable output.

HervalFreire on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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 the most efficient methodology for a given task then capitalism eliminated that methodology. That's the logical extrapolation. You subjective opinions on humanities worth is irrelevant to the most likely outcome.

juvvel on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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.

HervalFreire on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

It's possible. But unlikely.

Historically speaking, from crypto to AI, the market constantly evolves towards the next most profitable thing.

Only regulatory systems like the government has the tendency to temper such things (see the Fed and rising interest rates). However do note that capitalist entities have infiltrated the government and have huge sway over it's regulatory policies meaning that anti-business regulatory policies are unlikely to occur.

All of this just means that my conclusions are most likely going to play out. Barring some event that will cause intense negative public reaction.

juvvel on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> However do note that capitalist entities have infiltrated the government and have huge sway over it's regulatory policies meaning that anti-business regulatory policies are unlikely to occur.

Maybe this is the case in the US, the EU is known for being much more strict in its regulations, which is often ridiculed by the rest of the world. Those same people are going to hope for regulations once we see the effects of the current Wild West that is AI.

HervalFreire on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Agreed. The EU is ridiculed but it's also one of the happiest places to live. The relationship between the US and EU is almost parasitic with the EU simply feeding off most of the business innovation coming from the US.

I don't think the world needs this much constant innovation. Additionally the innovation itself can be disruptive. The US will doggedly pursue profits even if those profits involve technology that can cause the US to eat itself. If AI replaces all jobs and nobody has any money to buy stuff who will the companies sell shit too?

elforce002 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

100x this. I think will see something like France but on a global scale.

runnerup on March 25, 2023 | prev | next [–]

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 game assets for a retro computer game: https://hpjansson.org/blag/2022/08/16/adventure-game-graphic... The author clearly has actually studied art and is able to come up with prompts and concepts that I'd never be able to dream up. They're able to get the AI to generate what they want immediately with specific prompts like:

> "mexican hacienda on a sunny day, surrounded by plains, color painting by Charles Sheeler"

I have no idea who Charles Sheeler is. But if someone knows 1,500 different artists/photographers/genres/styles and the nuances of them, they can immediately select the right look for the client. It's not a panacea that will allow artists to keep doing what they love, but it is a bright spot and something to focus on for what the future skillset looks like for those who generate art.

[0]: https://hpjansson.org/blag/2022/08/16/adventure-game-graphic...

sheepscreek on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

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 initial trauma of becoming a manager. Learning to be content with the end result and the success of the team, than your direct individual contribution. The difference here is they didn’t ask for it.

I fully empathize with them. It makes me sad to think what they’re going through. My advise to them will be to look for other ways to get that satisfaction - either through a hobby or considering a different role/profession. For better or for worse, the world is changing rapidly and I can’t see it going back to what it was.

cthalupa on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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.

rakejake on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Yes, this is exactly how I am thinking about this. We are all going to become "managers". The drudgery of work is about to increase a whole lot.

lukego on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

I'm getting whiplash from the pace of change: I think of pixel art rapidly rendered from 3D models as the disruptive new technology that's devaluing traditional drawing skills!

ModernMech on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

> 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.

I think the point is that this artist can still experience that joy, but they just can’t get paid for it anymore. That is indeed sad, but that’s life.

On the other hand, maybe in a post scarcity society, this artist won’t have to work to survive, and they can do all the 3D modeling they want without having to worry about rent and food.

kitsunesoba on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> On the other hand, maybe in a post scarcity society, this artist won’t have to work to survive, and they can do all the 3D modeling they want without having to worry about rent and food.

The scary part to me is that there’s scant evidence that a post-scarcity society will be allowed to develop. It seems more likely that those at the top will reap the entirety of the fruits of productivity gains enabled by employing AI, much as they’ve been doing for the more incremental (but still massive) productivity gains of the past several decades. Very little of the pie will be shared with the working class.

dimaor on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

I think the point is missed here. the post was made by an artist who really likes his craft, and now with the generated models coming to the picture he feels like his work diminished to simply polishing after them.

I am a coder who really likes coding, getting results quicker will not make me happier.

it is different in a work environment, but still, a lot of people simply enjoy the path and not only the outcome.

Kye on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

It's the same with every person who shows up with AI music composition. "Finally, you can be free from the tedium of composing music and get to the fun parts!"

But that is one of the fun parts...

dimaor on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

as a hobby music producer, this thing make me sick :)

actually I think this problem started earlier, with many _musicians_ using pre made beats and auto tune. right now it just takes it to a whole other level.

music should be a tool of expression, not one to gain fame & social acceptance

krisoft on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> music should be a tool of expression, not one to gain fame & social acceptance

I don’t get it then why you care, let alone care enough to make you feel sick. Nobody is stopping you from using music as a tool of expression. You do you, yam in your basement or wherever you want. I bet that you will find like minded people who appreciate what you do, but even if not you yourself are saying “music should not be a tool to gain fame and social acceptance”.

So why do you care what other people do?

dimaor on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I guess I over exaggerated due to fast typing. it does not _make me sick_ I just don't understand the reason.

a bit of context: I've been producing music for ~15 years now, purely as a hobby (due to incompetence on my part to up a level).

I have friends which I helped and collaborated with for years on and off, and some of them seem to me like they are stuck in a loop of wanting to succeed without actually expressing themselves. they seem to be stuck in the mode of _this is how it's done, and this is what I want and anything else is incorrect_.

even when there are many other options to make it sound better and make it richer.

so correction: what makes me _sick_ is the fact that some people try to copy other successful musicians without even considering doing something original, purely because they want the same level of _fame and success_.

the_only_law on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

There are still masses of people making music without “pre made beats and auto tune” they just don’t get played in places like the radio because the radio is mostly for sanitized stuff that appeals to mainstream trends. I don’t expect most of the artists I listen to because an AI can produce a generic trap beat or something. Of course, there may be more garbage to sift through.

0xcde4c3db on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

This seems congruent with a thought I've had, which is that generative image models might enable people commissioning art to be more coherent about what they want. I only have FOAF-tier knowledge of commissioning artwork, but my understanding is that a major source of frustration on all sides is that a lot of work is often wasted because someone commissioning an artist has only the faintest spark of a concept or doesn't know how to communicate it effectively. I imagine a fair number of professional artists would be receptive to something along the lines of "here are my prompts/models, here's the set of the outputs I have opinions about and here's what I do and don't like about them; please use your expertise to compose this into something that actually works".

andrewflnr on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

The market of people who care enough about those aspects to pay an expert is, I'm guessing, much smaller than the market for people who will be fine with whatever they can come up with themselves.

ghaff on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

How many of those people would actually have paid an expert vs. downloading some stock photo or artwork and going close enough?

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

If we can have an infinite variation of personalized stock photos, I'm betting that the "good enough" side will win.

I'm still not scared about my job since I provide specific solutions (C++ architectures) that an AI cannot produce (yet), but it's worrying for everyone and every kind of job at the same time.

thrill on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

The market will decide if those "good enough" people are right.

harimau777 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Perhaps the market is wrong. Just because something is profitable doesn't make it good.

barry-cotter on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

If you don’t like the taste of the people who want to pay for art I suggest doing what is traditional and either (a) paying for it yourself, or (b) taking over or setting up the government funding for artists so that people who share your taste are in control.

harimau777 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

My concern is that there would be no one to pay for it because they have been driven out of the market.

JackFr on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

That doesn’t make sense. Buyers don’t get driven out of the market.

noirbot on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

They do if they lose their jobs. Art isn't something you must buy. I like to buy art, but if I lost my job, it's one of the first things I'll be cutting back on. And the less people are buying, the more the remaining artists have to charge to keep being able to afford to do art, which just spirals more people out of the buyers market.

pixl97 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

What is a recession or a depression?

Economic collapses are a thing.

harimau777 on March 29, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Sorry, when I said "no one to pay for it" I meant "no one who could be paid to do it". In retrospect, my wording was ambiguous.

turkeygizzard on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

I’ve been fiddling with midjourney recently. There’s definitely a learning curve to it, but ironically gpt has been helpful for generating prompts. I expect the edge that artists have in this regard to erode further with time

MildlySerious on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

> 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

< The art style of impressionism is characterized by visible brush strokes, emphasis on the changing effects of light, and an emphasis on capturing the fleeting moment.

Then used that in my prompt for the creator:

> okinawa street on a rainy night, visible brush strokes, emphasis on the changing effects of light, and an emphasis on capturing the fleeting moment

The result: https://imgur.com/a/QdT1Gtk

This was the first shot. No prompt engineering, no parameters, nothing.

runnerup on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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?

MildlySerious on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> The point is you knew to use "impressionist" as a concept.

I could have surfaced, or learned about it 20 seconds earlier from a different ChatGPT conversation (throwing vaguely related questions at GPT[1]), or something as old fashioned as a search engine. Maybe turning up the "novel" kernels of information that you won't get from LLMs without knowing to ask will be its own thing in the future. A few Pinterests for prompts are already out there if I'm not mistaken.

Great choice of art styles, by the way!

[1] https://sharegpt.com/c/jnpoQRv

tkiolp4 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Couldn’t you just have prompted:

> okinawa street on a rainy night. Impressionism style

MildlySerious on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

If I just wanted results, I'm sure I could have. I just thought it was interesting to see if this more abstract description would map to results that would be considered impressionism.

no_time on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

>I have no idea who Charles Sheeler is. But if someone knows 1,500 different artists/photographers/genres/styles and the nuances of them, they can immediately select the right look for the client

Don't overthink it. The SD GUI I've seen people use has a button that appends a random artists name at the end of the prompt. You mash that button until you are satisfied with the style.

stemlord on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

>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.

Strong disagree. It's a completely different discipline. One doesn't "know art", they know a specific flavor of it, and 3d modelling is not... sentence constructing.

nullsense on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

As someone with no artistic knowledge or skill who has been playing around with this stuff, I totally agree. I have found a large part of the learning curve to be getting a sense of how to describe the things in the first place.

It does lower the barrier to entry significantly for anyone wanting to get into it, but it's still going to be the case where some people are demonstrably better at it than others.

Of course developers will just solve it by making to be UX such that it uses some genetic algorithm to help you iterate to the exact thing you want even if you don't know how to describe it.

The exponential part of this ride really feels like it's coming in to full view.

krembo on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

Yet, giving a prompt has a much lower barrier than actually being an artist.

muyuu on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

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 to affect the creative work market massively over the next few years.

People will need to keep adapting and perhaps some humility would be in order when somebody else is going through hardship as the market for his or her work profile is in dire straits.

falsaberN1 on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

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-charged "useful idiots" for anti-AI agendas.

Have you seen AI outputs carefully? I have for the last seven months, and if an artist can be replaced by it, maybe that artist deserves it. I say this as an artist, 36 years of experience.

The worst is that this will be considered a hot take and mean-spirited by the immensely biased HN crowd, but lifeless art can be replaced by lifeless art, and that's the artist's fault for just coasting from check to check without putting much effort, therefore producing empty, emotionless art. We all know this, we all call it out when it happens, but for some reason this entire AI topic is making people forget it's a thing.

This is no different from that lazy guy at the office that just does the bare minimum to not get fired. Getting rid of them may give a more talented and unique but less popular artist a chance to get a job.

_lx4l on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> 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.

falsaberN1 on March 28, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I am not talking about GPT and LLM models. I have no opinion on those. I have an opinion on art because it's something I know intimately. Art is a form of expression available to all, it's not just art for business or commission. That only the business side of art is being discussed is ignoring what art actually means. Not everything is business, and I loathe "time is money" kinda worldviews, honestly.

I'm already able to create excellent models of any subject I desire in 15-45 minutes, with remarkable quality aside from bad hands, and usable forever once trained, then how come I'm still drawing? (more than usual, in fact)

Understand that and you'll understand my argument.

latency-guy2 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

> 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-charged "useful idiots" for anti-AI agendas.

Artists spread disinformation and hate too, in fact I'd count them as one of the primary sources of those things. Mere existence of political cartoonists is the simplest example if we go by the literal term "artist". Artists are rarely if ever divorced from their work either, so I don't think they can claim that the art really takes on it's own life.

I do agree with you on everything else you have said.

hotpotamus on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

Hillary Clinton said some words about it.

> "We're going to make it clear that we don't want to forget those people," Clinton said. "Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories. Now we've got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don't want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on."

Famously what got quoted was this part:

> "we're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business."

pharmakom on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I don’t see the pulled out quote in the main quote.

hotpotamus on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/9/15/1630615...

You can read more about it there if you'd like.

7speter on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

That’s the joke

kybernetyk on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

>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?

Twitter was full with snarky "just learn to code" comments.

perryizgr8 on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

> 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

Yeah I remember the whole "learn to code" movement that mocked people who were losing their jobs.

kybernetyk on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

And when it was about journalists losing jobs, it quickly got banned as "harassment". By the same people who a few years earlier made fun of blue collar people who lost their jobs.

Maybe this is the "learn to weld" moment?

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Can you give some sources for the "learn to code" thing? I only remember that it was a reaction to the people who wanted to change open-source (perceived as "destroying from the inside") without giving concrete solutions.

7speter on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Search for it on quora

david2ndaccount on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

This has been happening for centuries, see the legend of Johny Henry.

lowbloodsugar on March 27, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

—Martin Niemöller

elforce002 on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

The discussion is creating 3 groups: First group is sure AI will be an enabler and it won't replace them; The second group is saying AI won't replace them at least in the near future (1~10 years); Then we have the third group, which is basically the sentiment the op is living rn: AI is taking away their hopes, dreams, and livelihood.

Now, I think we'll see the strongest counterculture in human history against AI and the biggest social unrest to date. I'm talking about massive protests , massive regulations, etc... just because no one, specially the government, is prepared for what's coming.

habibur on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

And then industrial revolution didn't take out jobs, rather created more. So did computers in the 80s and 90s.

I remember typesetters in our locality were protesting in the 80s that computers were taking off their jobs. They started something like "burn the computers" movement.

More people were later employed as composers than there were typesetters.

TeMPOraL on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Those typesetters were likely right, tho. Sure, Industrial Revolution and computer revolution ended up creating more jobs than they took out - but what everyone conveniently doesn't mention is, those new jobs went to different people.

These kinds of transitions are large scale wealth redistribution. Your random typesetter 20 years into their career, with experience, good pay, and whole life built around economic conditions they spent those decades working hard to achieve, is not going to jump into a role of senior offset printer specialist, or DTP team manager. They're going to become a junior designer at best, most likely fall out of industry and into a junior whatever role. With commensurate drop in salary.

If you're over 30, imagine dropping down to whatever you earned when you were 20, and tell me that people protesting automation don't have an argument. And remember: it's only your career that resets; your health and obligations and remaining years to live do not.

grumbel on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

> 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 dramatically shrinking with advanced AI. There is not much area left where jobs can shift too.

The creative jobs can be automated just the same as everything dealing with digital data. Skilled trades, carpenter, plumbers and electricians might still be safe for some years, as robots still struggle with climbing a ladder or even just stairs, but those are areas that don't seem to be destined for rapid growth. Whatever new job you can think of, will probably be automated away before a human ever get a chance to touch it.

The most impressive part with ChatGPT and friends after all isn't just that they are reasonably good at what they are doing, but how universal they are. ChatGPT didn't need to be meticulously programmed to do the things it does, it learned most of that by itself just from the data feed into it. Meaning there really isn't any domain that you can't automate with AI in the long run.

What's left for humans? No idea.

elforce002 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> 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 for some answers here: - "Blue collar jobs are safe". Really? What happens when everyone is an electrician, plumber, taxi driver, etc...?

- "I use it to amplify my productivity". What happens when AI is so good that it can literally swap you

- "Just create a business around it". There's no competitive edge anymore. Everyone can do "everything" and won't need any expertise at all when AI gets "there".

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.

I'm not a conspiracy person, but I can see the "You'll own nothing and you'll be happy" getting dangerously close to reality.

_lx4l on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> 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.

CatWChainsaw on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Not to worry, you definitely won't be happy!

vasili111 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Robotics is far from replacing carpenters, plumbers and etc. They maybe are showing acrobatics and may even replace soon soliders in some cases. But repairing something requires effort that will be magnitudes higher.

Xenoamorphous on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Sure, as a whole the industrial revolution might have created more jobs. But what about individuals? Are we expecting some dude in his fifties whose job is going to be taken away by AI to switch careers just like that? That stuff is hard enough when someone is in their thirties. And in my country the unemployment rate is already 13%, there’s hundreds of candidates for any decent job opening.

lezojeda on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

To those who are in our 20s and 30s they just answer "be a capitalist, become an entrepeneur, use GPT to build a business".

Never have seen what the answer to people in 40s and 50s with family who can't do a career reset. I guess they'll just have to take a huge pay cut and deal with it, I don't know.

Macha on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Industrial revolution cities were famously a meat grinder though. Disease, poor quality accomodation, reckless safety considerations in early factories meant a lot of those displaced from rural artisan jobs to work in the cities literally died as a result.

Many of the new jobs' employees were from population growth, people that lived in the countryside thanks to the growth in food production that otherwise wouldn't have, then moved to the cities, etc, as sanitation improved a general fall in the death rate prior to the fall in the birth rate (but later than the initial migration to cities).

Nor was the city standard of living equivalent as people move from rural households (admittedly often multi generational ones, so more crowded than modern ones) to overcrowded tenements.

So the story people gloss over is that all the rural cobblers went to the city and became factory workers and everything is fine. But while it might be a reassuring story that _society_ survives and evolves, it's not at all clear that individuals did as well.

AmericanChopper on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Ludditism has been around since at least the 18th century, probably much longer than that, and that’s exactly what this is. It’s not even the hyperbolic “grandpa doesn’t like iPads” type of ludditism, it’s the literal raging against technological innovation because you’re scared it’s going to take your job type of ludditism.

The guy in the OP didn’t even have his job taken, he just had to use a new tool that made his work far more efficient.

elforce002 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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 = less businesses = more low-income and at risk people, and the cycle continues.

We'll basically create a neofeudalist society where the rich will control everything and the people will work for them (food, housing, etc...).

It seems crazy, etc... but not improbable. I'm not a conspiracy person, but I can't stop thinking about this: These advancements align with "You'll own nothing, and you'll be happy" sentence from the WEF.

AmericanChopper on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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.

elforce002 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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.

AmericanChopper on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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…

elforce002 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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.

medvezhenok on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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.

AmericanChopper on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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

jrochkind1 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

There weren't exactly fewer jobs in textiles after the industrialization the original luddites were against. The jobs were just much, much crappier. (And more of them were filled by children).

They weren't "scared it's going to take their jobs" -- they were _seeing_ the jobs they had _actually disappear_ (not hypothetical future fear), replaced by worse-paying jobs with much worse conditions. They were exactly right that their actual lives were going to get a lot harder.

From a recent Cory Doctorow post: https://doctorow.medium.com/gig-work-is-the-opposite-of-stea... :

> Despite what you may have heard, the Luddites weren’t technophobes. They were skilled workers, expert high tech machine operators who supplied the world with fine textiles. Thanks to a high degree of labor organization through craft guilds, the workers received a fair share of the profit from their labors. They worked hard, but they earned enough through their labors to enjoy lives of dignity and comfort.

> Nineteenth century textile workers enjoyed a high degree of personal autonomy. Their machines were in their homes and they worked surrounded by family and friends, away from the oversight of the rich merchants who brought their goods to market. This was the original “cottage industry.”

> The factory owners who built their “dark, Satanic mills” weren’t interested in making life easier for textile workers by automating their labor. They wanted to make workers’ lives harder.

> Textile machines were valued because they were easier to operate than the hand-looms that preceded them, and that meant that workers who wanted a fair wage for a fair day’s work could be fired and replaced with new workers, without the logistical hassle of the multi-year apprenticeship demanded by the hand-loom and its brethren.

> As Brian Merchant documents in Blood in the Machine, his stunning, forthcoming history of the Luddites, the factory owners of the industrial revolution wanted machines so simple that children could work them, because that would let them pick over England’s orphanages, tricking young kids to come work in their factories for ten and twelve hour days.

> These children were indentured for a period of ten years, starved and mercilessly beaten when they missed quota. The machines routinely maimed or killed them. One of these children, Robert Blincoe, survived to write a bestselling memoir detailing the horrifying life of the factory owners’ child slaves, inspiring Dickens to write Oliver Twist.

MSFT_Edging on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Tech people so obviously loath creatives, its so sad.

> he just had to use a new tool that made his work far more efficient.

He had all satisfaction, creativity, and joy sapped out of his job. He was made alienated, made to feel pointless, in order to commodify a creative pursuit.

Technology is doing what it has always done, rob skilled people of purpose. From the luddites, to potters, shoemakers, etc. They had a skill that was important for other people. Automation made this cheaper, so these skilled laborers were no longer of use. But now everything we have is made out of cheap materials, nothing lasts. Sure its cheap, it has to be cheap for the out-of-the-job skilled worker who is now working a service job, to be able to afford this automated commodity.

This degrades our society, piece by piece, stone by stone. What is the end goal of this automation? The folks who are reaping the benefits of this efficiency will continue to hoard. They'll fight any effort to give back some of those profits robbed from the laborers. We're turning into a society where we just continuously exchange cheap pointless pieces of plastic just to survive. Zero meaning left except for the psychopaths at the top, they're the only ones allowed to derive meaning from their work.

AmericanChopper on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> 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 the psychopaths at the top, they're the only ones allowed to derive meaning from their work.

Luddites say this about every single technological innovation that they whinge about.

MSFT_Edging on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> 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 should be concerning that any meaning found in work is being optimized away for someone else's benefit. The weird lack of empathy to admit it happened to you and to decide someone else should feel it to, sorta worries me.

Especially in a creative field. Who does the cookie cutter AI models benefit? It doesn't benefit the consumer who wasted money on a lazy product, it doesn't benefit the people working on the project, as now their working hours are cut due to the soulless optimization. It benefits the boss, the guy extracting this value and selling a lesser product.

AmericanChopper on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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…

MSFT_Edging on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> Ah you can afford TVs and corn based foods. Why don't you go back in time so you don't have to do pointless activities for most of your waking hours until you retire and die 10 years later

lowbloodsugar on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

>And then industrial revolution didn't take out jobs, rather created more.

This is your thinking: "Because all previous technological revolutions created more jobs, it follows that the AI technological revolution will create more jobs."

However there is an obvious difference between all previous revolutions and this one: previous revolutions replaced labor. The AI revolution replaces thought. Even the computer revolution replaced labor, such as "typing things onto paper" or "updating a ledger".

For me, the whole ChatGPT debacle just showed me that 99% (or 100%) of humans are, themselves, just autocompletion generators, with the training model being a religious text, a political manifesto or propaganda masquerading as a school system.

kajaktum on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Created more jobs, sure but what kind of jobs? More complicated, mind draining jobs that many, many people are simply not capable of. The general human intelligent cannot catch up with the rate that the market is asking for.

iainctduncan on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

The fact that one change produced a given result is no guarantee that a different change will have the same effect.

philwelch on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

If you take one look at the demographics of developed countries, the reality is that we absolutely need to replace the majority of human labor in order to maintain any sustainable material standard of living. Old age entitlements are a ticking time bomb, with fewer workers in each generation to support the growing share of longer and longer lived retirees. You want social unrest, take a look at France, which is on fire at the moment because the government had the temerity to try and raise the legal retirement age to 64.

cmrdporcupine on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Firstly, we are talking in this thread about intellectual, not physical labour. There's no AI or robot forthcoming that will replace (already brutally underpaid) personal support workers or nurses in nursing homes. Instead it's the higher paying or more satisfying intellectual, artisan, and creative work done by those senior's children that are on the chopping block.

Secondly, even if jobs are automated to support the aging population, the economic model we have doesn't facilitate this leading to an improved life. The incentives to automate in our market economy are strong, and produce amazing efficiencies. Unfortunately that incentive is to reduce labour costs, and there's always a period of unemployment and reskilling afterwards. And in places like the US, unemployment = no health care, among other insecurities.

And in the past a lucky few reskilled towards more intellectual, creative, or informational-managerial jobs. Turns out those will be easier to automate than we thought.

Building a robot is expensive. Automating a factory a huge capital investment.

But once the R&D phase is done, reproducing and distributing software is dirt cheap. Machine automation of intellectual tasks will happen far more rapidly and with more brutal results than factory automation ever has.

The Alvin Toffler fantasy of information age prosperity looks more preposterous every day.

philwelch on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> Firstly, we are talking in this thread about intellectual, not physical labour. There's no AI or robot forthcoming that will replace (already brutally underpaid) personal support workers or nurses in nursing homes. Instead it's the higher paying or more satisfying intellectual, artisan, and creative work done by those senior's children that are on the chopping block.

Cool, then we can free up a lot of those workers to do other work.

And it’s not just a matter of nurses and the like. Retirees need food, energy, goods and services just like everyone else; it’s just that they no longer participate in the process of producing those goods and services. Plus, a ton of health care is knowledge work too.

> And in the past a lucky few reskilled towards more intellectual, creative, or informational-managerial jobs. Turns out those will be easier to automate than we thought.

Which is good. Half of the population has an IQ under 100, and there are just as many people with an IQ below 80 as there are above 120. Which means most people can’t reskill to knowledge work. However, the use of AI will allow these people to reskill to productive work just as POS systems allowed people to work as cashiers without the ability to do arithmetic.

The only actual problem you’ve identified is a threat to the egos of knowledge workers whose sense of self-worth lies in their self-perception of having above average intelligence, or perhaps in not having to do any sort of physical labor. Just like the myth of John Henry, we’re going to feel compelled to eulogize the email jobs. Our grandchildren probably won’t pine for the days of open offices and daily standups though.

elforce002 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

100% agreed with you. The more we go down the rabbit hole, the more we see there's no utopia at the of the tunnel.

cmrdporcupine on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

My concern is around the class/income composition of the groups specifically in your group 3, and what kind of political forces their disillusionment and anger unleashes.

There are maybe parallels here to the 20s and early 30s in Europe, an era when there was a similar mass disenfranchisement of professional middle classes ("petit bourgeois"), artisans, and specialists... a corresponding mass anger and disillusionment.

And it was in large part those people who formed the base of the rising authoritarian right-wing / fascist movements in Europe.

It's not the most working class people who will lose the most jobs. There's no AIs coming to take away people's jobs cleaning cafeteria trays and mopping floors. It's paradoxically more expensive to automate manual labour or jobs with a high physical component. Competent meatspace robotics are hard and expensive. For now.

Instead it's people like us, used to a higher-privilege lifestyle, who have withstood the wave of previous automation and de-skilling. We're very expensive. And the people signing our paycheques I'm sure are salivating at the opportunity to de-skill and automate us away.

I hope I'm wrong, but I fear what could happen politically.

amelius on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

Well, I can tell you that the first time I see some sufficiently advanced AI walking in the streets between the public, I will grab my baseball bat and smash it to pieces.

ben_w on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I find it curious that even here there are people who conflate a robot body with an artificial mind.

Sure, you can put the computer running the mind that controls the body into the body itself, and there might even be good reasons to given spotty wifi or mobile data, but you don't have to.

Also: why embody them in human form at all?

https://www.tesla.com/drive

https://www.bostondynamics.com/products/spot

https://www.parrot.com/us/partner-ecosystem (FWIW I've never heard of these before, I just searched for AI drones…)

amelius on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> I find it curious that even here there are people who conflate a robot body with an artificial mind.

You are trying to read things in my comment that are not there. It's _not_ about destroying the actual machine. It's about drawing a line.

ben_w on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> Well, I can tell you that the first time I see some sufficiently advanced AI walking in the streets between the public, I will grab my baseball bat and smash it to pieces.

Describing an AI walking the streets, or smashing it to pieces, necessarily carries with it the implication that the AI is located within a physical body that moves on legs.

And those words you used are very explicitly about destroying an actual machine.

But if you wish to claim that was merely a linguistic turn of phrase not meant to be taken as an implied literal belief of the location of thought? Ok, but it remains the case that what you propose against a "sufficiently advanced" AI, is somewhere between petty vandalism and a pogrom, depending on questions of if "sufficiently advanced" comes as a package deal with "sentience".

Which is a totally different, and in the latter case much more severe, problem.

amelius on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Huh? Of course I understand that they have a backup somewhere. Whether I destroy the CPU or the actuators or some other hardware is not relevant as long as my statement is clear.

codpiece on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

You won't be able to. The aerial drones will take you out long before you reach for the bat.

boplicity on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Yeah, but what if it's just a little canister scrubbing public toilets,trash cans, or something similar. Do you really want to destroy that? Will you even realize what you're seeing?

elforce002 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

You know what's interesting: Your take is somewhat similar to a part of animatrix and even crazier is that I'll vouch for you just because of the sense of tribalism within me, hehe.

number6 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

AIs should have human rights, if we are able to upload our us into computer we need a precedence that post humans are humans too.

ben_w on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Maybe, but a pre-requisite to doing that right, is that we must first understand what this mysterious "consciousness" thing even is.

I can play word games like saying "consciousness" is the opposite of "unconsciousness" (or alternatively and IMO not entirely compatibility that it is the opposite of "subconsciousness"), but every time I've looked at this, it's either ended with (1) circular definitions, (2) definitions that accidentally include VHS players connected to TV set, or (3) things that humans regularly fail at.

None of that actually helps figure out whether or not a machine does or doesn't have that which makes us have the experience of being.

Getting it wrong, in either direction, is a Bad Ending.

https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/06/18/lamda-turin...

somethingreen on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

That's how I see it too. Big neo-luddite movement, anti-AI unions, "AI Free" labeling with corresponding certification, registries of AI users (and witch hunts of course), AIs being weaponized to destroy or corrupt other AIs.

AI providers need to be at the forefront of lobbying for reasonable AI control laws, or they are up for a rude awakening.

elforce002 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

The government needs to regulate ai & tech companies before you have 10x of what's happening in France.

Julesman on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

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 inherently good. Perhaps something valuable will be lost to efficiency and the bottom line. Hopefully something will also be gained.

Let's not be in a hurry to declare implications. And let's try to be helpful.

whateveracct on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

You can still do the old ways. I'm still gonna keep drawing and stuff, myself. I don't really see how the AI actually helps me accomplish my goals on an art or coding front as a gamedev. Where the goal is "make something meaningful and beautiful."

I don't like to shout "philistine" or "luddite" but it feels like all the people excited for these tools were tasteless to begin with and already weren't producing works that meet my bar of consumption. I guess we already knew that about the AAA game industry, for instance.

I guess it always pays to have taste - doubly in an AI-oriented world. The old ways aren't going anywhere imo.

spoiler on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I'm a developer and a hobby artist. So I could br a bit off on the art front.

For development: it's helped me adopt new libraries a bit quicker.

It also helped with generating a first draft of documentation/comments, or to help me iterate on the phrasing of some stuff I over explained, or not explained well enough. It's kinda made me a better writer as a result, since I learned phrasing techniques that I previously didn't.

It's helped me with boring stuff like converting data type syntax between languages.

It's good at doing autocompletion of lines or short snippets. This is a godsend in systems programming, where you type a lot.

It also helped me go from "blank page" projects or task by generating the boilerplate or scaffolding.

It's often times wrong (and sometimes in funny ways), but it's allowed me to focus on the problem domain rather than the supporting and often boring grunt work.

I think an artist probably has similar situations on the job. It wouldn't be a job of everything about it was rainbows and unicorns. Sometimes artists do boring stuff. Why not get that out of the way.

Or if working with really poor requirements on something that's not super interesting to them, maybe they can do rapid reference generation or brainstorming through the theses AI tools.

Or you realised you want to change the colour palette for a part of the scene. Instead of manually fiddling with thr the selection tools, and curves/HSL/filters, just ask the AI to retouching it. Then correct a bit, since it probably won't get it right. So just quicker iterations. I don't think it necessarily hinders the creative process

coffeebeqn on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

In games I think it’s quite clear how it will help. We already do this to a large part with foliage and trees. There is a ton of content that isn’t emotionally important but it needs to simply adhere to the style and sit there in the environment

luckylion on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

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.

Julesman on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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.

luckylion on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> In other words we can embrace the future without being cruel.

That's not "progress is necessary good". We're forming the future, our choices define the future, we're not damned to be powerless and either embrace what cannot be changed or suffer from resisting that which cannot be stopped.

Right now, lots of people are having their first experience that not all progress is necessarily good. It's fun to watch how they suddenly change their tune, much like banks when they need another bailout, and they start talking about "what's good for society" a lot.

> As far as affecting different people, LLMs are about to squish the middle class.

I'll believe it when I see it. We were promised widespread unemployment thanks to robotics, too.

spoiler on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

I know people like to politicise things since it usually creates a simple sense of unity and to gives people a sense of moral superiority. Simple is good. We humans like simple. If we didn't go and simplify things we don't deal with every day our already complicated lives would become too difficult to juggle. Their political compass is generally irrelevant. And there's always people who don't like SOME type of change. Conservatives think trans people are crimes against God; Progressive people think more process and regulation in trans conversations is a sin against humanity. Everyone has it hard.

I'm only mentioning this because it helps to sympathise with every person, not just the ones that agree with you. Life has more flavour when you're not focusing on "us or them"

luckylion on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> Conservatives think trans people are crimes against God

You're mistaking christian fundamentalists for conservatives. Conservatives are saying that changing your name doesn't mean you now get to compete in women's sports.

My point was: "Progress is always good, conservatives need to go" has been touted by the same people for decades, and suddenly they want to change the tune when it affects them. It's predictable and should be ignored.

jeppester on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

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 understands, but that it won't matter much.

All of this is powered by work done by real programmers who are not getting a dime for their effort. That just seems completely unfair to me, and even more so when already insanely rich corporations like MS only stand to gain from it.

I'm not sure I want to be part of it to be honest. It feels dirty and wrong as it works now. Laws might be able to change that, but with a whole industry of giant corporations ready to fight any such laws, I'm not optimistic.

grumbel on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

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 considered problems to begin with. A whole lot of data conversion is no longer necessary when you have an AI that can directly interface with the raw data and manipulate it in whatever format you like.

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?

AI is not just going to write software, AI is going to be the only software you'll ever need. BingChat today is already Photoshop, Shell and Webbrowser all in one. Won't be long until it learns to do most of the rest as well.

The interesting question is: What will be left after all this? If we automate away all the boring parts, what are going to be the bits that provide value? How will the Website of the future look like when AI will be the only one reading them? What's the value of a classic book when AI can write new books in real time? Will anybody bother with video games when they have a Holodeck at home?

quonn on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> 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, to enforce a business process etc. Since they do not believe in answers any individual would give out of the unstructured data, they would also not trust an AI, and rightfully so. ChatGPT is not trustworthy at all and there is currently no path to make it so.

jfengel on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I found that companies are less interested in quality data than one might expect.

I worked in ontologies, focusing on making rigorous schemas for better data quality and easier integration. Our lunch was eaten by schemaless databases and big data. We protested that they wouldn't like what happened years down the line, but it was cheaper to start.

I don't mean to shake my tiny fist or overgeneralize my experience. But I think if AI gives good enough answers enough of the time, with a tiny fraction of the effort, people might just adapt around that model. People would rather have good now than great later. Or even mediocre now.

flippinburgers on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

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.

quonn on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

For frontend - yeah, maybe. Or maybe the frontend becomes much more fancy. I‘ve built complex frontends that took a year or two but could imagine it all in weeks. I would also like to be able to build it in weeks.

tkiolp4 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

I think that’s a simplistic view. Sure thing AI will make a bunch of problems disappear… but do you really think that with all the power of AI, we are going to keep publishing react apps? Golang web servers? Rest APIs? No. We’ll be publishing more sophisticated stuff. And no, AI simply cannot magically do everything (AI today is not the AI we will have in 100 years… unless you think the AI of today is the most we can get from AI)… so in between we (humans) will be working to use AI tooling to fulfill user requirements.

Applejinx on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

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 lot of this 'real programmer work' is not poetry. Someone put together the ideas that make code resonate with how people think (for good or ill) and then a lot of real programmers groveled over tedious Python code or whatever, to make it happen at scale.

That tedious groveling and scale is what took the effort, but it's that which can be replaced by machine learning.

Art is prompt engineering. 'Always has been'. We don't master penmanship in the age of the keyboard. People still buy very expensive pens and write in longhand for the beauty of it, but it ceased to be a requisite chore many years ago.

Value the correct side of the balance. If you can't beat the guy with poorer execution by having a better eye and better prompt-imagining, you're not the better artist, you just have better penmanship.

Same for programmers. Best put your effort into trying to understand… because that's going to be a seller's market. You're right that most people won't keep up with understanding, and that's going to directly set their value.

vasili111 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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.

mattlondon on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

It will probably end up being more "test driven development"-like.

Write your tests/expectations and the tooling automatically prompts/writes the code to meet the tests.

Trasmatta on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

That sounds pretty miserable, because test writing is one of the least fun aspects of my job

loxs on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

My experience with Copilot is the other way around. I spend time writing my types/data structures, my functions, then Copilot tends to easily spit several variations of the test by just me giving it the name of the test.

ModernMech on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

The LLM will write the tests too. Your job would be guiding it.

code_witch_sam on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

why not have a system to write the tests as well?

emoII on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Won't the prompt itself be the test? TDD is literally just providing an expected output on a given input, before implementing the functionality. The prompt we give AIs follows the same pattern, "I have a data that looks like ___, visualize it in a graph that ____"

rhn_mk1 on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

I agree with the loss of understanding being a bad thing, but I cannot mourn the loss of creativity.

Programming is a core part of our society and infrastructure, yet it's still one like a craft rather than engineering. Creativity should not be part of infrastructure efforts on a level beyond embellishments and experiments.

krona on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> Creativity should not be part of infrastructure efforts on a level beyond embellishments and experiments.

You could say the same about architecture, but only modern architects think that way, because they were brainwashed by fashion.

rhn_mk1 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I do say the same about architecture, but with added nuance: the Sagrada Familia is creative in form, but not in function. It functions as a regular cathedral (or at least an art museum). The creativity is there, but it is subservient to the basic functional goals of structural integrity and fitness for humans to visit it.

Applejinx on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Buckminster Fuller is creativity. Geodesic domes, tensegrity.

Failing to understand that is evidence you can be replaced by an AI that encompasses all of what's ALREADY known and understood.

The reality is, we're looking at an arms race between imagination and execution. And just implementing that which we already know is profoundly devalued in the age of machine-assisted intelligence.

ModernMech on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

People thought the same about OOP when it was new. The promise was that programming would turn more into factory work. You’d get a spec for a component, implement it, then move onto the next. How soul crushing!

iLoveOncall on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

> prompt engineering

Sounds like coding to me.

ben_w on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Not from my current experience.

I'm intending to try it out a lot more — perhaps turn my old Java/OpenGL desktop shareware games into browser based JavaScript freeware — but so far, it's like messaging a junior dev and having them write code for you: 98% of the code works fine, 2% is total rubbish that you spend a normal amount of time (i.e. ages) debugging.

JanneVee on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

> 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 understands, but that it won't matter much.

Really? If you have a million dollar bug because of one edge case and you are going to go to your AI and ask it to try again?

jeppester on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I think that's going to be a very likely scenario. And the AI will very likely be able to fix the issue.

I just don't want to work that way, as what I enjoy most about programming is understanding things.

JanneVee on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Then you are in the wrong space of programming if you want to continue working. AI will improve over time and the scenario I described is going to be a thing of the past, but it won't go as fast as people expect because it is a question of trust and saving that hypotetical money by actually doing the work or at least understanding the output of AI.

I've experimented with both Copilot and GPT and I've gotten some nasty UB and even known security issues. Just looking at some of the GPT output lacking exceptions and errors checking that is clearly trained on tutorials. It will improve over time but currently it is not as good as people say it is.

autophagian on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

I've had experience lately of getting GPT4 to output some code, I notice there's a bug, I point out the bug (not even 'it's at this line with this variable', but just that it exists) and, yes, it does fix successfully fix it. So, yes, I think that's likely.

JanneVee on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Well that required you to understand the code. My reply is disbelief off codebases that no one understands in the near term when looking at the current output. People don't trust the output and do what you did, review it and catch the potential bug before going further with it.

The issue take with it is that we are able to trust the output of AI models as we trust the output of optimizing compilers. It isn't even close that we can just fire and forget the prompt like I can code up something and trust that it 99,999% the optimizer produces the desired binary that works as intended.

Waterluvian on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

I saw AI as a tool like Photoshop, and for that reason wasn’t buying all this anxiety. I still see it as a tool, but this post has changed my entire perception of the issue:

It’s not that a new tool will replace you. It’s that a new tool might be too compelling to avoid, but be boring and miserable to work with and suck the joy out of your craft.

29083011397778 on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

> I am now able to create, rig and animate a character thats spit out from MJ in 2-3 days. Before, it took us several weeks in 3D

Sounds like one artist in that studio is being let go, considering the studio is now getting work done dramatically faster. It'll probably be the guy with the (IMO understandable) "poor attitude" about what the job has become.

Even if you think the studio will simply output more art, they either need to find financially-viable uses for six times as much art, or let go of an artist - because if they just start using three times as much, that's still only enough work for one of the two artists.

chii on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

> be boring and miserable to work with and suck the joy out of your craft

you don't have to use the tool - just don't complain that you're not as competitive commercially as someone else who does.

If the craft is what you enjoy, then do it apart from the craft's commercial utility. Make it a separate part of your life - use the AI in your job, and don't use it in your spare time doing art for joy.

nirvdrum on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Humans are allowed to be upset when their lives and livelihoods are upended. "Suck it up" doesn't really help anyone. We shouldn't accept maximizing profitability as the only worthwhile outcome.

I'm a developer. I really hope my day doesn't end up being code review of shitty Copilot generated code because the person accepting the prompt did have the knowledge or care to check it themselves. Sure, I'd still be valuable and I'd still get paid, but I'd be miserable. At least until that skill is no longer needed. Or someone can do it for cheaper.

Setting aside I have other responsibilities outside of work that really don't leave much time for side projects, about the last thing I want to do is work on personal code projects just so they can be sucked up by Copilot. Not to mention I'm also supposed to allocate time to learn a new skill so I can be competitive in a new, rapidly shrinking job market.

protonbob on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Some people like getting fulfillment in their work and their spare time.

kybernetyk on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

>but be boring and miserable to work with and suck the joy out of your craft.

like javascript

Waterluvian on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

JS has become a delightful language. Doubly so if you use TS, which is surprisingly trivial to learn and begin integrating.

DaiPlusPlus on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

But it’s thanks to JS that we have TypeScript

Yabood on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

I think its both. Per OP, the process of producing their art no longer takes weeks when using AI, therefore, less people will be needed.

stemlord on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Not only that, but it's just fully not their art anymore, it's an approximation based on large-scale data scraping

sysstem on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

One could argue that their art is also not theirs but it's based on the art they have seen before throughout their life. It makes you reflect on what's really 100% original, as the saying if you want to make an apple pie from scratch...

jay_kyburz on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

But come on, how it moving polygons around and snapping verts together really all that fun.

Bringing characters and worlds to life is what artists really dream about, and AI tools make that easier.

Tesl on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

You know, I was finding this whole thread really depressing and starting to feel somewhat concerned about the impact AI was going to have on my own projects / future.

But actually this is a great point. You are right. Even in software development, the joy is building something excellent. The joy isn't usually in defining random util functions to help you get there.

With these advances we could be about to reach a point where extremely small groups of people could build phenomenal things. How nice it would be to be capable of building AAA games with a team of 2-3 people.

idiotsecant on March 25, 2023 | prev | next [–]

There were no doubt quite a few nail makers pre-industrial revolution that took pride in making consistent, quality nails. That work was utterly and completely obliterated by the industrial revolution. There may be a few remaining nail makers, producing nails with an extremely niche design, but not many. So goes those jobs our lifetime as well

sportslife on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

To complete this idea, old nails are better at holding than modern nails in at least some applications and are required for some restoration work. I remember reading (but can't find) a church-restoration project report mentioning it, but more can be read here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30421682

nirvdrum on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

What's the solution when so much knowledge work is upended at once? When manufacturing jobs were lost, we callously told people to go to college to learn to learn IT. Whether it's art, code, marketing, or other applied knowledge work, there's a mad dash to reshape all of those. And the sales pitch isn't that it's going to let us work less and equitably reap the rewards of productivity (well, I suppose if you lose your job you get to work less). It's that as a business you can do more with less to increase profitability. Quality might take a hit, but there's an inflection point for that. If sales drop but you reduce your labor costs enough, you still come out ahead.

What field are all of these nail makers supposed to switch to this time?

juvvel on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

This is what I wonder as well. We are told to "prepare" for the reality of AI taking our jobs soon, but how? What is the alternative field that will be a) safe from automation for a while and b) pay similarly to a CS/IT career? I haven't found the answer to this. We were told to get a higher education and go into "white collar" fields, and now we're told we were stupid for believing that these jobs would have a future. Seems very cynical.

scotty79 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Universal basic income is always the answer. Since progress bringsuch unpredictability to labor market we need to detach survival from labor so people can survive while they are figuring the stuff out.

_oghd on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

universal basic income is not sustainable in the same way minimum wage was not sustainable, looking as how even $15/hr isn't enough to cover rent basically anywhere where they actually pay $15/hr.

scotty79 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> 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 because they would no longer fear they'll become destitute if they risk not being able to get a job in cheaper place.

zajio1am on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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.

scotty79 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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.

zajio1am on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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%.

scotty79 on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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.

Kelamir on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Universal basic rent :)

whitemary on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

More like Universal Basic Capital

jatins on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

In a world where AI makes most of the things/services, wouldn't everything be so cheap that most people can afford it on something like UBI?

zokier on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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

revelio on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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.

medvezhenok on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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.

7speter on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Not when all the marine life dies off because the oceans are too acidic and wrecks all sorts of havoc on above land eco systems.

jatins on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

...how does the Marine Life die in this scenario?

7speter on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Which scenario are you referring to? The one where everything is cheap because of ai or because the acidic oceans?

Various sea organisms rely on calcium carbonate for the formation of their shells and bones. If the water is too acidic there less calcium carbonate in the water…

7speter on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Oh and what Im getting at is that things like food don’t necessarily have to be cheap because “ai” produces goods. Ecological collapse can make essentials expensive regardless of who produces the goods.

e63f67dd-065b on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

I think a better analogy is that pre-photography there were many portrait drawers who took pride in drawing good portraits for their clients. Then photography came, and the entire industry died a sudden and miserable death.

Portraits still get drawn, but not many, and certainly not for the sake of preserving what somebody looks like.

7speter on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

There were a lot more opportunities available when photography took over from portrait drawing than Amazon fulfillment centers

ruszki on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

There are still companies which provides you consistent, quality nails. Just ordinary nails without niche design. They still have to use manual labour to check and investigate each nail one-by-one. Of course, you won’t get those in your local hardware shop, and they are terribly expensive. The difference compared to old times is, that they still sell the cheap Chinese nails, they just add a layer of very expensive quality control.

readthenotes1 on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

Back in the day, I'd call in someone from the secretarial pool to take this sentence down and type it in for me...

gumby on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

The Unabomber was notable for manufacturing his own screws, so I'm not sure how many artisanal nail makers remain. In those days nails were re-used, it was such a pain to make them.

LegitShady on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

there are still companies that make cut or square nails - and machines that make them are old.

gumby on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Sure, but they are made by machines.

pkdpic on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

This is a tragic disappointment a lot of (if not most (if not an overwhelming majority (if not literally all))) artists experience at some point early or late in their professional careers.

I taught art for a long time and I would always try to frame this inevitable experience as an important moment of growth. When you have to form a deeper relationship to your creative work and think strategically about how you want to support yourself long term.

There's no getting around it, it's really hard seeing what this is doing to visual artists. The few of us that could find good work doing what we love...

8f2ab37a-ed6c on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

What's an analogy in the software world to this sort of tragic disappointment? Going from building fun videogame side projects to having to crank out dozens of over-engineered B2B SaaS microservices, for the sake of job security, for yet another sales workflow optimization tool?

_oghd on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

yes.

instead of spending weeks thinking about and designing some sweet algorithm Knuth himself would be proud of, you write the same CRUD app with the same design patterns.

Aeolun on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> the same CRUD app with the same design patterns

The same —hilariously inefficient— design patterns.

lowbloodsugar on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

That's the change in perspective. They are inefficient from a CPU point of view. They are efficient from the perspective of "churning out more shit for less". So it's the same, soul destroying effect as for artistic professions.

pkdpic on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

I too am anxiously trying to imagine what the software dev version of this will be... Sweating it out at every sprint meeting and stand-up...

mike_hearn on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

There's been a bunch of similar transitions, perhaps less massive. You see the echos of them occasionally when you read people getting upset about the poor performance/resource usage of modern software. A hacker was once someone who could write assembly and packed an entire graphical operating system into 4mb of RAM. Nowadays a hacker is someone who knows what useEffect does in a ReactJS UI. The people who loved the metal, who loved knowing what every byte of their program did, they are mostly relegated now to hobby programming. Or maybe some embedded work but that's not particularly well paying. SerenityOS is a love letter to this era of development.

lowbloodsugar on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Or even just going from writing video games by yourself, getting to do all of it (graphics, "AI", design), to being one of a hundred programmers churning out the latest version of some "AAA" title. I now work at a FAANG, and in many ways, it is more rewarding. I'd love to be part of a five person indie studio making great games but it is a fucking lottery and my kid is heading off to college.

lunfard000 on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

in the other hand this will enable developers without art skills to produce their indie games with a professional-looking art on their own.

csours on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

I used to have a job I liked. That job went away in the name of efficiency. I can't even disagree with the analysis - the old way was less efficient. It still sucks to lose something that you enjoy doing and that helps the team.

I'm doing fine, I went from specialized tech support to software development; but when we talk about efficiency, we are talking about people's lives.

nbzso on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

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 design. Personalization of UX by data based generative interfaces. So even the flow and journey mapping will be automated soon (UX researchers, hello).

For me, this is the end of an era of innovation driven by human creativity. You will have a data scientist and secretary, which will prompt all day the "boss" vision.

A.I. art is not art. I will give you a simple example: Who will be the creator of the famous David sculpture? Michelangelo or the rich patron who gave the description of the task? According to the definition of A.I. "art" the patron is the artist.

So in this scenario, the art becomes a commodity generated without human touch and personal expression. Just a synthetic membrane of average results trained on stolen data and genius intellectual property laundering machine.

Personally, my decision is to capitalize the remains of an industry and detach myself from any form of metaverse interactions. I started to paint recently again and don't give any F* about commercial viability of the process. If people of the future want to live in A.I. induced corporate coma, so be it.

raincole on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

> A.I. art is not art. I will give you a simple example: Who will be the creator of the famous David sculpture? Michelangelo or the rich patron who gave the description of the task? According to the definition of A.I. "art" the patron is the artist.

No? What are you even talking about? AI is not a person. In every single legal and ethicical discussion, "human" and "non-human" are treated completely differently. AI is a tool, while Michelangelo isn't.

Who's the creator of David sculpture is completely unrelated to whether AI art is art or not.

falsaberN1 on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

"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.

nbzso on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Sorry, the idea that artists are synthesizers of the past art is ludicrous. The human is not the machine. There are a billion factors for interpretation in creating a personal style. The A.I. image generators are just machines which produce average from all previous artists. They have no personality or agency (yet).

> Stable Diffusion trained its algorithm on data sets collected by the German nonprofit LAION, which has collected billions of captioned images from art shopping sites and websites such as Pinterest.

And it has done so without consent, causing artists and advocates to raise copyright concerns.

https://bit.ly/3FU4OSa

lowbloodsugar on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

>a billion factors

precisely.

precompute on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

> A.I. art is not art.

It isn't human-generated art. It would also be difficult to really label the generating process as a process that generates "art". I'd rather only label the end result as "art" for people that think it qualifies. It's the same as not considering photography as art. How many photographers actively contribute to camera technology? Or how many people that have worked on camera tech can profess to be actual photographers? Very, very few for either case. It's similar for prompting for an image. It's a "skill", the same way photography is a "skill". You'd be hard-pressed 20 years ago to take pictures of a quality consistent with a high-end DSLR today. Yet are people today "better" photographers just because they own better cameras? Or is an "AI Artist" a "better" AI artist because image generation got better, and / or he got a much better model (seeing how the quality of diffusion-based image generation wholly depends upon the model being used, and not so much upon prompt tuning)?

> I will give you a simple example: Who will be the creator of the famous David sculpture? Michelangelo or the rich patron who gave the description of the task? According to the definition of A.I. "art" the patron is the artist.

Yes, and I hope that changes, but it won't as long as there is monetary incentive for companies to shell out models. Genuine human contribution to the models will also decrease exponentially, because everything that could be mined has already been. They can make small gains with labelling but the rest is a hard ceiling.

Attribution is very finicky right now because there's some effort involved in generating those images. If it was completely effortless (with a UI that labeled it as such) and gave sources / similar images, you could stop calling it "art", and instead just plain old machine-based image generation.

jstummbillig on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

> I started to paint recently again and don't give any F* about commercial viability of the process.

That is an affordance a lot of people have to be granted now.

fintechie on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

> A.I. art is not art.

IMO you can certainly output art, code, etc from AIs. AI as a new kind of productivity tool, a very powerful one.

nbzso on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Just yesterday, I gave the ChatGPT prompts to generate Midjourney prompts. It transformed a simple sentence of "Portrait of beautiful woman on the beach with yellow dress." to the specific output of prompts with different lenses and lighting setups generated with astonishing results. My input in the process was minimal. No compositional skills or artistic taste. Powerful tool? Yes. Productivity is not an Artistic measure. Transitional value and personal expression is. But hey, be productive while you can.

462436347 on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

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 under a permissive, share-alike license, they're helping to train an AI that will eventually compete with them for their job, they will not only be less inclined to share it (under a permissive license or not), but be less inclined to produce it at all.

kmeisthax on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

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 with no AI assistance, another artist using AI as a tool can make three. They start off with a prompt in DALL-E, SD, or Midjourney, and then tweak the output with prompts and so on to get exactly what they want quicker.

Now imagine a non-artist using the same technology. They don't care about the touchups. They just want to churn out lots of pieces all at once. So that would be nine times more output compared to the unassisted human - three times three. And there are plenty of them doing this, because they all watched the same video on how you can hustle T-shirt and poster stores by submitting lots of AI-generated pieces.

The reason why you are seeing art sites ban AI art is purely a matter of practicality. Many of those spaces are able to provide free promotion to people who post quality content because quality is itself a limited resource. Now the human trying to make their magnum opus - AI or no - is going to be buried under lots of low-effort garbage from zombie modernist grifters.

cageface on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I think it's fair to say that what this current generation of AI enables is cheaply generating a limitless amount of content of not great but acceptable quality.

And I think you're exactly right that this is going to make it extremely difficult for the great stuff out there to rise to the surface. It's going to be suffocated.

_lx4l on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

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.

odood on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

I believe you are spot on.

We are already seeing the same result of LLMs, with sci-fi magazines (temporarily) no longer accepting submissions and self-publication platforms such as Amazon's being flooded with auto-generated crap.

Hustle culture is part of it, but only one part of what I believe will be a negative outcome for society.

As AI systems display inherent bias, and it is possible to train for that bias (e.g. RightwingGPT), we have essentialy weaponized content generation, and we have no scaleable mechanisms such as fact checking to combat it.

Whether it is low-quality work, spam, disinformation, outright manipulation, copyright violations, or other forms of negative results, we have automated the ability to produce it.

7speter on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I’ve been shuddering to think what this will do to search engines for the last few weeks

Gigachad on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

This is insignificant. The training set already exists. And there are plenty who do not care about having data used for training.

lunfard000 on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

Let's not pretend that is just altruism why people "open-source" their art or code. Most of them do it to get noticed.

anon7725 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

The benefits of openness compound irrespective of the motivations of creators.

lunfard000 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

you could argue that this LLM's will benefit more users than the produced value itself lost on sea of SEO garbage. But my point is that the openness wont stop because people will still need to show their craft for better employment opportunities.

juujian on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

From all I have learned about ChatGPT coding copilots, this is going to be bleak. Similar art styles. No sudden surprises. Eerily familiar characters. I don't like the look of this. More reason to cherish hand-drawn/hand-animated (?) unique works though.

muyuu on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

Generally speaking, whatever output people can do, generative AI can do to the point you wouldn't be able to tell it apart.

xdennis on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Except for the hands.

If you're familiar with the Rick and Morty "what is my purpose" meme ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sa9MpLXuLs0 ), it will essentially be the same for humanity in the future.

Humanity: "What is my purpose?"

Robot: "You draw the hands."

Humanity, with existential dread: "Oh my god..."

muyuu on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

that is technical minutia that will improve before artists relying on that hurdle saving their job have time to sign up for the dole

don't get me wrong, I have sympathy for everybody who for whatever reason sees their livelihood endangered overnight through no fault of their own and with little time to adapt

but I perceive a lot of denial:

- denial that "it could not/would not happen to me"

- denial that this rate of change is not rather unprecedented, "it was always thus" kind of denial

- denial that just because a certain niche won't be quickly automated, it follows that this job is safe or that a general reshaping of that general industry won't happen, changing the incentive structure massively

- denial that a second order effects may get you; so you can now automate some expensive part of your process? that also means the barrier of entry for the competition is lower and whatever competitive advantage you had in that process is now gone. Sure, embrace the efficiency but keep adapting because the only thing sure after those changes is that your industry will experience some "creative destruction"

nullsense on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

I think the point is it's not going to suddenly give us surprises like Banksy shredding art.

maxdoop on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

How do you know it won’t? I don’t mean to sound like a doomer , but I never see evidence for these claims around “AI not ever being creative like a human!”

These AI’s are literally trained on all of human creativity… i struggle to see how there’s any indication AI would fail to be as creative as a human in even the near-ish future.

NhanH on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

They aren’t trained on all of human creativity. Most of human communication is verbal, and that still isn’t captured. I am not saying whether it will have much difference, just that your statement is factually wrong.

maxdoop on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I used “all” instead of “most”, which is indeed inaccurate. A better response would have been “a collection of humanity’s creativity”.

However, you fail to recognize that OpenAI also created Whisper, which is a quote capable speech-to-text transcriber; and this tool easily converts audio and video (those verbal bits you mentioned) into text.

So the pool of creativity which OpenAI can train its models on is far larger than just original text; further, they demoed image modality a couple weeks back which would allow for VISUAL creative works to be parsed as well.

NhanH on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I understand your points, but what I wanted to highlight was something slightly different: verbal communication and dialogs should still consists of magnitude more human conversation than text, or presentation, or basically anything digital.

maxdoop on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Apologies, I’m maybe low on coffee this morning.

Do you mean things like tone, facial expression, the general “energy” around a conversation, etc?

NhanH on March 28, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

It's simpler even: there are conversations that are straight up never happen in writings. So by training only on written text, you will never got those conversations. For example: teacher - student conversation where one side is confused and need to be explained, or many kind of debates and discussions where there is no end conclusion.

Basically, pick a random human from the street and they would be talking and listening a lot more than they would be writing. Those talking and listening is never going to be captured by any digital system.

It might end up that written text has enough similarity with verbal communication that it doesn't matter anyway. But that's hard to guess as a priori that it would be the case.

lowbloodsugar on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Quite the opposite. AI will be better at learning "what surprises" humans than humans because it won't be filtered by a human going "oh, that wouldn't surprise me" (because you just thought of it, idiot). Now imagine a million, a billion "banksy" "surprise" pieces. This is the future.

And the future is now, of course, because there are tons of such artists and the value comes only from the elite who ascribe value and not some inherent value of the thing itself. Things are important ("worth money") because tasteless fucks with money say they are worth money. Go watch "The Menu". Ralph Fiennes face cooking the last meal says it all.

raincole on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Artists who are hired by film/game studios have nothing to do with what Banksy is doing.

paxys on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

> I am now able to create, rig and animate a character thats spit out from MJ in 2-3 days. Before, it took us several weeks in 3D. The difference is: I care, he does not. For my boss its just a huge time/money saver.

This is the crux of it. The bottom line is that you are free to practice your craft and love it, but don't expect a company to pay you big bucks for it for no reason when they can find cheaper and better ways to accomplish the task. Automation eating away jobs (including ones that had a quality of romanticism associated with them) has been a constant in human history, and it is silly to expect that it won't apply to you for whatever reason.

miohtama on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

I posted this earlier today

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35301727

“The Death of a Technical Skill”

The case study what happened when Adobe Flash died and how the job market was affected. With AI this will happen for many more industry verticals.

Johnny555 on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

And his work isn’t even much better:

>I am angry. My 3D colleague is completely fine with it. He promps all day, shows and gets praise. The thing is, we both were not at the same level, quality-wise. My work was always a tad better, in shape and texture, rendering

No company is going to spend 5X more time on work that is a “tad” better.

teg4n_ on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

You misunderstand. They were comparing their quality with their coworker’s before AI started to be used.

Izkata on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

You missed the part right above it:

> However its hard to see, results are better than my work.

markles on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

The lack of empathy the HN community has really shines through in many of these replies:

> There were no doubt quite a few nail makers pre-industrial revolution that took pride in making consistent, quality nails.

> And nothing of value have been lost.

> LOL at the reply a couple posts down, where OP admits they work at a mobile shovelware sweatshop.

wsc981 on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

Yesterday I visited an old, but still reasonably healthy man who has been living in Thailand for 40 years now, maybe longer. Reasonably healthy as in: he doesn't need to visit hospital or use medicine, but his power is now waning a bit due to age.

A man originally from Switzerland. 88 years old now. When he arrived in Thailand he bought a nice plot of land and made a quite beautiful garden there, with many fruits and vegetables and trees. Also many salas spread throughout the 8000 m2 terrain. And chickens, dogs, cats walking around and about.

The man has had quite an adventurous live in the past, back when the world was more adventurous as well, perhaps ...

Anyway, the man is content just tending to his plants. And reading and writing in one of the salas that he uses as a (kind of) outdoor office. In the past he also used to paint, but he's not able to do this anymore.

Maybe we'd all be happier with just a nice plot of land and some plants to tend to and perhaps some hobbies to keep us busy. And maybe it would keep us healthier (both mentally as well as physically) as well.

johnwalkr on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

What's your point? Many people would be happy if they are lucky enough to be born in a wealthy country and save a bunch of money by the time they're 48 and retire, move to a poorer country and be happy tending a garden. Not many people are this lucky and it will be harder going forward as such desirable cheap places are becoming less cheap rapidly, and less accessible. "Golden visas" in such places are under scrutiny as they are just driving up real estate prices with little benefit to locals.

biztos on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Also foreigners can’t own land in Thailand, so while I hope the Swiss gentleman has many more years of happiness, it was never his garden, which might be a turnoff to the techno-libertarians out there.

wsc981 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Not 100% true, foreigners can own up to 1 rai (1600 m2) once they gain citizenship (which takes a bit of effort and a lot of time).

biztos on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

My working definition of “foreigner” excludes Thai citizens, though maybe it’s more subtle than that: I didn’t know naturalized citizens were subject to ownership limits.

stemlord on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

I won't be able to afford a plot of land without a job. I feel like we're on the verge of cataclysmic unemployment and I have absolutely no desire to wait in squalor for legislation to catch up with the nifty little UBI idea floating around which seems like should have been sorted yesterday.

bryanlarsen on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

An acre of farmland costs $2000 in North Dakota. You need 5000 of them to make a living growing wheat, but an acre should be enough to feed a family, maybe a few more if you want meat.

CydeWeys on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Being a subsistence farmer is terrible though. There's a reason 99% of Americans stopped doing it just as soon as they were able to. It's certainly not a comfortable retirement!

PragmaticPulp on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Whenever somebody claims it would be easy to feed a family from some small farmland, it’s very clear that they’ve never had to live anywhere near that lifestyle. It’s terribly difficult and unpredictable.

Aeolun on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

50-70 bushels of wheat per acre. $7.5 dollars per bushel of wheat.

Still, every year you’d have like 2 tons of wheat from your acre. You’d be able to live on that, even if your diet is a bit colorless.

wsc981 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

I think growing a single crop is risky, makes it harder to be self-reliant. My girlfriend grows many different fruits and vegetables, so we’re less bothered by the price changes each season or year. And we can be sure our own food includes a lot of organic produce.

kcb on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Nature destroys crops = dead?

7speter on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Yesterday? Everyday since 2020 people on here and every other forum on the internet have been blaming the $1200 check for bringing on the apocalypse

SECProto on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

> Maybe we'd all be happier with just a nice plot of land and some plants to tend to and perhaps some hobbies to keep us busy.

And enough money saved up to buy land in Thailand and retire at 48, without worrying about how he's going to pay for taxes for the rest of his life, or how he will buy food to supplement what he's growing in case of issues there, or...

RDaneel0livaw on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

"Maybe we'd all be happier with just a nice plot of land and some plants to tend to and perhaps some hobbies to keep us busy. And maybe it would keep us healthier (both mentally as well as physically) as well. "

And where is the fantasy world where "we all" have enough money for this?

coffeebeqn on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Also you forget that there are 8 billion people who would need some acres of arable land

wsc981 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

I don’t think huge wealth is needed, but it very much depends where you buy the land. Coastal land or land near big cities will be much more expensive than land in a remote village.

blackoil on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

This romantic affair works only for rich. Pretty sure the man also has maids, support staff and vendors working for him.

wsc981 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

He has not, but has a wife and daughter. Possibly other kids. I did not get the impression from him that he was rich, but he did get lucky to buy a large plot of land for cheap due to:

A) living in a remote village

B) Currency conversion

The house itself was also pretty cheap, being a traditional Thai wooden house and not particularly huge.

patja on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Sounds like the conclusion of Candide. When confronted by the misery of Pangloss' best of all possible worlds, we must cultivate our garden.

rcpt on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

No. God no are you kidding? Subsistence farming? We did that for thousands of years it was horrible.

JeremyNT on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Sadly, we are not headed to such a future. The economic benefits of these LLMs will go only to the capitalists, and any labor savings will allow them to reduce wages and headcount while leaving workers unemployed or with less bargaining power.

AI will be yet another tool to further wealth inequality. We won't be able to afford retiring and tending to our plants.

chriscappuccio on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Solution: be a capitalist

borissk on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

This is a solution that will work for a very small percentage of the people - those who were born in rich families and those who are a lot more driven and/or smarter and/or luckier than the average.

What about the other 99%? As they say a revolution is three missed meals away...

kmeisthax on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

/r/stablediffusion is arguably worse. Lots of people on there who have active disdain for any human (non-AI-assisted) artists who complain about AI.

It's like watching 17th-century Parliament winge about machine breakers.

scotty79 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> It's like watching 17th-century Parliament winge about machine breakers.

It's really hard to avoid this because nearly everything about it the same each time.

sheepscreek on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

All is not lost. I am sure many of us do care. I feel the frustration and pain of the OP. And I am someone not easily swayed by emotions.

The shift that’s happening right now will have far reaching consequences. I often ask myself “at what cost”, but one can ask that question for any major invention in history.

the_only_law on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

Wait till more developers are being affected and their pie in the sky ideas about the future don’t come true. I promise you the tune they’re singing will instantly change.

drowsspa on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Yeah, clearly developers think they will come out on top...

CommanderData on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

It frightens me but some are just devoid of the ability to be empathic, even if it's to be empathic against their future selves.

People really do argue themselves aggressively into points that exploit themselves without any benefit.

Hnrobert42 on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

I think you are seeing what you want to see. When I read your nail maker quote, it did seem bad. When I read the full comment, it seems much more sympathetic.

rcoveson on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

The first one is a little unoriginal (but this conversation has been had a bunch so it's hard to fault it for that). The second two we were all working on downvoting and had them near-invisible until you quoted them, restoring their reach. :P

anigbrowl on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

Very true. Much as I like AI on the technical side, I also look forward to the howls of outrage when some large model comes for the smug squad. coding, trading, management are all eminently replaceable skillsets.

barrysteve on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

He doesn't need empathy. He needs to find a way through to a better advantage over AI. I'll give him compassion as he struggles through.

Creating static images (that do not require a significant amount of visual depth and perspective) is a dead art form. The market will accept flat looking images as long as they're drowning in detail, and AI can generate that.

I'm taking a stab at what's next, he needs to (take a stab too) and skip over the loss of love for an out-of-date computing skill.

the_only_law on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> I'm taking a stab at what's next

And what does your crystal ball tell you that is?

ChatGTP on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

I’m a world where you have no “value” you become trash to those who “do business”, it won’t be a pretty transition. I’m concerned about it personally.

It wouldn’t be a problem if most people just respected each other, I think deep down inside they do. But while those paying our “wages” are an important part of our lives, we’ll have trouble.

jeeeb on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

I suspect this isn’t much different from the direction software development is headed.

You can either find satisfaction in the process or the outcome. The process can already be fairly mundane and will become more so with time.

A couple of other random thoughts:

1. Currently, these things work best (really need) an operator experienced in the craft. Ironically by eliminating entry level positions they may make it hard for new developers to gain that experience and enter the industry. Instead the entire industry may become one of increasingly aged SEs prompting LLMs to update code, and (occasionally) auditing the output. Somewhat akin to the COBOL developers of today.

2. If we really do get AGI then the marginal value of creative output (be it software or 3d art or otherwise) will be driven to zero. It will be so cheap to produce that competitors will easily arise.

anon7725 on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

> 1. Currently, these things work best (really need) an operator experienced in the craft.

I guess the question is: how long does the intermediate state of super-powered developers last?

a_bonobo on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

>The thing is, we both were not at the same level, quality-wise. My work was always a tad better, in shape and texture, rendering… I always was very sure I wouldn’t loose my job, because I produce slightly better quality.

One thing I had to learn the hard way in programming: it doesn't matter how good my code is or how modern the framework is, what counts is results delivered to the customer. Any newbie can outperform me in that regard.

andrewstuart on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

Maybe it's a bit like professional software development where developers no longer get to create products, they just are code monkeys that complete tickets that are specified to the Nth degree and there's no creativity or fun and indeed if you do anything except what's on the ticket then you'll have to answer for it.

If you are a developer who loves the art and craft of creation then you have to do that at home.

Work is just being a cog in an agile machine.

jackblemming on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

On the other side of the fence, I'm extremely grateful tools like Copilot can automate the mundane process of looking up magic incantations to get some (usually poor) library to do what I want. I have no sympathy for programmers who saw it as a point of pride to memorize hundreds of built in functions and annoying minutiae.

kranner on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

Knowledge of annoying minutiae can be indispensable when you're trying to debug code that looks like it's calling the right functions based on the function signature.

culi on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

This seems like a poor use of Copilot. At least in the JS ecosystem, pretty much every library has TypeScript support now. No need to guess or look anything up. Copilot can still be wrong, especially if the API changes over different updates

In my experience Copilot's value add is simply autocompleting simple/boiler-plate-y lines for me. Definitely wouldn't wanna trust something as fuzzy as an AI to "memorize" APIs on my behalf

superb-owl on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

I can empathize. I've been using Copilot inside of neovim, and it's frighteningly good. It feels like it's reading my mind.

In a few years, a lot of us will be just be writing highly specific Jira tickets instead of doing the hard logic of coding.

dilyevsky on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

I mean I’m using it (also nvim). It’s powerful autocomplete, speeds me up by maybe 20-30% when in “typing in code” phase and that’s that. Dont see it replacing software engs any time soon. SWE+copilot will replace just SWE tho that one is for sure

nullsense on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

Don't even need to write the Jira tickets.

tlocke on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

We've created a society where there are such things as 'jobs' and unless you're rich, you need a job to support yourself and maybe a family. I think this model of society worked reasonably well for a while, but with AI we're coming to the end of that era.

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.

Back to the case of the 3D artist, in this new era she won't need to have a job to support herself, and she will have the freedom to create her art as she wishes.

throwawaylinux on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

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 the way you imagine. We live like aristocrats today. We live in vast mansions that have hot running water, electricity, refrigeration, heating and cooling, lighting, we have servants bring us gluttonous feasts whenever we like, we careen around in our horseless carriages and flying machines. We laze around many hours of the day wasting time on frivolities like watching TV, playing computer games, reading books, drinking and taking drugs, etc. We have armies of doctors and security at our disposal if we should break a leg or even get a sniffle.

So we live better than kings did 200 years ago.

Life might get better for the average commoner in another 200 years. There will still be the haves and have nots though. People with a lot of wealth won't want to share it with others, and people with less will be envious of those with more, that's the constant in the human condition.

Nobody with the robots is going to give money to a bunch of hippies to laze around. If they want a piece of it they'll have to either work to create it themselves or to take it by force. Either way it won't come for free.

mongol on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> 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.

throwawaylinux on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> Do you think the lion's job is to hunt? And the zebra's job is to eat grass?

Yes. Difficult, cruel, and brutal jobs. Few people would choose to change places with them.

> A job is something you do in exchange for something else as payment.

Broader term is something you do to get your bread. Working for yourself, cooperating and exchanging with others, are all jobs.

You can go out on your own and start a business, it's not insurmountable, everyone from a street vendor to a corner shop to a farmer to Apple has done it. It's something that many can choose to do if they wish, but many choose not to. Can't avoid that by nitpicking semantics.

tlocke on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

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 :-)

throwawaylinux on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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.

tlocke on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

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 said, 'yeah right, nice idea but of course it'll never happen'.

jvidalv on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Are you aware that is not the rich people who sustain the state and thus 99% of its income, but the middle class right?

That's why politicians who campaign with ideas like "taxing the rich to fix X problem" are pure populist bullshit. You are the one who is gonna end up paying more.

First there are not enough rich people compared to commoners, and second, they can and will hide their money if possible and worth it.

So in the UK as in any other state, what did and is providing "free" education is your money and the money of the ones like you in the middle and upper-middle class.

tlocke on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Surely it's true to say that in the UK some people simply couldn't afford to send their children to school, but now every child can attend school regardless of their parents' wealth?

medvezhenok on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

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.

throwawaylinux on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

> 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 said, 'yeah right, nice idea but of course it'll never happen'.

And yet you ask people today and they'll moan about never having had it worse, boomers this and billionaires that (or tories I guess, I don't know what the equivalent go-to brainless insult is over there).

Not that there aren't valid reasons for complaint, but as I said envy (and greed) is a fundamental part of the human condition. I don't know why people think some utopia is just around the corner -- we've had thousand-fold multipliers in production. Fossil fuels, internal combustion, farming and construction machinery, factories, chemicals, computers, industrial robots, electricity. From pre-historic farmers and hunter gatherers to now production has increased unimaginably. The utopia never comes because that was never what was preventing it.

People who want there to be a utopia where nobody works and everybody is happy sharing everything fundamentally want to extinguish humanity. Because that's not what humanity is.

tlocke on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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.

throwawaylinux on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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.

lvoudour on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

This next era may take 100s of years though, AI taking up physical labor is still science fiction (and I'm not fully sold on the utopia angle). She'll need to support herself much sooner than that, let's be realistic

jerojero on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

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 work, now with the AI, that has become unacceptable.

Why would the socio-economic system change? We've been automating work for a while now and people don't really get fired over it; they are just tasked with producing more. Remember that the computer itself was a huge productivity enhancer. When excel came out suddenly one accountant could do the work of 10 but most people weren't liberated from their tedious manual algebraic works, instead, we simply started to produce significantly more than before.

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. Seems to me like our societies are more geared towards growth rather than improving quality of life.

steveshurley44 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

The one word answer for why you are wrong to not be concerned is entropy.

tlocke on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Can you elaborate on that?

tlocke on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

> 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 the idea for a bit I became a convert and threw out Windows and installed a Linux distribution on my home machine. At the time, when I talked to people about Open Source software, there was a near universal reaction of, 'nice idea, but it'll never catch on' and they would go on to give me many reasons why this utopian idea would fail. Now, 25 years later, Open Source is a great success.

As a postscript, I got into making contributions to Open Source and I still do. Maybe one day my mind will be too addled to code, or perhaps an AI will do it better than me, but until that day I fully intend to carry on with Open Source contributions.

jerojero on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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.

quonn on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

But as an utopia it failed. There was a time when you could „live“ inside the open source idea or community like in a house. That was around 2002 plus minus 4 years. Open Source later succeeded but it doesn‘t feel like that anymore.

vermooten on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

I remember the 90s when manual typesetting and page layout was replaced with Quark Xpress, and when analogue phot retouching was replaced with Photoshop. Lots of highly skilled people suddenly out of work - the ones who didn't retrain to use the new tech. Wasn't overnight but felt like a revolution. Then of course magazine publishing lost out to the internet.

I would love to spend my days making stained glass windows, or as a dry stone-wall builder in the Yorkshire Dales. TS, there's no way to make a living in either.

mattlondon on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

I feel like we are at a bit of an industrial revolution type stage here - lots of old jobs that were previously done by hand (spinning yarn, weaving, making bricks etc) are about to be industrialised and automated. I don't think it will happen overnight, but perhaps a decade or two and a lot of jobs/industries will be irrevocably changed.

I am surprisingly sanguine about it. I think there will always be a need to understand what needs to be built, even if it is the AI that is actually coding it up. SWEs will probably end up in more of a supervisory role, responsible for ensuring that the requirements are suitable for automated code generation. Think TDD, but with AI writing the non-code bits.

Interesting times.

Havoc on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

Thought the top comment is insight too re the whole AI thing:

>In a society that judges a persons worth purely on their economic contribution it's going to be a disaster.

dm319 on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

There's no doubt that this artist has lost something as a result of AI (the pleasure and enjoyment of their job). But we should also ask if we are at risk of losing something as a society.

cuddlyogre on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

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 lock you out of their system, leaving you with a project that cannot be finished because no one in your organization knows how to develop that kind of project.

Or, say you are developing an application that helps some marginalized group or is working to expose some kind of corruption. But, as it turns out, the owner of the AI profits from that marginalization or corruption in some way. So they lock you out and blacklist you in some way.

When it is all said and done, AI will be owned and operated by the same people that own everything else in the tech industry - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple. Are you really content with only being allowed to express yourself in the way they deem appropriate?

_lx4l on March 27, 2023 | parent | next [–]

> 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.

cuddlyogre on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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.

scotty79 on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

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.

tgv on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

More money for the boss, less (jobs and thus) money for the rest. Such a wonderful prospect.

scotty79 on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

That's argument against capitalism not against automation.

tgv on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

As I wrote elsewhere: save for a world revolution. Capitalism is a given, it's not going to go away. The degree swings a bit, but right now the tendency is still pretty "right" wing, so you've got to see the application of AI in that context. Anything else is at best day-dreaming.

scotty79 on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> Capitalism [...], it's not going to go away.

And the automation is? We were getting rid of labor that can be automated in monarchy and in feudalism. Capitalism is no different.

Future with different organization of production and sharing of its results is imaginable. Future in which most people refuse to pursue automation is not.

doubtfuluser on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

I think this is the curse but also the opportunity of AI.

OP can now do the same work they did before in just 2-3 days. Could they now open their own studio and offer services for many customers on their own instead of working for one company?

What will happen with indie games or indie software? Suddenly one person who is good at inventing ideas will be able to develop whole games, with music, graphics being generated by AI, coding heavily supported by AI (not _yet_ fully taken over), marketing, etc also supported by Ai. My hope is that this will result in a lot more new startups that will also create a lot more jobs. Maybe the ultimate losers will be big-corporations who can’t build these large models on their own and are unwilling to call external services for fear of their data, or who are simply too slow to adapt.

I often think that what is happening right now is actually a prototype example of what is described in the “innovator’s dilemma” disruption.

lysecret on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

Fascinating, this reminds me a lot of a conversation I had about 4 years ago with a translator, they were working at a translation company which just introduced AI. And their initial implementation of AI looked like this: We give you an initial translation and then you modify it. The thing is this turned the translator from a "creator" to an "editor" and they absolutely hated it. Back then, the power was in the hand of the labor (not the company) so the company actually modified it in a way such that it was completing and recommending things for you but gave you the control of the whole thing. This is much easier to imagine with text, but there might be a way to give people the creative control, even with these new tools.

6177c40f on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

What's really the point of AI? Is perfect efficiency and maximized profit really the end goal we've been trying to achieve this whole time?

scotty79 on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

The whole point of all progress is democratization of the product/service through making the production process cheaper.

drumhead on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

It's like what happened to cinema musicians after sound on films was developed. They'll still need people like this but not as many. But then that's the nature of a technologically driven society, at any moment your job could be obsolete.

npteljes on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

I'm not an artist, and I don't mind the general direction the AI is going, but I feel for the people who are impacted like this. It must feel like shit to be replaced in such a way.

DubiousPusher on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

Perhaps the most wrongly maligned group in the history of the world were the Luddites. A chaticature of the Luddites comes down to us. It is of a people who would deny progress which was obviously inevitable so that they didn't have to change. They are cast as inflexible, lazy, stupid, belligerent.

But when we read the speeches of the Luddite leaders, more than anything else they talk about "liberty". Luddites spoke and wrote about the dangers to their liberty created by wage pressure from power looms. But much more, they spoke and wrote about the danger to their liberty posed by moving away from handloom weaving in homes and small shops towards weaving with power looms in a factory system.

What they resisted more than anything was the destruction of their autonomy, their subjection to abusive floor managers and the grinding dullness of repetitive machine labor.

Programmers have been facing this down already for some time. As full-stack engineering, excellent automation tools and powerful APIs have proliferated, we don't often get to go deep into some problem. Algorithmic design and development, which is a huge pleasure of mine has faded to the background of gaining a shallow understanding of many technologies, plumbing them and futsing with their numerous configurations. AI is already accelerating this for my work and I am struggling to find it not dismal. It is no surprise that now that the tools exist to comoditize art, the work is following a similar trajectory.

AI should be a unifying event for tech labor. Not to resist it entirely but to ensure in whatever future develops that we have some say in how work can remain enriching and dignified alongside the growth of these tools.

bradwood on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

There is "art" and there is "design". It feels like OP might be confusing the two.

The latter is about creative expression within the confines of constraints like time, money, function, etc.

The former is not.

Doing graphic design work at a commercial enterprise is a creative endeavour constrained by commercial realities.

Perhaps the OP just needs to accept that he is working in the real world. They should probably find a creative outlet that is creating art in addition to their design day job.

jongjong on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

That's the risk of participating in a completely new industry... You don't know how long it's going to last; it has no track record. It reminds me of my own career as a software developer. I self-taught myself coding since I was 14 in 2004. I'm from a relatively small town and nobody in my family had a tech background or even knew anyone with a tech background. So it was quite a stretch/unlikely for me to become a developer. I would spent my lunch breaks in the school library; sometimes coding by myself on library computers. My dad thought I was wasting my time. Back then, the only people making any money in tech in my town were developing websites for local businesses and it wasn't very profitable. My dad wanted me to be a lawyer.

I feel like I did many things right; I got into web development early (while most of the jobs were still for programming for desktop PCs), I was an early adopter of Node.js, I went to university and did a course on AI/Machine learning. I launched a popular open source project. But somehow it never worked out for me financially; I was never accepted into any fast-growing company, my popular project was big among startups but didn't gain enough traction in the corporate sphere (where it could have been monetized). Now AI is threatening the entire profession.

I think my dad was right, I should have been a lawyer and done software development as a hobby.

The only silver lining that I cling onto is that my main interest has been software architecture and higher level systems/infrastructure thinking. So far, AI hasn't shown itself to be able to effectively solve higher level software architecture/design problems. It's great at answering questions, but not at asking (the right) questions which is what software architecture is about.

lucidguppy on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

Didn't software replace a huge chunk of billable hours?

antirez on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

"I don’t want to make “art” that is the result of scraped internet content". I guess he/she was ok with creating "art" that was heavily based on other things he/she saw on other games and on the internet. Artists reasoning in this absurd way should ask themselves: I'm ok if a law passes that makes it illegal to get inspiration for other copyrighted work?

deely3 on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

There is a difference.

1. Corporation scraped art for AI to learn without permission.

2. Corporation own resulting AI model, and don't want to share it. Only sell the results.

antirez on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Both arguments are wrong, in my opinion.

1. Artists getting inspiration from all the other works (payed by others) also don't ask any permission. If you want to create a game with a monster heavily inspired to Alines move monsters, you don't need to ask, nor you will be sued. 2. Artists are also against Stable Diffusion.

testHNac on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

Reading some of the comments about coding and AI got me thinking.

Can modern AI come up with new Javscript libraries, Open source projects, Browser Specifications etc The new way of doing things that improve things.

When most people start using AI to make their work easier. Then very few people will develop the competency to create new things, innovate.

At some point will that cause progress to slow down ?

pharmakom on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

It’s gonna be tough as a junior dev in the near future. I’m very grateful that I managed to upskill so much before all this happens. In the worst case, I’ll have a crappy job directing and debugging AI output… but in the best case, we have reached AGI.

_lnwk on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Yeah...

How will one be able to find a job when AI will do way better than junior? Of course, seniors will be better. But interns? Why would you pay for lesser quality?

MacroChip on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

The more specific the source you draw joy from is, the more precarious you have always been in life. This is not a judgement.

fintechie on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

I feel bad for people reluctant to embrace the tech. It feels like refusing to adopt email, the web, mobile apps, and so on. Why not use it to your advantage?

Truth is, it's going to become a must for many companies very soon, or they'll be unable to compete. Maybe there will be some niches where human artists thrive, but it's uncertain at this stage.

dtdynasty on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

I didn't interpret their article as reluctance to embrace technology. They understandably liked 3d modeling using the current tools and was able to make a living doing something fun. It's a rare occurrence and sadly innovations in technology took away the joyful part of their job. If it was not a tech innovation removing the joy from their job they would probably still be upset about it.

antibasilisk on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

Yeah I feel similarly about programming, honestly even the existence of compilers makes me feel this way to a lesser extent, but AI is absolutely crushing any sort of enjoyment out of anything and further turning it into a mediocre slurry of content.

nullsense on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

I'm enjoying programming more than ever because of it.

throwawayasz on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

I hated mine and eventually quit working for life because of a stupid CEO and inexperienced coworkers. Copy and paste what everyone was good at over there.

Luckily i could afford to retire early. I feel sorry for those who got stuck in jobs

jrochkind1 on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

The dominant opinion in this thread seems to be that OP has no reason to be sad that they can no longer get a job doing what they love, because... someone else will probably get a job doing something else instead?

muskmusk on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

Your job, no matter who you are, is always to please the customer. If you focus on that then you will be fine. But if your focus is a more selfish one then you could be exposed.

sjaak on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

What happens to us when AI becomes better than us at every mental task?

Ignoring the economic factors, what does that mean for our self worth? If we know it’s easier to ask a machine to do it, will we stop doing everything?

Can we reframe our purpose and just be content living?

(Above quote from: https://twitter.com/iamharaldur/status/1639368422763970562)

pharmakom on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

We will become a leisure society. Honestly that sounds great to me.

tgv on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

We will become a terribly impoverished society, with the unemployed fighting over scraps of food. There is no realistic path towards "a leisure" society, save for a world revolution.

medvezhenok on March 27, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Last time that technological revolution threatened this many people's livelihoods we got rise of Hitler and WWII (propelled by the petite-bourgeoisie), and I imagine that this time we won't get away without a conflict of a large caliber either (fighting over the distribution of the AI spoils)

ummonk on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

The issue here is that you have to use text prompts (because the overwhelming bulk of training data out there available for AI is in the form of text). Ideally you should be able to sculpt and rig and paint manually via AI tools - the tweaks you do to a sculpture should be inputs to an AI system that can give you an intuitive and responsive system that replaces current procedural generation.

tstrimple on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

You absolutely can use these tools for this. There are stable diffusion plugins for photoshop that allow far more control over what is generated where.

https://youtu.be/nnyjQkgccnA

ayx on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

Making art of any form is about you, not about the art. When you learn to paint well you are creating you, the piece is just a side effect. Getting good at something affects the way you see the world. It creates meaning in you.

The one sided focus on the finished piece is the outcome of our culture valuing the art more than the creation of the artist. (The creation of you, not your creation.)

8f2ab37a-ed6c on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

I imagine portrait painters and later photographers all experienced a similar transition. They had built their livelihoods around a certain visual asset generation technique, and a new technology disrupted that process and pushed them into the nice-to-have luxury corner. The same train will come for prompt engineers eventually too in the usual cycle.

barbariangrunge on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

The term prompt “engineer” is tedious to professional engineers everywhere

riwsky on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

“Softerware Engineer”

RcouF1uZ4gsC on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

Reminds me of the story of Mel.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

Mel obviously took pride in his work, and seemed to look down on compilers in much the same way the author looks down on Midjourney.

erikstarck on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

Probably for all the unimportant NPCs running around in a game, AI does a good enough job. But for the main characters and the plot, I suspect a human touch is still needed. Climb up the value chain. If you're cranking out monsters in volume, you're at the bottom.

thuuuomas on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

> I suspect a human touch is still needed

This is the motivated reasoning of a comfortable person.

AI will eat the Protagonist Jobs too, sooner rather than later.

mLuby on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

First they came for the artists, and I did not speak out—because that job doesn't require real creativity.

Then they came for the engineers, and I did not speak out—because that job doesn't require real reasoning.

Then they came for the sales folks, and I did not speak out—because that job doesn't require real human connection.

Then they came for the executives and politicians, and I did not speak out—because that job doesn't require real leadership.

Then they came for me, and I did not speak out—because I was just grateful to have any job at all, even one doing manual labor under the ceaseless watch of glorified chatbot. At least Netflix can create any movie that I or my AI girlfriend ask for, so that's cool I guess.

—trained on a quote from Martin Niemöller

borissk on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

The progress in IT have already made unemployed millions of people. E.g. there used to be shops selling flights and holidays on every corner. There used to be a number of insurance shops in every town center. Every company used to have rooms full of typewriters and typists.

After the software developers made a lot of jobs obsolete, their own job is being made obsolete by the data scientists.

pharmakom on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Building these AI systems is software engineering, not data science. In fact, data science may be one of the first engineering professions to go.

Netcob on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

> I wanted to create form In 3D space, sculpt, create. With my own creativity. With my own hands.

I think this is difficult to get over within a few years, let alone overnight. I can sympathize as a programmer - only very recently did I notice that I can finally implement a feature or create a new program and have it work on the first try. That took years of practice (for me at least) and I feel like I've really learned a "craft".

On the other hand, as a kid I first got into programming because I wanted to create computer games. And the only time when I actually did that consistently was before I knew any programming languages, just point-and-click tools specifically made for creating games. I eventually studied CS, on my way to making games got sidetracked by learning OpenGL and graphics programming, interned at a gamedev company where I did more graphics programming and learned that this is not the industry for me even though (or maybe because) I love games. Now I've been doing backend programming for a few years where I've been way more concerned with data and architectures than I am with what it's actually for.

I feel bad for people who love the process more than they love achieving a goal. Sometimes I really love coding, solving little challenges, optimizing something, the feeling of having build something basically by meticulously translating an idea into something a computer can understand in every detail. But sometimes it gets really boring. Writing yet another REST controller. Copying and mapping the same data object. Handling errors. It feels like I'm solving the same problem over and over and over again.

Then I think about what I would be doing if I didn't feel like it was too much work to make it happen. I have an idea for a game that's currently impossible to do unless you have a team or at least one extremely experienced and multi-talented game developer with no job. I have several ideas for web services that I could figure out, but don't have time for. Finally at my job, my team currently has absolutely no way of properly dealing with a decade of technical debt.

With AI, I can see myself actually making these things happen, as long as I'm willing to give up some control over how it's done.

Which comes with a little bit of alienation, unfortunately. Maybe that's how older programmers felt when switching from punch cards to assembly, from assembly to compiled languages, and from those to interpreted languages. Obviously the step to AI will be bigger than that. Same with artists: I'm sure many people were discouraged by not holding a brush anymore, or molding something with their hands. Some just love the process of bringing an idea into existence, others just want it to happen by any means necessary.

Personally, my way of dealing with this will be focusing on seeing technology as a means to an end again, which it always has been. Falling in love with a specific tool is not a good idea in an era where changes happen faster literally every day.

quadcore on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

Midjourney is an illegal product and it's easy to prove. Adobe did a way better job at this btw, protecting artists by simply making a legal product.

The way a good lawyer is gonna make a shitload of money is by asking one simple question: who's the artist?

Say you generate a picture with Midjourney, who's the artist? Not you, definitely not the AI as it's not a person, so the closest artists you can find is the ones who made the pictures in the training set. Done.

Hang tight buddy.

causality0 on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

Man is it hard not to feel a little schadenfreude. For decades the white collars watched the blue collars lose their jobs to machines and said "well I'm so sorry for you, but you really should've realized the purpose of a human being is to use their mind and create, they can never take that from us".

This is going to do for art what YouTube did for video production: obliterate the grind. Now what counts is your genuine creativity, your inspiration.

eropple on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

> This is going to do for art what YouTube did for video production: obliterate the grind. Now what counts is your genuine creativity, your inspiration.

These two sentences are so violently at odds as to be comical. YouTube is nothing but the grind. It is an unending content mill and if you stop, you may literally never regain even the precarious position you'd managed so far.

Creativity? Inspiration? It's time served above everything else.

hooverd on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

If you want to make it on YouTube, and not just have a channel outside your day job, you basically have to mold yourself and your content to be perfectly palatable to the recommendation algorithm.

CatWChainsaw on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

The scahdenfreude is going to be off the charts in a few years when these "tools" get so advanced that cease making people more productive and cause a massive loss of jobs, and no replacement, and no post-capitalist utopia. The people who were so sanguine about adapting to change are going to realize they were made promises that never stood a chance in hell of being kept.

fauxpause_ on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

I would be interested in hiring a 3D artist that uses mid journey to go fast. Where can I find such people?

al2o3cr on March 25, 2023 | prev | next [–]

LOL at the reply a couple posts down, where OP admits they work at a mobile shovelware sweatshop.

dagmx on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

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 some representative visual as soon as possible

There’s no current model that makes acceptable 3D content for games, and cohesion isn’t good enough for 2D art for anything except visual novels. They can certainly act as a base but this persons post makes it sound like they’re barely adding anything on top.

So yes, they’re a shop that’s churning out content to make a buck as quickly as possible.

If it wasn’t generative art that replaces this person, it would be someone who could do things even slightly faster or cheaper, even if the quality was worse.

This is the most vulnerable part of society to any form of automation. The level where they’re effectively an operator.

This person would be miserable in this place regardless of AI because their boss doesn’t value them or the work. They would have a more fulfilling career in another studio, where generative art may still be used, but as a tool not a factory to generate things to rush out the door.

Quiark on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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

dagmx on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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

mitthrowaway2 on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

Is something wrong with that? You have to start somewhere.

dagmx on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I don’t think they were judging the employee, but the number of people extrapolating this experience to all artists.

astrange on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

Yes, if your boss requires you to pretend to be a checklist instead of a human, then you're not any better at your job than an animated checklist would be.

moltar on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

I wonder if horse buggy drivers had the same sentiment when cars came out?

konart on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

I doubt it. Kind of. The reddit use did not loose the job or money. What was lost is motivation.

Now it's just a "job". Without any spark.

psnehanshu on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

Not related to the topic: For a change nerds are linking to www.reddit.com rather than old.reddit.com

qwick23 on March 26, 2023 | prev | next [–]

Sounds like viral marketing campaign in flavor of Midjourney

wetpaws on March 25, 2023 | prev | next [8 more]

web3-is-a-scam on March 26, 2023 | prev [–]

People are already generating entire apps with AI in minutes. Software engineering as a profession is finished. We are all now slaves to Roko’s Basilisk.

sublinear on March 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

Most apps worth money have to integrate with existing systems in highly specific ways determined by endless meetings with real people to extract the requirements and probably haven't been done before and are usually all proprietary code ChatGPT doesn't know about and there's not a cobol's chance in hell anyone is going to rewrite it all in a way that's compatible with junk hallucinated by a bot. There's no business case for that. It will probably always be cheaper for humans to maintain what has already accumulated over decades despite the "high" salaries.

The knowledge gap between devs and everyone else, including bots, is a chasm. It seems many don't realize how hard some devs work for so little relatively speaking.

quonn on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I something think that some developers posting here want to be punished for earning a living wage. Strangely lawyers never think that and I can assure you that this is not a more difficult profession [0].

[0] Surely someone will quickly post that it is.

spoiler on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

Ah. I think it still requires you to understand what you're doing. I tried to use both copilot and ChatGPT 3.5 and 4. It doesn't get a lot of things right in my interest areas. I think it's great as a crazy-good autocompletion or refactoring tool. It also helps with boilerplate. But every time you need to know what you want, and it just saves you typing the code.

Sometimes it's just amusingly wrong, too. Sometimes annoyingly so, especially after it repeats mistakes.

I always said our jobs aren't hard because we have to write code for computer, but because we have to capture intent for other humans in code. Sometimes we don't even know what the intent is, because half the time we don't even know what we're building exactly.

So, this all slightly shifts the level of abstraction for developers to think more about intent and less about code. You still have to make sure the code is correct. So, you need to understand the code and the intent. Not much has changed. It's just gotten less mechanical.

Anyway, I don't think people need to be scared of AI just yet.

Obvs there's programmers that enjoy the nitty gritty keyboard slapping, and they can still do that for problems they find interesting. But for things they want to get out of the way, why not unburden ourselves?

Typing on phone so pardon the typos/autocorrect

pharmakom on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I think LLMs will make a software engineers job harder and more in demand. By removing boiler plate, engineers will be expected to create more output per person, and the job moves up the stack from junior code monkey stuff to architect / senior debugging guru style work. Not everyone can do such a role. It will be a very tough time to be a junior.

terminatornet on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

I'm guessing this tweet is what the OP was referring to

https://twitter.com/mortenjust/status/1636001311417319426

This is the first bit of AI news that actually made me want to investigate it for myself. Even though it is pretty impressive to get a working app out of a few prompts, it seems for now it's not capable of producing much more than snippet level code.

I like the author's take further in the thread:

> Company A fires half their staff yet keeps delivering 100% of their old capacity = they save money

> Company B keeps all their staff, but can now deliver 200% of their old capacity = they win the competition

> So seems like the strategic move here is to raise the bar rather than replace engineers

https://twitter.com/mortenjust/status/1636037312571211777

My hope is that stuff allows me to augment my workflow and automate repetitive and tedious tasks away but doesn't fully replace me (or I get UBI and don't have to work anymore)

blackoil on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

But Company A has reduced product price be 60% because the biggest cost center is now halved. Customers like some new features from B but not justifying the price.

factsaresacred on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

Likely sarcasm, still I'll bite.

I saw the exact same commentary around the no-code hype of the past few years and it made me increasingly cynical. No-code tools made it super easy to create a boilerplate website that looked pretty but was not fit for purpose. Meanwhile it was advertised as "Build an AirBnB clone without code!".

OK fine, hyperbole as a marketing tactic. But many people handed over wads of cash for courses that promised results that were in reality no more than cardboard cutouts of actual websites.

The Internet appears to have an endless ability to create markets for don't-do-the-work-and-still-enjoy-the-reward snakeoil.

And now we have ChatGPT- an instant boilerplate-creating machine. Watch as a new (or in many cases the same) class of charlatans grease up this technological wave too.

enumjorge on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

Can you share examples of this? I've been doing some searching on my own because I find this stuff interesting, and I haven't seen evidence that current versions of AI tools are capable of helping generate entire apps in minutes, at least non-trivial ones.

I keep seeing some real dramatic premonitions about AI, and I'd love to see something to back them up.

Even the original post, I'm having trouble understanding. I know Stable Diffusion can create some amazing images, but I don't see how it's being used to create sprite assets for games. You typically need the same character from different angles. Can Midjourney v5 do that? The OP talks about being a 3D artist. Can Midjourney generate meshes and 3D objects or just raster images? I didn't think we were at the point where these tools could fully replace an artist's workflow, but the OP seems to claim so.

mrcartmeneses on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

All knowledge workers are completely screwed. The only way out is UBI and a maximum three-day work week.

brushfoot on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I don't see it. I consult, and AI has just let me take on more clients. Using ChatGPT lets me finish their projects faster.

What's ending is the era of CRUD work.

grugagag on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

> don't see it. I consult, and AI has just let me take on more clients. Using ChatGPT lets me finish their projects faster.

Get ready to take on more clients and at a smaller and smaller gain. An avalanche of competition is coming your way too if you have no moat.

brushfoot on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

For sure. I recommend anyone in business for themselves productize and build moats.

I still work about the same hours, though. AI has just raised the level of abstraction. Less time is spent on looking up specific syntax and more on reviewing, iterating, testing, architecting.

blackoil on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Today yeah, but tomorrow the clients can use GPT 7 consultant who has better context with access to all the mails/data of the client. It is fast/cheap and is a polymath.

mrbombastic on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I don’t understand why people see this future as guaranteed, just because GPT4 was a great improvement on 3.5 does not imply this approach will continue accelerating at this rate. I am not saying it definitely won’t happen but I find the confidence that it will pretty baffling.

nirvdrum on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

It seems unlikely to me that this technology has plateaued. The gains have been exponential. It strikes me as prudent to at least consider its continued improvement a possibility and try to work out what that means for society. The best thing on the table so far is people lose jobs and business owners make more money. Some amount of that is unavoidable and maybe even beneficial, but too much of it is unsustainable. Better to have a plan and not need and all that.

mrbombastic on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

I don’t take issue with considering continued improvement and largely agree with this, my issue is with all the proponents who speak about it as if it is guaranteed.

anon7725 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

We have numerous examples that have worked this way throughout the history of computing. It would be shocking if it plateaued this early.

mrbombastic on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

We have numerous that haven’t also, AI approaches specifically have plateaued quite a bit throughout history.

pharmakom on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Why do you think such a world would have companies, governments or even money? We are way outside the horizon of predictability if LLMs reach AGI levels.

luckylion on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

This has been said for years, first about robotics, now about AI. And today, most developed nations have trouble finding people to work because there's so much work that needs to be done.

The opposite is happening, yet it's still repeated.

ChatGTP on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

Sounds like absolute paradise, I don’t give a shit about “work”, or status or anything of that.

I hope Silicon Valley builds itself a starship and ships itself off to Alpha Centuri and leaves me to live a pretty simple life with way less grind.

sublinear on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

A Marxist can dream

weird-eye-issue on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

Okay. Link me to a single production app with paying users that was created with AI in minutes.

Since it only takes minutes to make you must have a lot of examples.

CamperBob2 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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

weird-eye-issue on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

So you are saying they are right but they are just a few years off? That is the same as being wrong.

kbelder on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

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

CamperBob2 on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

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.

brushfoot on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

Trivial app demos, sure. Non-trivial, no.

Influencers have been cranking out the former to sell their course/personal brand/consulting. They stand to gain from making AI look as magical and easy as possible.

A decision-maker watches an influencer's video and goes, "Wow! AI can do it all! I need to hire this influencer as a consultant/like their content/buy their course!" The reality isn't quite as flashy.

Incorporating LLMs into my workflow has been a great productivity boost, but by no means do they spell the end of software engineering.

sumitkumar on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

True. The influencers are using AI to sell themselves. The amount of human attention which goes into doing a semi repeatable task will surely go down with AI but not so much as they claim to churn out apps in seconds vs hours/minutes with a real developer.

Also, I have not seen any insight level help from GPT. It just seems like it has a good recall for everything it has seen. And prompt engineering takes away the mental work away from the problem and more about what the model knows.

imtringued on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

ChatGPT is impressive if you start from a clean slate but the moment you do anything more complicated it slows down to being as fast as doing things yourself. After all, you have to know what to input into it and that may take longer than actually processing the information.

Yabood on March 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

This won’t be a problem once you can feed it an entire solution. I suspect we’re not too far from being able to do that.

lewhoo on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev | next [–]

If this is indeed so simple then why chatGPT (meaning web app not LLM) was so buggy ? Did OpenAI use their LLM to make the app or not ?

mr90210 on March 26, 2023 | parent | prev [–]

We shall see.

1.5K comments

Comments Section

b_a_t_m_4_n

•

2y ago

That's grim. And it's just the tip of the iceberg. We've barely scratched the surface of machine learning let alone genuine AI.

In a society that judges a persons worth purely on their economic contribution it's going to be a disaster.

844

loakkala

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2y ago

We should have been living in a resource based economy after the first depression.

156

Revolutionary-Fix586

•

2y ago

Jacque Fresco was right

7

7 replies

SoulSkrix

•

2y ago

Are we not already?…

2

loakkala

•

2y ago

We have a corporatocracy pretending to be a capitalist democracy.

40

n01saround

•

2y ago

I always think of it as half oligarchy half police state, but I've probably been arrested more than the average Joe so....

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SoulSkrix

•

2y ago

I think that is just the issue with not combining capatilism with socialism (when the money becomes more important than the individuals well-being)

-1

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u/WallaceCorpPC avatar

WallaceCorpPC

•

2y ago

all due respect, what are you talking about? this is capitalism 101 right here

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u/PlanetAlexProjects avatar

PlanetAlexProjects

•

2y ago

I thought we were an autonomous collective

1

u/RamenJunkie avatar

RamenJunkie

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2y ago

We are, but the only resource that matters is money.

1

Battousai_1806

•

2y ago

Money is air. it represents nothing since gold reservers were replaced by USD reserves. Capitrollists just print quadrillions every year and musk and the lot have many billions but in reality it's all worth nothing. Remember how hard peps memed cryptos because they are essentially worthless since they are not backed up by anything? what if I told you real money is the exact same?

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

…fiat currency …. vote Ron Paul 2012

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

WpgMBNews

•

2y ago

InternationalMonk694

•

2y ago

so let's stop waiting around for dysfunctional centralized versions of a RBE and actually collaborate towards a networked decentralized one. we can crowdfund local nodes all over the planet. I'm helping with a project trying to do exactly that, to purchase land and create commons spaces in the middle of major cities, and help connect an open global crowdfunding network. imagine what we can protect and create. nonprofits and community land trusts are great tools for the process.. donations of money and land and resources can be tax deductible, and the land itself can be property tax exempt. Solarpunk postcapitalism.

1

LifeworksGames

•

2y ago

I’m working in recruitment and writing isn’t my strong suit. ChatGTP poops out perfectly fine pieces of text. Add some flavour rather than reinventing the wheel. It really made my job significantly easier.

But yeah, also the tip of the iceberg. I hate to see people get so negatively affected by it.

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[deleted]

•

2y ago

u/hoplahopla avatar

hoplahopla

•

2y ago

Consider that in 1 or 5 years it might also eliminate your job entirely...

19

LifeworksGames

•

2y ago

It may, but I highly doubt it'll put all of us out of a job, just like the industrial revolution didn't.

In the end of the day, someone has to make the phone call to the actual human person to ask if everything is alright, if they need anything specific to perform better or to schedule an external company for training.

I mean, yes sure they could ask a chat bot to do this for them, but I don't think any human would want to work for us if that was the case.

-1

u/Corax7 avatar

Corax7

•

2y ago

They already have bot calls for Costumer Support etc, how hard do you think it is for a future AI bot in like 5-10 years to go.

Sir, I called you to see if everything is alright? Do you need anything?

And then go through with the person if he needs anything specific, sure they might still keep 1-2 people for the job just incase the AI can't help but probably 99% of the jobs will be gone.

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No_Doc_Here

•

2y ago

The industrial revolution brought more wealth and quality of life to most (almost anyone really) people but it also brought misery and slum barracks to those caught up in the midst of it.

That's what I am concerned about (and I am aware it's selfish) what I have.

The fact that my grandchildren might have it better doesn't help at all.

1

Battousai_1806

•

2y ago

except the steam machine needed operators, AI does not. The most positive future I see is we'll all be pensioned, like some small towns in Switzerland already have due to their workforce being displaced by machines, because we're still in capitrollism so it does not matter how potentially rich someone can become without people actually spending money in shit. They'll have to throw some dollars at the masses if they're all put out of jobs merely to preventt the economy from collapsing as a whole, great depression style.

1

CloroxWipes1

•

2y ago

More like 6 - 12 months. Have you seen the plug-ins that are coming to ChatGPT 4.0?

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

Are you worried about how impactful it’ll be in recruiting then ? Seems like it’s not too far away from replacing recruiters either

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2 replies

[deleted]

•

2y ago

So why do they even need you anymore?

9

LifeworksGames

•

2y ago

If writing content was such a significant part of my job that the mere existence of ChatGTP meant I wasn't needed anymore, writing not being my strong suit would mean I wouldn't have been there anyway, now would I?

Writing content was at most 5% of my time spent even before this. It just alleviated the pressure for me, I still have to curate a lot of details as to the nuance of the exact department / job / tasks. It's awfully good at structuring and writing generic content but to make it appealing to the exact target audience is not something it's capable of as of yet.

Oh and then there's the 95% of the rest of the job.

1

u/curl-up avatar

curl-up

•

2y ago

Could you put some color on what that 95% looks like? What do you think will be impossible for AI to do? And where do you think AI could assist you?

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SoulSkrix

•

2y ago

To find the talent, send the messages, have correspondence after the initial letter has been responded to?…

I don’t like recruiters (as I’m spammed all the time) but this is just silly

-1

dom96

•

2y ago

AI can already do those things, it's just not exposed yet by OpenAI (with their new "plugins" it will be exposed). So it really does seem like we are living in a scary age.

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allbirdssongs

•

2y ago

you are going to be replaced soon by someone who does what you are doing 10 times more and faster with the power of AI, hell, might be even automated at some point.

dont you see? you are also walking on thin ice

1

LifeworksGames

•

2y ago

I'm literally saying that I'm using AI now (as one of the only ones in the office) to improve my workflow. It really helps. If it gets automated, I'll actually be quite happy as the main part of my job (being in touch with people), is something I prefer to do vastly more.

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u/manly_ avatar

manly_

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2y ago

Wait until you try using chatgpt in job interviews/tests. Or writing cover letters. Or just write a bullshit email, then ask chatgpt “make this sound more professional” and by god, it will. People really massively underestimate its power it’s not even funny.

1

LifeworksGames

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2y ago

I actually have, and it's brilliant for that too.

1

u/Protahgonist avatar

Protahgonist

•

2y ago

Just last night I started using CGPT to write flavortext for locations in this world I'm creating for a d&d campaign. Saves me a lot of time and lets me focus on the parts I actually enjoy. I just say "write a small blurb about this village of farmers and lumberjacks with one tavern owned and operated by the local magistrate" and it gives me a nice travel blurb

1

jasonbornee

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2y ago

ChatGPT is already a boon. Midjourney has so much potential but the features they are working on are not the right ones. Accuracy and user feedback need to be paramount.

1

ElectronicKandy

•

2y ago

This

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Anti-ThisBot-IB

•

2y ago

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1

u/Fleischhauf avatar

Fleischhauf

•

2y ago

last sentence is very important here. we need to change basing our worth on the jobs we do and the money we earn. in the long run this will not be viable anymore (and it's a good thing because all work will be done for us)

1

u/fouric avatar

fouric

•

2y ago

In a society that judges a persons worth purely on their economic contribution it's going to be a disaster.

In which country is that the case?

1

b_a_t_m_4_n

•

2y ago

The UK. The unemployed are scum, spongers, scroungers, benefit cheats, the great unwashed, pick your insult. Benefits are reduced at every opportunity, made opaque and impossible to access. Even when the majority of people claiming benefits are actually in work the mythology of hate is maintained. It's everywhere, all over the media, all over social media. The unemployed are lazy layabouts sucking off the teat of society and deserve every misfortune that comes their their way.

1

Beingabummer

•

2y ago

I hear a lot of people going 'people thought this when X came around' (industrialization, electricity, the internet). So who knows, we might just adapt and evolve. But AI being able to simply copy human input is going to require a pretty drastic rework of not just the economic systems we operate with, but society at large.

In capitalism, no company will be able to justify not using AI while at the same time, capitalism requires humans to have money they can spend which they get from jobs.

How does a company either justify working at maximum efficiency but not having customers with money, or hiring people at less-than-optimal efficiency just so these workers have money to spend on the company's product?

1

u/Phoenix-Infinite avatar

Phoenix-Infinite

•

2y ago

We are about to destroy life as we know it as a society ans we going to have to save people

1

b_a_t_m_4_n

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2y ago

"as a society" run by and for the wealthy "we going to have to save" the wealthy "people"

1

u/Phoenix-Infinite avatar

Phoenix-Infinite

•

2y ago

I mean we are gonna have to save freaking everyone. Like everyone. The wealthy don't know yet that no one will be able to buy their goods and services if no one has any money cause their jobs were taken by AI that was cheaper to employee than people.

1

b_a_t_m_4_n

•

2y ago

A nice dream. But not going to happen. As the jobs dry up the sellers will just keep moving onto markets that are still functioning until they've killed them all, at which point the wealthy will switch to only making the stuff they themselves need and the rest of us will die in starvation or conflict over resources.

1

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Limondin

•

2y ago

Based on what you've told us, even though your title is 3D Artist, you actually deliver 2D Sprites. If what you like is to sculpt form in 3D space, I suggest you to find a new job in which you actually deliver 3D models.

185

High_Philosophr

•

2y ago

This is exactly what I came here to say

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20 replies

linx_sr

•

2y ago

Im sure as a 3D artist, you have a still long way to go. It's too bad that the studio you're currently working in has found a way to change innovation for procedural, but that's just the workflow of a single or similar projects. The majority of the 3d studios still rely on modeling, uv, texturing, materials, rigging, animation, lighting, art direction, rendering, game development, UI, UX, and whatnot. Don't lose hope, have a portfolio on the standby, and try to expand your craft.

442

GeheimerAccount

•

2y ago

I disagree, there are still very strong advancements for AI turning photos into 3d models or 3d models from prompts, also now that many AIs get an API there are also already applications for blender where you just tell the AI what you want and the AI does it for you...

Maybe there will be a couple of very specific things that the AI wont be able to to so soon, but if it can do 90% thats already already.

I mean OP already said that the AI basically made him 90% more productive already just because it took over so much of the creative process and is even better at it.

71

pablas

•

2y ago

I don't think its gonna replace modellers any time soon. It will be huge timesaver for doing low poly background props but still you will need a skillful 3d artist who can edit mesh as necessary. Its not that any good prompter will learn blender overnight.

Edit:

We are far away from AI generating quad topology game ready or film assets. How do you even train model like that? Stable Diffusion often doesn't understand prompt because laion database is a giant mess. You would need to scrap (not In a legal way) all sketchfab assets to build quality dataset. I can't imagine anyone is able to buy millions of 3d assets with textures just to train the model.

It's just like Photoshop was, you need to adjust your workflow or you will die. It will be huge for VFX if you can generate background assets with textures in few seconds. But people who can combine it all together and fix AI mistakes will be still needed. There still will be demand for AAA assets. I just wonder for how long. People will be promoted from modellers to composers.

I think that in a few years almost every software will have an AI assistant which will automate many tedious tasks.

I am browsing AI subreddits daily. I know exactly how fast everything is going. I've seen Spleeter, Riffusion, Stable Diffusion, txt2vid, txt-2-3d, chatgpt, ai upscalers, frame Interpolation and so on. It is year of AI

If I am wrong then I'm shitting myself because I've just lost several years of learning 3d and texturing

EDIT2:

As it turns out sketchfab already being scrapped. We are not doomed but it will get worse. I feel dumb and scared

101

u/twicerighthand avatar

twicerighthand

•

2y ago

Nvidia release a paper a while back that generates 3D models from text or a single image

32

the-strange-ninja

•

2y ago

NVidia Picasso. They just showed some stuff off at GDC last week.

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Superblazer

•

2y ago

You should realize that advancements in AI is occurring at an unprecedented pace. The new versions of AI are being released in a matter of months, rather than years.

53

uknow_es_me

•

2y ago

That's mainly because the advancement in most cases is the training model expanding or tweaks being made to improve the model for a target subject.

One thing that advances AI like Midjourney is the simple usage of it. There's a reason that it provides 4 variations for a prompt. The user can then say, oh upscale #1 and it will note that the result in #1 was more desirable for that prompt. Or if the user says show me variations on #2, then 2 was good but not quite what the prompt desired, then rinse repeat.

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u/ImaginaryCheetah avatar

ImaginaryCheetah

•

2y ago

I don't think its gonna replace modellers any time soon.

OP is a modeler, and has been replaced by AI.

it's happening now.

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Mooblegum

•

2y ago

Maybe the futur of 3D artists is to generate 3D models with AI and then clean the meshes and do retopology, until AI can do that by itself.

I also stopped doing illustrations for my books and generate images that I clean and edit the characters. Also I only outline my stories and make GPT generate the text. That is the only way to compete with the guys that generate full books on KDP. Trying to keep a bit of creativity by prompting and editing.

That is sad for humans creativity.

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u/hoplahopla avatar

hoplahopla

•

2y ago

Won't help if the market will settle for "much cheaper to produce automatically, even if not that good".

That's how the once huge hi-fi in the 80s-90s market died, because most people now would just listen through their phones or laptop speakers or crappy BT speakers.

It's also how first the compact, and now the consumer DSLR and Mirrorless market is drying up, since for most people their smartphone is good enough to take the pictures of their kids, holidays, and so on.

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[deleted]

•

2y ago

you're missing the point here. AI won't immediately replace any and all 3D modellers - the question is how many 3D modellers does a company need if AI optimizes the work flow to a point where one 3D modeller can do the work of x people in less time

13

[deleted]

•

2y ago

I just saw an AI prompt add on for blender this past week....soo yeah I think it can learn it overnight. Better wake up and smell the diodes....a change is coming and its only good for the rich people who won't hesitate to replace you with an AI prompt and a Boston dynamics robot running android.

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Black_Barba

•

2y ago

You would need to scrap (not In a legal way) all sketchfab assets to build quality dataset.

This has already been done.

Comment Image

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63 replies

JukePlz

•

2y ago

but if it can do 90% thats already already.

But that's the thing. It's nowhere near doing 90% of the work. As I'm sure you will notice if you actually try to use these tools.

Some of the texture generating models are somewhat better already, for specific use cases (like, projection mapped textures), but the geometry generating AI I've seen as tools thus far is very, veeeery raw and will require a lot of additional work by the artist to clean up to be usable for a studio pipeline, particularly if it's any sort of complex work like detailed character designs as opposed to simple environment objects, most of which were ALREADY automated by non-AI processes like plugins to make trees/rocks, geometry node groups that can make whole configurable (and artist directed) buildings, megascans or asset stores and collections.

I'm sure in the near future these tools will improve. But I can't agree with the whole blackpill mentality that this will somehow replace artists agency almost completely, because regardless of how complete your prompting is, the AI will always make it's own assumptions and biases on the generated work, and will need additional manual work to fit art direction and design guidelines since the principle is that you are rescinding control and precision over the design details whenever you let the AI take the wheel.

1

1 reply

Awkward-Joke-5276

•

2y ago

creating a 3D model is highly skill only “AGI” could do that alone by prompts , but at the point when AI becomes AGI all jobs be gone anyway

1

1 reply

canpoyrazoglu

•

2y ago

Don't wanna bring bad news but Midjourney, as I remember from an office hours talk, have plans for 3D, possibly in progress. Combine with UE's Nanite and we'll have "prompt-and-drop" 3D soon.

Not entirely replacing artists though, and in right hands it makes artist's job easier IMO.

1

pedrofuentesz

•

2y ago

I worked as a 3D artist for 2 years in videogame industry fr mobile. I'm glad there's people out there working on UV unwrapper AIs lol.

1

Edarneor

•

2y ago

UV - yes, that's what it should do, maybe some textures even, but not sculpting and everything else

1

usurperavenger

•

2y ago

What we've been witnessing in the past few months with AI has absolutely shaken my expectation that the future is in any way predictable.

It was similar with COVID: within six montths the world changed.

Its an inflection point.

248

[deleted]

•

2y ago

Now world is changing every week.

66

justjanne

•

2y ago

Welcome to IT, where the world's been changing every week for the past 20 years^

Once upon a time there was an entire indie industry of people building websites. Between social media, Squarespace and Shopify, that entire industry got automated away.

We've had this breakneck speed in tech for a long while, it's just that now slowly other industries get pulled into it as well. It's actually kind of shocking to see how surprised everyone is.

34

voinekku

•

2y ago

I'm a layperson when it comes to IT, so I might be totally off, but I don't agree with this. For the last 50 years it's been a common wisdom that if one learns the logic behind coding languages and learns a commonly used language or two, they'll be set for a good-salaried job for their lives. And it has held to this day.

Now it's completely up in the air if knowing a coding language is even remotely relevant in 5 years.

Same with 3D-modeling, animating, texturing, sound effects, etc. etc. Hell, even in concept art is questionable if the human touch is unique and valuable.

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Ange1ofD4rkness

•

2y ago

No kidding. Blowing away Moore's Law was just the tip. Thankfully there is one saving grace for software developers. "Learn really old languages". Stuff where there's not enough data out there to build an AI around.

(or work on complex stuff an AI can't figure out how to process)

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Luqizilla

•

2y ago

been living on the edge of tech for the past 12 years, and your statement feels accurate - it also baffles me how people don't get how intertwined and interconnected the world is and how shaking those foundations faster has been the norm for a while now, as someone mentioned - COVID rocked everything else and forced everyone into tech, now everyone has access to tech labour as the big tech layoffs happen - that "tech mentality" is going to start to sprawl all across industries - pharma, cars, etc

3

Brudaks

•

2y ago

Nope, I've worked in IT for 20+ years, and it has not changed nearly as fast before. In some domains there were times when we saw new frameworks arrive or change as fast - even weekly, but then each change brought just the-same-but-different things, slightly more convenient but not a game-changer, more like changes in fashion; and while there were many game-changing advances in tech, they happened relatively rarely, and often took years to get adopted.

What we're seeing now is fundamentally new capabilities arriving every month, while historically even in domains like electronic commerce or social media similarly meaningful changes happened perhaps yearly at most. The current rate of change seems faster than even the original dot-com boom, where so many "before-its-time" things got tried.

2

u/MacroMeez avatar

MacroMeez

•

2y ago

I’ve been a programmer for 17 years and I’ve never seen anything remotely like this.

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u/SouvenirSubmarine avatar

SouvenirSubmarine

•

2y ago

Where was this breakneck speed in your example? These changes didn't happen overnight. I agree that there's less demand now but it's not like freelance web developers don't exist? I know I still get people asking me to build websites. Also, social media took years to really catch on.

This is one of the biggest, fastest changes we're seen in the space in the past 20 years. There's a reason to be surprised.

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

AI is the biggest gamechanger of all time. Bigger than ICE, bigger than steam, bigger than sanitation, as it is the first to not simply be a new tool, but to fundamentally have the GOAL of not being a tool, but of being a labor replacement mechanism as the end goal.

1

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Kreugs

•

2y ago

Change is the only constant.

26

don_sley

•

2y ago

I feel like the world has changed differently since 2020, covid bombed the shit out of us then the Ukraine war and now the rise of AI, guess the future isn't going to be bright then.

13

1 reply

redeyesofnight

•

2y ago

We approach the singularity

19

[deleted]

•

2y ago

We are approaching apocalypse too.

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[deleted]

•

2y ago

SnooOranges7533

•

2y ago

If we define it as 'information processing developing at a rate that cannot be comprehended by any individual' I think we are already there!

1

u/generallycrunchy avatar

generallycrunchy

•

2y ago

It always has been. People have been saying that about as long as there have been people.

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

Whole professions didn't disappear overnight, so it's definitely picking up pace.

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ninjasaid13

•

2y ago

It was similar with COVID: within six montths the world changed.

funny how COVID actually accelerated AI progress.

1

u/TarumK avatar

TarumK

•

2y ago

Either it's an inflection point or it's a sudden advance that brings a bunch of changes and then stalls for a long time. That kind of thing happens too. Sometimes one thing (language models, generating pictures from prompts) turns out to be solvable with one technology but then that hits a limit. I mean, the current crop of AI doesn't work in a way that's analogous to the human brain at all, so it's not like it's on a fast track to general intelligence. It's essentially a very high powered statistical matching tool. I'm not saying it is gonna stall out, it's just that we also can't be sure that it won't, or somewhere in between. It really could go both ways.

1

usurperavenger

•

2y ago

Can provide an example?

1

u/TarumK avatar

TarumK

•

2y ago

Of things stalling? I mean it happens all the time. People in the 50's thought they were just around the corner from taking vacations on the moon and unlimited power through fusion. General AI has been "just around the corner" for decades.

1

usurperavenger

•

2y ago

"General AI has been "just around the corner" for decades".

Provide examples to back up your assertion pls. .

1

Continue this thread

Frosty-Ad-6946

•

2y ago

That’s rough bud. I haven’t started working as a 3D artist yet, and while many traditional artists argue that technology will never replace human creativity, it's becoming increasingly clear that 3D art is becoming a major force in the industry.

37

u/hoplahopla avatar

hoplahopla

•

2y ago

Well, many traditional artists see what they want to see. The market doesn't care about "human creativity", just for efficiency and profit margins

19

Awkward-Joke-5276

•

2y ago

I’m traditional artist who jumped to AI and digital suddenly, it’s open my mind for me

1

Ange1ofD4rkness

•

2y ago

What do you consider traditional art?

To me that's physical medians such as watercolors, acrylic, oils, clay, ext. Which in that case, AI has a LONG way to replace. I have been to craft shows where I walk down isles bored and then all of a sudden am stopped by a piece. Interesting enough the pieces that stop me are usually originals. My mind caught it before I even realized.

The imperfections these medians can produce I don't see AI producing for a long time. How do you get it to fade a watercolor stroke, or have small build up of acrylic paint. Or create a unique carving? It can't, it only knows 1s and 0s. All it can do is increase the resolution

4

Rhetorikolas

•

2y ago

It's still a major force, and there's different kinds of 3D art. The beauty of doing it nowadays is that more and more tools are being consolidated and workflows integrated. Even Unreal Engine has some decent modeling tools. The future is cross-platform and open access.

1

Leyr2

•

2y ago

I will soon begin 5 years of studying for this industry and feeling shitty that it may be worthless even before I end my studies. I don’t know what to do at this point

72

[deleted]

•

2y ago

mlresearchoor

•

2y ago

if you're feeling doubts, study some field that builds things that provide economic value (e.g., CS, mechanical engineering)

otherwise, if you truly love art as a career, go for the art job with full knowledge of the risks

6

u/UndeadOeric avatar

UndeadOeric

•

2y ago

CS may not be a great pick. I have a friend with 30 years of software engineering experience who now uses GPT-4 daily and said it's 3x to 10x faster than what he can do himself, at equal or better code quality/readability. He predicts most tech companies will be able to get rid of about 70% of their current Engineering workforces by the end of the year.

10

AlmoschFamous

•

2y ago

How did your friend last in the industry for 30 years if he's that terrible of an engineer? Chat GPT can't even do entry level work. Let alone anything complicated.

9

progthrowe7

•

2y ago

Right now, Chat-GPT is best used as a first draft, before you go in and refine the code. It can be frustratingly obtuse at times - you tell it x function is deprecated, but then 2 mins later it forgets that. Tediously long prompts or doing a second pass yourself is still necessary (for now).

1

Continue this thread

u/CaptainBucketMe avatar

CaptainBucketMe

•

2y ago

I'm sorry, but I deeply question your friend's ability as a software engineer if he really thinks that GPT-4 surpasses him in code quality/readability.

4

dats_cool

•

2y ago

Absolute nonsense. I'm a mid-level engineer and, yes, the productivity gains have been noticeable but GPT4 is NOWHERE near automating anywhere close to what I do on a daily basis. Your friend works on super basic stuff if he's able to have his productivity explode like that.

So many bad takes on reddit on software development, it's like everyone's suddenly an expert. So nauseating. I almost wish I picked a different field because I literally can't escape it anywhere I go on the internet.

I've also tried the blindly paste AI-generated code, usually for smaller stuff, and it always gets torn apart by senior devs during code reviews. They don't even know it's AI-generated, it's just the design choices that GPT4 makes is awkward with bad design patterns.

3

Rhetorikolas

•

2y ago

Yeah but GPT-4 still needs quality checks, the AI isn't perfect. Because he has first hand knowledge, he knows how to get the most out of it. That said, yeah I wouldn't be surprised if companies slim down their teams. Economy is already forcing them to.

2

u/RPWPA avatar

RPWPA

•

2y ago

I used chatgpt and other Ai tools like you.com many times now and maybe once did I get useful feedback from it. Sure I was using it for complex things but that is still a horrible rate.

Not sure about gpt 4 but doubt the difference is that big.

2

5 replies

Steven-Maturin

•

2y ago

Study the history of art and design in detail, and learn how to draw and paint for real. Knowledge is power. Learning softwares is just using someone else's product. AI just uses someone else's creativity. It's time for artists to get back to basics.

2

[deleted]

•

2y ago

mrhaluko23

•

2y ago

You're better off still studying this over some useless degree that hold zero value to anyone. Don't worry.

2

u/Zer0D0wn83 avatar

Zer0D0wn83

•

2y ago

Don't invest 5 years in studying it, that's a terrible idea. Do a few Udemy courses, build up some skills, and get creating. Then, keep your eyes on the new AI tools and incorporate them into your workflow. Spending 5 years to learn anything is crazy.

1

9 replies

Humble_Tea1529

•

2y ago

oh so not only were mobile games cheap and soulless, they have now figured out a way to make em cheaper and more robotic.

also that sucks bro, hope u find a better job that actually allows you to be creative

102

u/bASEDGG avatar

bASEDGG

•

2y ago

tbh I would have seen it coming as soon as midjourney v1 released.

Working for mobile games is only good for maybe 1-2 years to build up a portfolio, but it’s definitely not a long term thing.

I would love to know OPs hourly rate in that studio. I guarantee it’s minimal wage, given how mobile game studios tend to pay their employees

21

allbirdssongs

•

2y ago

yeah issue is that its hard to actually produce a portfolio WHILE wasting your energy in a studio that forces you to do awful tasteless work, you have to put in the hours after the work, i really think its better not to join that industry in the first place, i met many 2D artists that simply burned their life away on those meh companies

4

u/bASEDGG avatar

bASEDGG

•

2y ago

Yeah true, work like that can be really draining.

Heres to hoping that the assets he or she made at the job pre midjourney are of good quality and portfolio-worthy

1

voinekku

•

2y ago

That's precisely what brings in the big bucks in capitalism, and when all the control is in the hands of people who care about nothing but the big bucks, that's what it produces. Everything is in an unending spiral towards being more and more cheap and soulless.

6

[deleted]

•

2y ago

People will be creative in their spare time, not on the job. But...the idea is soon nobody will need to work.

3

Humble_Tea1529

•

2y ago

bro I wish this is where we are actually heading

1

2 replies

allbirdssongs

•

2y ago

mobile games are so mindtwisted, they are mass produced and mass generated just so companies can make clients addicted and take money out of them. which in return makes souless consumers that cannot think either, when you think it that way is very zombie like system.

1

DrawChrisDraw

•

2y ago

That sucks man. It's hard for me to not resent the people that made this new technology. For them, it was a cool science project, but for artists it's like someone released an invasive species into the ecosystem.

155

u/VertexMachine avatar

VertexMachine

•

2y ago

Now the polite society learnt what "not important" masses of people felt when their job were automated or outsourced for last 100 years...

At the end making AIs will be automated too :P

48

justjanne

•

2y ago

Making AIs — software development — was actually the first part where this automation happened. With the smart autocomplete and refactoring of resharper years ago, then followed by copilot. Software development changes all the time, constantly moving one level higher on the abstraction ladder.

9

Tyler_Zoro

•

2y ago

At the end making AIs will be automated too

I for one welcome my vacation. Let the AIs do the hard work and we'll tell stories and dream up the future.

-3

Gluebluehue

•

2y ago

You can't dream or tell stories if you're starving and struggling to pay the bills.

The advancement of AI isn't coming along with economic changes where there's universal income or we ditch money all together. I love how people are so pumped about it because AI will free us to "do what we want" as if it were also bringing us a paycheck for just existing but it's just not even a strong talking point in most political agendas.

8

Continue this thread

u/zellyman avatar

zellyman

•

2y ago

Gonna be hard to have a vacation if you don't have income lmao.

3

Continue this thread

[deleted]

•

2y ago

SerMattzio3D

•

2y ago

I think you're giving them too much credit. The people that are making this tech are purposefully designing it to remove human creativity from art.

They're usually pretty well off, being paid by large companies to screw the little guy and cut jobs of talented people. I think they're quite loathsome individuals to make these "developments" with that purpose in mind, actually.

I've spoken to a lot of software engineers who find this sort of stuff unethical, especially when it steals from other people's work to "train" the AI.

12

No_Doc_Here

•

2y ago

We software people feel the pressure ourselves (or at least people are uneasy about where this is headed). Most of us are not AI/ML experts after all but develop boring business software.

These things are really good at creating software code as well and who knows what constitutes "good enough" for many classical software development jobs.

Judging from history "ethics" will do very little to stop the proliferation of genuinely helpful technology, so society will have to find a way to work with it.

6

u/CleverReversal avatar

CleverReversal

•

2y ago

The people that are making this tech are purposefully designing it to remove human creativity from art.

Do you really think there's a software design requirements document out there somewhere that lists this a required feature? I don't.

4

[deleted]

•

2y ago

Then you could argue that when humans get inspired from other artists in some sort of way they're also "stealing". AI learns from what it already exists, just like humans do.

2

Edarneor

•

2y ago

Ai doesn't learn anything - it's a math model that (in this case) is put together by some people using other people's work without permission.

The whole "ai learns just like humans" argument is just a smokescreen

3

[deleted]

•

2y ago

You don't understand how IA works. It learns. It might be without consciousness, but it does in a similar way the brain does (deep learning is modeled trying to mimic how the brain works).

While it is true that AI models are built using mathematical algorithms, they are designed to learn from data and adapt to new information, just like humans do. AI models are trained on large datasets through a process called machine learning, where the model uses statistical algorithms to identify patterns and make predictions based on the input data. Just like humans do through experience.

We can debate the ethics of the issue, but you need to understand that the way humans work ain't much different, but we just call it "inspiration" (which sounds nice) because we appreciate humans consciousness. If you browse Instagram/listen to music to get inspired, someone could argue you're just copying ideas to start "your own" ones, which is the same that IA is being accused of.

3

Continue this thread

u/KarmaIssues avatar

KarmaIssues

•

2y ago

A) AI learns, like definitionally learns. That's the whole point it's an optimisation process that learns what makes something better and uncovers links that humans can't, it then remembers and improves upon this. It absolutely does learn.

B) Copyrighting artists is indeed bad but most of the training data that these companies source is from publicly available sources.

2

Continue this thread

u/KarmaIssues avatar

KarmaIssues

•

2y ago

I think you're giving them too much credit. The people that are making this tech are purposefully designing it to remove human creativity from art.

It doesn't remove human creativity from art a human still has to come up with the concept and decide when it's good enough. It automates a part of the workflow not the entire thing.

1

RoboticAttention

•

2y ago

It is far from a "cool science project," it's very profound and technically challenging frontier of scientific/engineering endeavor

2

don_sley

•

2y ago

This is why I feel like artists or people who made this should have consciousness when creating stuff, its cool to them at least but there're always consequences even if its just a drawing

1

u/Galaxy01500 avatar

Galaxy01500

•

2y ago

They don't care what they create if it gives THEM chance to be on top and earn big money for themselves

Referring to AI creators

11

1 reply

BurnTheBoats21

•

2y ago

AI in general will advance technology in every way and we can't just abandon the benefits it will bring to our healthcare, infrastructure, etc to keep artists happy. jobs get replaced all the time, it's just their turn. We aren't going to regret it; we just need to process what this inflection point means for us as at a societal and a personal level.

-3

u/twicerighthand avatar

twicerighthand

•

2y ago

The only reason it came for art is because a mistake in art is still art but a mistake in healthcare or infrastructure is more serious and less forgiving

7

[deleted]

•

2y ago

wannabe2700

•

2y ago

It's back to the good old job of finding your food and water. All others are just a luxury.

1

1sagas1

•

2y ago

Going the way of the milk man, blacksmith, elevator operator, candlestick maker, and more. Resent all you want, you either adapt to progress or get out of the way

1

u/hoplahopla avatar

hoplahopla

•

2y ago

Well, when it happened to the working class the intellectual classes and the creatives were smirking and asking them to retrain and do something else

-2

u/Striking-Squash2044 avatar

Striking-Squash2044

•

2y ago

were they?

I didn't realize "just learn coding" was coming from the creatives

7

DS_3D

•

2y ago

Neiija

•

2y ago

Isn't AI art not copyrighted? I hoped this would slow companies down in using it commercially. But anyhow, this is a legit reason to look elsewhere. Especially bigger studios that use a full 3d pipeline have not jumped on this train just yet. Maybe for exploration, but not for asset creation. Of course nobody can say how long that holds up but for now, put yourself out there.

134

j03ch1p

•

2y ago

Lots of concept art never becomes public. So "AI art" (generated images) for concepting shoudln't be an issue.

81

Neiija

•

2y ago

Yes that's what i meant with for exploration. But in the post it sounds more like it's about final game assets

41

WhatsLeftofitanyway

•

2y ago

For many small companies, this usually doesn’t matter. Unless someone blows whistle big time or someone with extremely keen eye sees the asset used in final game to be infringing copyright, this will be just water under the bridge. And if you’re located in countries where copyright law is very different, like china?

30

Continue this thread

u/ImaginaryCheetah avatar

ImaginaryCheetah

•

2y ago

But in the post it sounds more like it's about final game assets

the sprites are the game asset.

the 3d model is source from which the sprites are generated, although they apparently go through some levels of touch-up and finishing post-render.

i would expect the sprites can easily maintain trademark.

edit// y'all keep downvoting me, meanwhile OP said "we make 3D models, just to render them and get 2D sprites for the engine"

0

u/Ruining_Ur_Synths avatar

Ruining_Ur_Synths

•

2y ago

It's actually a much bigger issue for concept art.

The parts of art that AI creates are not copyrightable. If you come up with a character and then have machine learning pose it, the pose and final image is not copyrightable.

If the machine learning algorithm is designing the character or locations for you, those locations and characters cannot be copyrighted. The concepts cannot be copyrighted.

Using AI to make production art of copyrighted characters and locations is much safer than using AI to do concepts.

The only issue is that the corporation or people involved may not disclose that AI was used in generating the concepts, and file copyright for the products of AIs even though they lack human authorship so are not eligible for copyright.

It's not the art itself, its the ideas.

7

j03ch1p

•

2y ago

Legally speaking this is all gray area. We speak as if there are guidelines but there aren't, yet.

Just because a comic that was entirely generated wasn't copyrightable doesn't mean it will be the same thing in complex pipelines over many iterations.

Also concept art will never be limited to prompting: there will always be paint-over, like it happens with photobashing.

6

Continue this thread

Tyler_Zoro

•

2y ago

The parts of art that AI creates are not copyrightable. If you come up with a character and then have machine learning pose it, the pose and final image is not copyrightable.

Cite specific precedent, please. The CO decision (which, I'll point out hasn't yet been tested in court) draws a very specific line around their decision based on the specifically human creativity involved. If you use AI art as a basis for a pipeline of development, then I don't think you can say that it's non-copyrightable any longer, based on the CO's ruling.

It's definitely arguable, and I wouldn't say that we can 100% know how the courts will rule, but it doesn't seem likely that we're going to turn copyright law upside down and claim that no amount of creative transformation of a non-copyrighted work can produce a copyrightable work.

That would be catastrophic for many existing uses of copyright, totally aside from AI.

2

Continue this thread

u/TomaszA3 avatar

TomaszA3

•

2y ago

the pose

Isn't it not copyrightable anyway? It sounds as ridiculous as copyrighting a color or a shape. Sequence of poses maybe, but a singular pose?

1

Continue this thread

GeheimerAccount

•

2y ago

you cant copyright the AI art itsself, but if you just use it for inspiration of course you can copyright the final character

15

u/ITwitchToo avatar

ITwitchToo

•

2y ago

If you just modify it enough from what the AI spat out it's a derived work which itself is copyrightable.

4

1 reply

Mefilius

•

2y ago

It can be, but it needs to be more than just the image that a prompt spit out. In this case it would be the post processing that OP is doing that may make it copyrightable.

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

autoencoder

•

2y ago

Even if the art assets aren't copyrightable, assembling them into a coherent, playable and attractive game probably is.

1

u/VertexMachine avatar

VertexMachine

•

2y ago

Especially bigger studios that use a full 3d pipeline have not jumped on this train just yet.

Hate to break your bubble: https://mobile.twitter.com/OverdrawXYZ/status/1604295021842337792

1

Tyler_Zoro

•

2y ago

Isn't AI art not copyrighted?

The copyright office in the US (note: the US is not the rest of the world) has deemed pure AI art to be non-copyrightable, and specifically pointed out that this is based on the assessment that there is insufficient creative work involved in its production ("creative" being specifically defined by the CO as human creativity).

But that doesn't mean that you can't create copyrighted works from AI output.

That being said, none of this has been tested in court, and it will likely be years or even decades before all of the nuance is sorted out.

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

The FCC ruled they aren’t protected by copyright

0

stuaxo

•

2y ago

It shouldn't be, but the way things are - how would you know, and I imagine there will be a lot using it anyway.

1

allbirdssongs

•

2y ago

there is no way to prove it.

1

smokewheathailsatin

•

2y ago

no this is a myth

1

shimapanlover

•

2y ago

It's the USCO that said it. They aren't Judges and they aren't lawmakers. It hasn't been tested in court.

Even than, the USCO said that modified AI Art can be copyrighted if it surpasses a threshold. Nobody knows at what point that is. Nobody knows if this will hold up in court, nobody knows if lawmakers will make laws before a single of the court cases get resolved.

IMO, many big companies are starting to offer AI Art or incorporate it. Most likely they will be lobbying lawmakers to make AI art copyrightable, since there is a lot of money behind it.

Until than, I still wouldn't copy AI art since you could become the first case someone wants to set precedent over - and saying the USCO said so isn't going to help you, a district court or even the supreme court won't care about what the USCO said.

1

u/CutterJohn avatar

CutterJohn

•

2y ago

Considering a photograph that you took zero effort in creating by purely pressing a button is copyrighted, I can't imagine that guiding an ai to deliver an image you want won't be.

1

Steven-Maturin

•

2y ago

Isn't AI art not copyrighted? I hoped this would slow companies down in using it commercially

For finished work sure. But for comps, its a game changer.

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

Isn't AI art not copyrighted

This is not settled law by any means, none of the cases that have been adjudicated actually challenged the idea that AI art lacks human authorship meaningfully.

In one of the cases the dude was some wacko that thought the AI was sentient. In the other copyright was initially granted, but later stripped, the guy involved in that case now has lawyers involved and is submitting additional claims to try to argue his position.

given that I have copyright on photos i take while absent mindedly tapping the shutter on my camera phone while waving it around as AI facial recognition systems adjust focus it seems likely that some circumstances will allow copyright for AI art.

1

1sagas1

•

2y ago

And hopefully our legislative system catches up and enables it to be copyrighted

1

u/MayoMusk avatar

MayoMusk

•

2y ago

Maybe a positive spin on it. Sounds like your job just got a lot easier which means you’ll have more free time to make your own 3d models that are even more interesting to you? I dunno just trying to help.

70

Shoddy_Employment954

•

2y ago

Or the boss will just expect more output faster

85

15 replies

coindrop

•

2y ago

he will still work the same number of hours, they will just spit out more games now and the hours will be longer because the creativity is gone.

76

u/VertexMachine avatar

VertexMachine

•

2y ago

yea, and also OP is most likely drained by the job he now makes :|

23

[deleted]

•

2y ago

Right. Technological advancements do nothing to help the workers. If something took you a week and now takes you 1 day, they'll hire 4 more artists to make up the difference and hit max output. All AI does is enable more output and make the job shittier for actual creatives. I loved the element of study and training that came with art. Now it's pointless.

In the future we're going to get 90% more Netflix level junk content generated by masses of "prompt engineers". It's sucks.

9

Awkward-Joke-5276

•

2y ago

That unhealthy

2

Barxxo

•

2y ago

you’ll have more free time

In the past things like that never happend although promised every time.They promised people had to work less when robots showed up everywhere.The opposite happened. Because a lot of people lost their jobs due to the robots the others had to work harder for less money. That's capitalism.

26

[deleted]

•

2y ago

This is different because this is labor replacement, not a tool that makes labor work more efficiently. It's a fundamentally very different thing.

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

This is the problem lol, it’s all about progress and doing things faster. Our endless need for “improvement” as a species will lead to our collapse

12

[deleted]

•

2y ago

if my two worker bees can double their output by means of AI tools, i might as well only employ one.

1

u/MayoMusk avatar

MayoMusk

•

2y ago

The more comfortable your workers are the lower your turnover rate will be. Adding stability and success to your company over time. And most likely profitability as your company grows because people are doing better work for you since they are enjoying their work.

But most managers arent wise enough to see past basic math.

1

u/Corax7 avatar

Corax7

•

2y ago

Or maybe if his job is easier, he will just be paid less and forced to do more work during a day than before?

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

u/PiterLine avatar

PiterLine

•

2y ago

My whole life I wanted to be an artist, I was never good at drawing, all I could do is some ok-ish doodles, at some point I discovered 3d art, and it all just clicked, I finally found something I was decent at, finally I started to see some hope for doing what I loved doing. I never thought I was going to be the best, but I also never thought that something I love so much was going to devolve into writing a prompt and getting a result possibly better than I'd ever be able to achieve. It's just depressing

57

mrhaluko23

•

2y ago

Same here bud. Its very depressing, but remember, we don't know what will happen, positive or negative.

9

u/PiterLine avatar

PiterLine

•

2y ago

I know, usually I'm hopelessly optimistic to my own detriment, but in this case, even if the future is never set in stone, we all can still see what's the most likely scenerio. The only thing we can really hope for is that the ones who actually care will keep going no matter how pointless it seems.

5

LordMarcusrax

•

2y ago

I'm going to say something really unpopular: as someone who can't draw a stick man but has a lot of ideas to put on paper, AI generated art has been a blessing for me.

1

u/PiterLine avatar

PiterLine

•

2y ago

I can understand that, I can't really draw anything I'm happy with. And that's why I moved to 3d, I just found it easier to make something I was happy with. I found a different way to express myself you're using a work around, both ways are valid. I'm not angry at people being able to express themselves, I'm just annoyed with 'human art' loosing value, as in how much is my work worth when an AI can imitate me, do it faster and probably better. And you know, even that would be fine, if not the fact that as I said, I wanted to do it as a job, and in the last months, with each passing day, that becomes more and more impossible, at least in the way most of us imagined it. I am honestly just really conflicted over this whole thing, it just depresses me.

1

darthmase

•

2y ago

as someone who can't draw a stick man but has a lot of ideas to put on paper, AI generated art has been a blessing for me

It's been often said in creative fields that ideas are cheap, literally anyone can have them. What kind of work are you doing that needs art so much, that you couldn't collaborate with an artist before, but can now do on your own with AI?

And finally... do you think of the finished work as something you did, a result of your creative process?

1

LordMarcusrax

•

2y ago

Point is, it's not a work at all: it's an hobby.

I roleplay as a master, I make no money from it.

1

darthmase

•

2y ago

I understand, and I agree that from a hobbyist point of view, it's and amazing thing (I myself am thinking of picking up game development as a hobby), but it's a problem when this mindset comes into the heads of bosses and CEO's, as creativity will suffer and productivity expectations will soar, while the pay will probably stay the same, if not decrease...

1

OmegaTSG

•

2y ago

You're missing out on the joy of creating. This is the real problem with AI for me. You could have experienced the process of learning all that and had a lot of fun and meaningful experiences through it - AI took that away

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

Unit27

•

2y ago

Use the time you save by using these AI prompts to send your resume to other companies. If they don't care about your work look elsewhere.

39

Gioware

•

2y ago

Soon there will be no "elsewhere" to look.

14

u/gvdjurre avatar

gvdjurre

•

2y ago

I don’t believe that’s the case. You just need to keep adapting, as you should have been doing from the start of your career.

If you want to keep up you will need to learn new workflows, software and tools all the time. That’s not new. This is the Blender subreddit for Ton’s sake. Blender single handedly made 3D design available for everyone.

That said, I feel OP should look for a job that actually makes use of their potential as a 3D artist. They’re still there you know.

1

RHOrpie

•

2y ago

I mean, this is no different to any career where you end up being pigeonholed into a job you didn't want to do.

The question to ask your boss is "How do I get back to 3D modelling again?". Make sure he's clear that's your passion and that you are happy to keep doing your current role because you understand that sometimes this is required. But that this isn't where you want your career to go.

If he can't get back to you with a plan... You're probably going to have to seek alternative employment.

Out of interest, can you maybe just ask to do some of the 3d work?

39

u/hoplahopla avatar

hoplahopla

•

2y ago

His problem at the moment is not employment, as he remains employed. It is the thing he loves doing being automated and taken over by AI.

13

AtoumMirtu

•

2y ago

I dont feel like seeking alternative employment would change anything if OP chooses to go to another technology/creative area, only handiwork or crafts can't be replaced (for now) it seems

6

AtoumMirtu

•

2y ago

I dont feel like seeking alternative employment would change anything if OP chooses to go to another technology/creative area, only handiwork or crafts can't be replaced (for now) it seems

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

Defiant_Source_8930

•

2y ago

Why do people say “i mean” at the start of their sentence. Like what’s the context of this comment here

1

RHOrpie

•

2y ago

Because for me, it adds gravitas to the statement. I hadn't considered it a sticking point tbh.

Why do you care?

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

The capitalists 'round these parts will just tell you this is "a great opportunity for you to move on to something better", because all outcomes are positive ones, or something to that effect.

Society rarely thinks about the devaluation of craft that comes along as a side effect of tech advancements. Some remain fortunate enough to eke out a living for discerning customers (high end woodworking is an example). Hopefully you can land on your feet!

32

Sternsafari

OP

•

2y ago

Thanks. It feels good to be understood. Even its not all happy and positive side effects.

11

u/dnew avatar

dnew

•

2y ago

You mean the devaluation of crafts like steam engine maintenance, horse shoe blacksmithing, grain milling, bank tellers and bookkeepers, things like that? This has been going on since the very concept of technology was invented. It's just happening faster now, because science builds on science.

6

u/the_Demongod avatar

the_Demongod

•

2y ago

We're talking about an artistic craft more comparable to someone like a jeweler or silversmith, not bank tellers

6

u/dnew avatar

dnew

•

2y ago

So? Why does that make a difference in therms of "devaluation of craft"? Wasn't scribing books a craft until the printing press came around? Wasn't blacksmithing a craft before injection molding became common? Wasn't maintaining or operating steam engines a craft, even if it wasn't artistic?

8

u/Striking-Squash2044 avatar

Striking-Squash2044

•

2y ago

yeah, I think we should conduct human experimentations too. human limbs are too weak, should just chop them off, and replace em with robotics

2

u/dnew avatar

dnew

•

2y ago

"I never asked for this."

0

Continue this thread

[deleted]

•

2y ago

u/onlyonebread avatar

onlyonebread

•

2y ago

I think it's just a pragmatic mindset to have. You're not going to reverse this or somehow not make the world function on capitalism. May we well understand where things are going and try and make the best of it.

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

learn to code

1

RogueStargun

•

2y ago

You do realize there are jobs with 3d modeling that isn't just focused on making 2d sprites right? We are at least 5 to 10 years away from AI being capable of spitting out fully rigged models with correct topology (or coming up with an alternative to catmull Clark subdivision based mesh rendering altogether)

30

u/shieldy_guy avatar

shieldy_guy

•

2y ago

I give it 1 year

48

[deleted]

•

2y ago

From the things I’ve seen it’s 3 months away

24

[deleted]

•

2y ago

Source?

-3

Continue this thread

iHubble

•

2y ago

You guys are vastly underestimating how complex and tedious the process of generating high-fidelity, UV-mapped, riggable 3D meshes really is. There’s a world of difference in quality between the output of marching cubes (e.g. DreamBooth, Magic3D) and what a talented artist could model with subdivision surfaces, the former being absolutely useless as a production asset. I think 5 years is a lot more realistic.

1

u/shieldy_guy avatar

shieldy_guy

•

2y ago

If we're talking about how long until 3D artists are replaced, then I'd say never. but I'll also bet that in 1 year, we'll have tools to model, texture, and rig from a single image or prompt, and it'll be pretty good.

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

remindme! 6 months

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

u/kitanokikori avatar

kitanokikori

•

2y ago

Five years? Fam it's already here. If you think this can't be advanced quickly and that rigging and correct topology will be a moat, you haven't been paying attention to the insanely fast rate of progress that AI has been making

4

1 reply

cerebralvision

•

2y ago

This might peak your interest. GPT-4 integration into blender.

https://twitter.com/gd3kr/status/1638149299925307392?t=0WG6Pv-C6j0Wr4Z_Gjlklw&s=19

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

u/Gluomme avatar

Gluomme

•

2y ago

Give it two years, TOPS.

1

u/lavalyynx avatar

lavalyynx

•

2y ago

Agree with 3d modelling specific jobs. But I think there will be good ai assisted modelling very soon - in like 6 months. Anyways ai also has to learn from somewhere, right?

1

u/lillybaeum avatar

lillybaeum

•

2y ago

Look into Objaverse for the capability of AI in the 3D space.

1

Brudaks

•

2y ago

I'd give it one year or less - and the deciding factor for the speed of developing that tech is not some fundamental advances but rather a guess for when someone will care enough to put in the (not that huge) effort to make a custom model for such a relatively niche use case.

This Twitter thread was interesting and relevant - https://twitter.com/sleepinyourhat/status/1638988283018465300 - you may discard it because the drawn unicorn is crude, but you shouldn't, it's an example of "drilling with a saw" that shows that even an uncustomized text model (which has literally never ever "seen" a single image) can generate vector shapes for some concept; and it can also spew out Blender commands to create 3d shapes even without any fine-tuning on that.

IMHO all that is needed to spit out rigged 3D models with mostly-correct topology is taking the existing tech and giving a few engineers a few months (if there would be volunteers or some investors for that), and the reason we don't have it today is that nobody has given it a solid attempt yet based on GPT-4 scale models.

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

dashrendar4483

•

2y ago

It's depressing and I hate people that are all giddy about AI generated "artwork"so they can act all superior now that AI can make them feel better than talented artists that went through the whole process of learning their craft. The techbros who created that AI clearly aren't artists and hate artists. Of course, those clients and exploiters who hate to pay artists for their workload are over the moon.

Artists get no respect in general and AI just put a nail in their coffin while exploiting their existing artworks without credits to generate content replacing them without any artistic and personal craft behind.

30

DeRoeVanZwartePiet

•

2y ago

Artists may be the first, but they will certainly not be the last.

I'm a programmer. And where the likes of ChatGPT are heading too, the future for programmers is looking grim as well. And the worst part is, we are helping those AI to get better and better ourselves. Without realising.

23

thomasbatey

•

2y ago

"The techbros who created that AI clearly aren't artists and hate artists" "I hate people that are all giddy about AI generated "artwork"" So for you everything is about "hate and be hated"?! I thought artists were not so short-sighted...

0

saltysnatch

•

2y ago

I am giddy that more people will be forced to choose class solidarity

1

Soibi0gn

•

2y ago

CheckMateFluff

•

2y ago

[deleted]

•

2y ago

its factory workers vs. robots all over again, but now with artists.

(also weavers vs. weaving chairs)

(also fire running keepers vs. fire stone users)

Whats so evil about it is that the owners of everything always make a profit of it and give a sh*t about the damage they cause in the societies.

26

u/CheckMateFluff avatar

CheckMateFluff

•

2y ago

If removing labor from a society damages it then maybe we should be looking at why the society is designed that way.

38

[deleted]

•

2y ago

Humans have always and will always tie resource ownership / value to "worth" (thus the infamous "we feed you" capitalism pyramid painting, which remains as true now as it ever has been). No society has functioned for very long, if ever, under any other circumstance.

In our society, the problem continues to be that while tech advancements have made it so that we can theoretically support a significant percentage of unemployed, our greed continues to demand that if your passions can't be monetized, they aren't worth pursuing. Unless you're already wealthy through some other means.

12

u/CheckMateFluff avatar

CheckMateFluff

•

2y ago

There are many other societies that have better social net falls and place more value on the fact an individual can work rather than how much they do work. That place is 100%, not the USA but it could be if we all decided it was better to value each other instead of fighting over arbitrary issues.

And on the flip side, just because one avenue of exploitation has closed doesn't mean that another will not open. Artists have been used and abused for so long that we forget that this was also supposed to be a passion.

Ultimately society will have to give or collapse at some point. I know it make people angry when its mentioned but a UBI would fix almost all the automation issues afflicting society today.

13

Continue this thread

[deleted]

•

2y ago

No society has ever been automated as much as it is becoming to be either. You can't base outcomes of things that didn't work in the past if the past is significantly different than the present. Capitalism will die when everything is automated no matter how bad the rich want it to stay.

1

Continue this thread

[deleted]

•

2y ago

yes. indeed. we should !

3

mrhaluko23

•

2y ago

I feel that unless humans give themselves something to do, they feel they have no purpose. Many people's purpose in life comes through hard work and labour, mine comes from making art. We're all different, but the through-line seems to be some form of a healthy work hard/play hard is what we want innately.

0

[deleted]

•

2y ago

Talented people will always complain when there is an easier way to do what they do.

This isn’t just with AI… workers have been and will continue to be laid off because a machine can automate the process they do for hundreds of years now.

Consider “getting with the times” since it’s been hundreds of years… I was a painter. You know how many interior decorators started making their own “accent art” after social media exploded? All of them. It’s bullshit and their painting are trash, but people love it because it’s EASY.

25

[deleted]

•

2y ago

Just wondering, what do you do now?

4

[deleted]

•

2y ago

Baron_Samedi_

•

2y ago

Man, I feel you.

I have been spending time on a project that includes AI generated outputs, lately. Prompt > refine > photoshop > img2img... The process takes all the fucking fun and sparkle out of art, making it nothing more than mindless drudgery, and also making me feel like I am just an appendage to an AI.

Fuck AI "art".

17

Edarneor

•

2y ago

I agree, this is stupid. Artists shouldn't be cleaning up after the AI, it should be cleaning after the artists, if at all

10

KananDoom

•

2y ago

When we find out which company, if their assets were made w AI, we can straight up use them in our own projects. You can’t copyright AI output.

16

u/muyuu avatar

muyuu

•

2y ago

edited AI output is no different from retouching pictures or using stock assets as the base for some work

6

KananDoom

•

2y ago

Do you work in the industry? If you did then you would know all those assets cost the company money to use (unless fair use). Stock assets cost money, photos to retouch have photographers who took them, all have IP associated with them. Every shot in every show you watch has an office keeping a log of where every shot comes from. So yah, there’s a big difference.

2

Dark_Al_97

•

2y ago

Good luck proving that in court.

0

u/muyuu avatar

muyuu

•

2y ago

indeed, good luck proving the assets you just brazenly took from some company were, even partly, AI generated

3

majeric

•

2y ago

Midjourney might be able to produce the texturing for your models, however, literally EVERYTHING else you would have to do yourself. Midjourney doesn't do 3D modelling. It doesn't do sculpting. It doesn't do rigging.

It would maybe speed up what 20% of your workflow. Replace some of what Substance Painter does for you.

And honestly, I have a hard time believing that Midjourney actually speeds up the workflow of Substance Painter.

I've got 20 Years of game development under my belt.

20

u/bASEDGG avatar

bASEDGG

•

2y ago

AI might not be able to do sculpting or rigging YET, but it’s dumb to think that ai won’t develop rapidly and take care of that also.

Look at all the AI tools Nvidia is pumping out. Auto rigs have been a thing for years too and they aren’t AI based.

Only hope we have that some companies see it as a good idea to switch to a 4 day work week and that the gaming and VFX industry doesn’t have as many crunch times anymore.

One can only hope, right?

22

allbirdssongs

•

2y ago

you are literally asking for a controlled capitalism, and that exists, as far as i am aware, some countries liek sweeded are already there, go live there, they are the happiest ppl on earth too btw

1

u/bASEDGG avatar

bASEDGG

•

2y ago

I think you understood my comment wrong.

Can you elaborate further on how my comment is asking for a "controlled capitalism"? What definition of "controlled capitalism" do you use? Do you mean state capitalism?

2

Continue this thread

majeric

•

2y ago

Yes, where’s the outrage for auto-rigging tools taking away jobs from people who can do rigging?

0

u/kitanokikori avatar

kitanokikori

•

2y ago

OP was using Blender to generate 2D assets, in his case Midjourney speeds them up because they skip the 3D step entirely

5

majeric

•

2y ago

But it can’t generate images consistently from image to image.

3

[deleted]

•

2y ago

ZestyData

•

2y ago

..yet

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

Midjourney might be able to produce the texturing for your models

I pray for this day

1

majeric

•

2y ago

There is a texture site that I saw that's completely AI generated. Here it is.

1

u/jrdidriks avatar

jrdidriks

•

2y ago

Under our current capitalist system, the profit motive will not let these ai tools be used for anything but undercutting artists. Which is a real shame because without that context I think the technology is just amazing. Sorry this happened to you. Don’t lose the joy of practicing your work even though you may not be compensated for it in the same way.

14

u/dnew avatar

dnew

•

2y ago

Nonsense. You can use the tools for anything you want. The problem here isn't "capitalism" but "free market." If someone else can provide more value for the same cost, you buy it.

Have you stopped buying mass-produced consumer good? Do you buy plates by the boxload from Sears, or do you find a local potter to spin you a dozen dinner plates by hand?

-4

u/jrdidriks avatar

jrdidriks

•

2y ago

The situation you just described is a problem. It’s bad. People’s livelihoods shouldn’t be tethered to a race to the bottom in the pursuit of profits. Also here’s a free tip: try being less condescending

7

u/dnew avatar

dnew

•

2y ago

I'm not being condescending. I'm pointing out the errors in your statements.

The situation is a problem. However, violently forcing people to work for the benefit of others without any choice in the matter is also a problem. Life is rough, and the universe is unfair, and always has been. Complaining that it's unfair to you doesn't make me obligated to fix that for you.

Your livelihood isn't tethered to a race to the bottom. That's only the case when you refuse to adapt to changes and take control of your own life.

What's your suggestion? Require the boss to pay his employees more money than they bring into the business? Prevent competition from finding more efficient ways to reach their goals? I'm honestly interested in hearing how you plan to eliminate people losing their jobs when it's replaced by technology, because we already have a derogatory word for that.

It's super-duper easy to say "you're evil because your best solution isn't ideal for everyone" as long as you don't have to yourself come up with the ideal solution.

-1

u/jrdidriks avatar

jrdidriks

•

2y ago

Oh so you agree, you just think there’s no better alternative. So ur not only condescending ur very unimaginative. That’s a pity.

4

Continue this thread

[deleted]

•

2y ago

The vast majority of people work jobs that aren't fun or fulfilling to pay the bills. That's just the nature of work, and it's happened a million times before to people who turn their hobby into their job; the necessity of the work drains the fun out of it.

13

iszomer

•

2y ago

A part of me no longer wants to put any artistic content online ever again to be freely scraped by an AI. Then again, I wonder if we would adapt a workflow to include controversial topics in steganographic form to non-controversial art to simply poison the well..

13

Edarneor

•

2y ago

Have you tried https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/

There are conflicting accounts on whether it works against training AIs, but might be worth trying

6

6 replies

baronvonredd

•

2y ago

Your perspective needs adjustment.

You are an employee for a company that wants to make money. They hired you as a technical expert to help achieve their goals. You do that by the most cost efficient, time efficient way possible.

You get your joy at work from pleasing your employers, and getting paid.

If you want joy, you need to get that with side projects and self-lead learning.

Never put your expectations in your employed work, you will forever feel used, disrespected, and empty.

This has always always been the case. You're just learning it now.

12

Sternsafari

OP

•

2y ago

You have a point. I just realised the way I get my self esteem and joy as an artist coincidentally matches with my duty as an employee. And thats quite a risky match.

19

4 replies

Odd-Way-2167

•

2y ago

Much like being a hired gun in a band. Just there to play the music amd act enthused about it. The creative expression comes from doing your own thing on the side, while cashing the checks from the main.

11

1 reply

[deleted]

•

2y ago

[deleted]

•

2y ago

You are not teaching anything but your own dreary perspective

6

[deleted]

•

2y ago

and from what perspective can anyone ever teach if not their own?

1

2 replies

HistoricallyFunny

•

2y ago

find creative ways to use the AI.

Since consistency is a problem, perhaps using 3d models with AI created textures could offer an advantage. (as an example)

When change happens, look for the new opportunities it offers. Because its new ,there are many new ways to be creative. Look for them.

11

saltedgig

•

2y ago

give him 3 example as it did not do justice by saying look for them.

8

randytayler

•

2y ago

Someday soon there will surely be "Certified Zero AI Contribution" labels.

Like an "Organic" label for art and games and music and writing.

11

thomasbatey

•

2y ago

But the demand will be incredibly tiny compared to the supply. Luckily I can see Universal Guaranteed Income being fast tracked now

3

3 replies

aggibridges

•

2y ago

I’m so, so sorry. Sending you many hugs.

11

Sternsafari

OP

•

2y ago

❤️

8

[deleted]

•

2y ago

u/LittleLoyal16 avatar

LittleLoyal16

•

2y ago

Damn... :( I think many people who write as a job (translators, speechwriters, copywriters, etc.) are probably also getting the shit end of the stick like this. Everything can just be quickly done with AI such as ChatGPT and then they just have to quickly check if its good enough... AI will take the actual fun and challenging parts of creating and leave us with the boring cleanup...

10

[deleted]

•

2y ago

6 replies

Turbulent-Bat

•

2y ago

Why was the pipeline in 3D to begin with if it’s so easy to replace with 2d images?

9

Sternsafari

OP

•

2y ago

We did 3D models to be able to animate and have shots from all angles. But in the end we place 2D sprites in the engine.

I am not in the company from the founding/beginning, but as far as I know the reason is, the guys founding were 3D artists and programmers, so they decided to make a 2D game with 3D as a tool to get better and editable results, at any point in the pipeline. They had no experience in creating 2D art. They kept it that way until now, as the new tool (AI) gives way faster results.

Games like clash of clans for example are built exactly that way. 3D as a tool, 2D ingame.

9

Turbulent-Bat

•

2y ago

How does mid journey give you consistent angles like in 3D?

20

IgnisIncendio

•

2y ago

Right, I’m suspicious. From my experience AI is not consistent.

3

Continue this thread

u/a_cloud_moving_by avatar

a_cloud_moving_by

•

2y ago

There are now AI tools where you can give it a 2D sprite and it will generate other angles. It’s surprisingly good. I’m an artist and I’m definitely with OP on this one— some (many) parts of the process that artist love will now be replaced by prompting AI

1

Continue this thread

u/man-vs-spider avatar

man-vs-spider

•

2y ago

That’s how donkey kong 64 was made, it not that unusual as a workflow

8

u/muyuu avatar

muyuu

•

2y ago

yea that was around the time it started becoming common

first time I saw it was Rise of the Robots in the mid 90s and Donkey Kong Country around that time as well

later I saw that other titles had used it like "The 7th Guest" for CD-i and Windows, and a rather obscure Sharp X68000 game "The Ancient Land of Ys" (what must be the very oldest game using that technique as early as the 80s - that machine was truly ahead of its time, it was like the Amiga on steroids and if you like the classic games RType and Rygar, you need to witness the X68000 versions)

2

[deleted]

•

2y ago

This is heartbreaking we need to take strict actions against ai otherwise we would be doomed

9

u/Purplekeyboard avatar

Purplekeyboard

•

2y ago

And what about machinery? Machines have been stealing our jobs for years. We must take action. Smash all the machines!

3

[deleted]

•

2y ago

Fuck off mfer, atleast it took us 4-5 years learning a medium we are not noobs like ai mfers who just type some words fuck you idiot think twice before commenting

1

u/Purplekeyboard avatar

Purplekeyboard

•

2y ago

Bow down to your AI overlords.

1

Education-Sea

•

2y ago

lol thanks for this

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

u/AdecoyanaII avatar

AdecoyanaII

•

2y ago

this is very fucking grim.

8

thomasbatey

•

2y ago

Yet normal. It's called progress, whether some like it or not. As long as you're an employee, you're at the mercy of your boss and the work environment.

0

u/flaviusb avatar

flaviusb

•

2y ago

This is the perfect example of how these systems are a gun pointed at the head of labour, and that part of how it works is by eliminating the quality premium.

8

u/patrlim1 avatar

patrlim1

•

2y ago

Take your portfolio of 3d assets and apply to a bigger studio, one where your work will be appreciated and respected.

8

voinekku

•

2y ago

Welcome to capitalism and worker alienation.

What you describe has happened to pretty much everything people used to love to do and to take pride in as their work since 1800s. It feels dystopian, because it is, and always has been.

8

u/TNicksJimsko avatar

TNicksJimsko

•

2y ago

Difference is at least you had like a decade to adapt. You still had ownership over your own face, your voice and your life.

Now your features are everyone’s commodity. Just look at the Atrioc situation where he generated porn with someone’s face who didn’t consent to it

Goes to show that the only thing we “learn” about history is how to make things even worse

4

2 replies

1 reply

maxoakland

•

2y ago

That sucks. This is why I hate generative AI. Civilized countries should ban it

6

2 replies

Aetherial_Edge

•

2y ago

It's certainly been disheartening, especially with all the AI news this week. It definitly feels like they're spitting in artist faces with this... Though your situation seems a little more unique since your going a roundabout way of making 2D sprites. I don't think what they currently spit out would be acceptable enough for normal 3D games. Atleast character wise, they might be able to get away with it in the environment.

5

u/LoganVArts avatar

LoganVArts

•

2y ago

The problem is this is unfortunately happening everywhere and the law makers are too slow to react. I also truly feel lost with Art as a whole and will only continue to do personal projects. But the passion for turning it into a career is gone until more changes happen..

5

u/Phage0070 avatar

Phage0070

•

2y ago

This advantage is gone, and so is my hope for using my own creative energy to create.

All this has revealed is that your skills are now not being fully employed in your current job. You don't need to model and rig a 3D character in order to create 2D sprites for a game, so your ability to do so is no longer useful.... for that job.

The only thing that has changed here is that your job no longer is the same as your passion. Find a new job that is what you want to do, it is as simple as that.

But leaving a company and a nice team, because AI took my job feels very dystopian. Idoubt it would be better in a different company also.

The advantage you have is that you still have your current job in the meantime. Some people lose their jobs and need to learn entirely new trades, you just had your job shift into something you aren't truly passionate about.

5

[deleted]

•

2y ago

u/TimSimpson avatar

TimSimpson

•

2y ago

First, I want to say that I'm sorry that you're experiencing this.

Your story reminds me a lot of an account I heard a few weeks ago about a young 20-something typesetter in the late 90's. He adored that work, and the advent of digital publishing absolutely crushed his love for that industry, because he really valued the tactile nature of it, and the transition to digital had none of what he loved about his previous job. In the end, I believe he ended up going to be a carpenter and had some success with that.

As an artist who has worked in a bunch of different industries and mediums over the years and is now DEEP into the generative AI ecosystem, I'm not going to sit here and say that you should just embrace the change without consideration, because that would be cruel, and it's entirely possible that particular aspects of your craft that you loved may not make the transition, and I'm truly sorry about that.

However, I'd encourage you to step out of the comparative lens here (particularly comparing yourself to your coworker) and recognize that your medium isn't the end all, be all. Your vision as an artist is. If you get good at using AI in your workflows, it can be molded and shaped almost as precisely as any other tool. These tools are like languages, with certain dialects being better suited to express particular concepts than others. And like languages, some of them are more useful in certain contexts than others for various reasons. And until we get true AGI, I'm very skeptical of the claims that artists will ever actually be fully replaced.

I'd take some time to further explore these tools beyond just what you immediately need for your job and see if there's anything there that sparks your imagination the way that modeling did originally. In particular, there's a whole host of artistic possibilities with Stable Diffusion, its extensions, and the world of fine-tuning. You may find that you just feel limited by Midjourney, and that having more control helps you regain that sense of professional competence that you feel you've lost touch with.

On the other hand, you may find that there's some other intangible aspect of your work that doesn't translate to these new mediums, and you may end up wanting to look for a different job that can still scratch that itch.

At the end of the day, I don't know you, and that's something you'll have to explore and decide about on your own. I just wanted to comment and offer some encouragement since you seemed pretty despondent, regardless of what path you end up taking.

P.S. If you want help finding good resources for Stable Diffusion or even just want a lay of the current generative AI landscape (idk how plugged into all of it you are), my DMs are open, and I'll be happy to help you find what you need.

5

u/TreviTyger avatar

TreviTyger

•

2y ago

It's potentially corporate and career suicide to use AI works as there is no copyright protection. This is likely why Disney are not developing their own AI systems for generated assets even though they have the catalogue of exclusively owned works to do so. (Even then they'd have to revisit exclusive licensing agreements to account for new technologies).

No business that relies on IP as it's main product is going to survive for long by using unprotected works as their business foundation.

Most start-ups fail. If Disney used AI to make Steamboat Willie then Disney wouldn't exist.

More info on the dangers to professionals and businesses here (link) in the pod cast featuring Attorney Franklin Graves.

https://www.reddit.com/r/COPYRIGHT/comments/11dejx6/nice51_artificial_intelligence_ai_copyright_and/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Use AI at your own risk, is the appropriate maxim.

3

u/TimSimpson avatar

TimSimpson

•

2y ago

Oh hi, Trevor! Nice to see that you followed me over to Reddit from Twitter. Enjoy your block. Again... For the third time...

For anyone else who sees this comment, Trevor likes to spread misinformation about how copyright works. In reality, AI copyright is primarily an issue if you are attempting to register the raw output of a prompt-only generation. Any additional transformation or arrangement of the generated assets is copyrightable, making this a non-issue for studios using them for base assets. It's also currently being decided at this time whether raw generations made using techniques like IMG2IMG or Control Net involve enough human direction to qualify for copyright on their own. We will likely find out by the end of the summer.

The actual quote from the Copyright Office was that it,

will register works that contain otherwise unprotectable material that has been edited, modified, or otherwise revised by a human author

The copyright office decision regarding Zarya of the Dawn made it where the raw generations themselves are public domain, but that doesn't mean that those images become copyleft, turning all works they're used in into public domain works themselves. That would be very cool and good, but that's not how it works.

That being said, there are no copyright issues for the end users caused by the training data of the models themselves, though it may end up being an issue for the base model CREATORS, like Stability AI (It's unlikely to be the case, but is currently being litigated). The outputs are transformative enough for that not to cause issues for the end users.

In conclusion, what OP was doing with the MJ assets is totally in the clear, legally speaking, and there generally isn't a reason to worry about copyright when using AI unless you're attempting to replicate existing works or something that would also get you in trouble in any other medium.

Edit: Its always fun when internet stalkers keep popping up on alt accounts after you block them repeatedly.

Get some help, Trevor.

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

u/BatAccomplished6878 avatar

BatAccomplished6878

•

10mo ago

I resonate with the idea that "Recognize that your medium isn't the end all, be all. Your vision as an artist is. If you get good at using AI in your workflows, it can be molded and shaped almost as precisely as any other tool."

However, I think the challenge with AI is that the change to the artistic process isn't incremental, it's qualitative.

I imagine if AI was applied to music making like it is in Art, then as a musician you could simply type in a prompt like "write me a ballad about love", and it would pop out a fully-fleshed song with lyrics and instrumentals, all with high or higher than studio production quality.

Sure, I could then sculpt or tweak this song.

But that's a very different process, akin to an editor or producer.

Musicians that enjoy the process of actually making their music (playing their instruments) wouldn't see that as a new tool (instrument) to make music, but rather a replacement of their instrument.

Similarly, artists that enjoy the process of actually making their art have less paid opportunity to do so when using a tool like AI.

The problem isn't about your vision as an artist. It's more like with AI, making art is turning into Netflix — you type in what you want, and it spits out the thing you want to see. So there is some removal of the process of actually creating your own vision.

1

u/CanIPleaseScream avatar

CanIPleaseScream

•

2y ago

it goes without saying that you are better at using AI than most people but even then the skillfloor to using AI to generate "art" is sooo low and that sucks

4

20 replies

ElementalXLobster

•

2y ago

Honestly, AI art needs to be banned. It’s KILLING HUMAN ARTISTS.

4

[deleted]

•

2y ago

I say it should be taxed. That's the best way to limit its use without outright banning it.

2

thomasbatey

•

2y ago

I like AI art. To each their own.

2

u/nxwtypx avatar

nxwtypx

•

2y ago

I've prompted at least 14,308 images out of stable diffusion. What's my body count?

1

ElementalXLobster

•

2y ago

Funni meme now the adults talk🤮

4

1 reply

u/Somewhatacceptable24 avatar

Somewhatacceptable24

•

2y ago

Listen. All you assholes are making a huge deal out of AI for no reason. Take mathematicians. They survived the invention of the calculator, their lives made better by it. Horses; after cars became widespread, horses survived and thrive. It’s not killing human artists; it’s changing their lives. For the better. There’s a million examples of this and you should really stop yelling about it.

Just fyi this is a message I’m copying and pasting for when it seems needed; it’s annoying to have to type a response out like this.

-2

ElementalXLobster

•

2y ago

Nope.

4

u/Somewhatacceptable24 avatar

Somewhatacceptable24

•

2y ago

What do you mean by nope?

2

ElementalXLobster

•

2y ago

AI is killing human art jobs, did you not read OP’s post? I’m also a developer and I hate the concept of AI art. It’s WAY overstayed it’s welcome and it’s time for it to be banned.

5

Continue this thread

u/Somewhatacceptable24 avatar

Somewhatacceptable24

•

2y ago

Oh and by the way with the amount of time you took there’s no way you read it all and thought it out. Maybe think about what I’m trying to say?

1

u/Somewhatacceptable24 avatar

Somewhatacceptable24

•

2y ago

Oh my fucking god PLEASE stop blowing up my notifications abt this, I don’t have the time or energy to deal with this.

1

thomasbatey

•

2y ago

LoL

1

u/Somewhatacceptable24 avatar

Somewhatacceptable24

•

2y ago

Yeah it’s really annoying

1

thomasbatey

•

2y ago

This is not wrong.

1

u/Somewhatacceptable24 avatar

Somewhatacceptable24

•

2y ago

THANK you.

1

foxping

•

2y ago

After the current hype of AI is done, and everybody finds the next thing to get hyped about, your team, your boss will realise that it's was never about just pushing good looking images that a person's worth was, it was the vision that they bought to the table.

Your worth as an artist will be realised, not now but the time will come soon. What you can do till then is to make yourself as a great artist that any robot can not replace you. and by greatness I don't just mean being able to push out content faster than anybody else or make pretty things. be a visionary. be something that a robot can never be. Be great.

You will find a better place to express yourself, your work and everything that you want to build.

4

mixxituk

•

2y ago

one day midjourney will only being fed by midjourney and then mankinds creativity will stop

4

u/7734128 avatar

7734128

•

2y ago

Imagine that a person creates hundreds of images via for example Midjourney. 14 of those are upvoted, liked or spread quite wide on social media, and thereby end up in the training data for the next iteration.

There is naturally a lot of randomness in the generated images.

This would essentially be human reinforced training, which would not essentially suffer from the fact that the training data was created by AI.

Current models would overfit if directly trained on all the previously generated images. I don't see how that would happen if human rating was involved?

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

SpaceGazebo

•

2y ago

Hang in there, OP! I'm a graphic designer and it's a weird moment for creatives right now, but... like with anything in life we'll adapt and overcome. Don't give up on what sounds like a dream situation over this!

4

Lithium321

•

2y ago

Telegraph operators will adapt and overcome!

2

[deleted]

•

2y ago

Yes, it's called the phone, the internet and both allowed my brother to work from home, and the latter allowed me to do my job as well as I work for a company that's from a different country. Not sure if trolling or actually stupid.

2

u/Incomitatum avatar

Incomitatum

•

2y ago

I've had 5 people PM me, just today with this Thread and Image.

I've been trying to give them healthy frames of mind. Some are real-close to the tip of the spear on this, and feel more affected by these developments than others.

I am a creator and producer of Multimedia, focused on Concepting, Illustration and Animation. After business-development, It's what I've centered my Studio around.

While I am not against employing AI in the gaps, helping it speed up parts of the pipeline: I have no intention of giving it control of creating entire Outcomes and Art.

In Employment and much of Marketing it is imperative that we polarize, and "create Distinction". I am counciling my peers to not worry about these developments, and to focus their Craft now on the thoughtful-humanity they put into their Processes.

Do not be discouraged. Use this to speak even more deeply about your Art, how you see the world, and your process. If you weren't used to speaking intelligently about your Craft and your way of seeing the world now is your start.

How can we use this to show off the Humanity of our visions and desires?

For now, I see it as the difference between Fast Food and a Home Cooked meal.

In this way, I see us gathering entire Cabals of artists who are proudly NOT powered by Ai.

I don't think the Tech is "evil", but man IS going to use it for Exploitation (for Capitalistic Reasons).

For now; double down on your WHY: what MAKES (enCourages) you to be creative? How do you demystify your Process so we can fall in love with your Humanity? "Creation, is a holy act".

((Do not think this is an Endorsement of AI in general, I just refuse to live in Fear of it, and believe that my "career" is over)).

4

thomasbatey

•

2y ago

The thing is, healthy or not, a lot of people LOVE fast food

1

u/zwburger avatar

zwburger

•

2y ago

It’s time to find an employer who respects what you do as a 3D artist, as a human, and most of all, as an employee.

As a copywriter and blogger, the future is uncertain on my end as well, but there will still be companies and employees who respect the work you put in.

4

Noobzoid123

•

2y ago

Familiarity with these tools is a great skill to have. U must seperate your job and passion. For passion projects you do at home. This is how I found my peace.

3

[deleted]

•

2y ago

u/Equationist avatar

Equationist

•

2y ago

I'm really sorry about this. Ideally we'd have AI-based tooling that makes it easier to sculpt and paint - instead we're stuck with tooling that translates text based prompts into pictures. Unfortunately, all the readymade training data for AI is in the form of text captions, so we're stuck with text-based interfaces to AI that lose the physical connection of crafting art.

3

soultogetherla

•

2y ago

My suggestion is to put that care into your own art work, but when at work.. follow the rules or take flight. While the position is creative, it's a job that is connected to a company that must investigate/implement new trends/tools in order to stay competitive. I hear your pain though.

3

u/DavidJelloFox avatar

DavidJelloFox

•

2y ago

The real horror about ai art is when everyone stops making their own art the ai will have nothing new to interpret or work off of which will then lead to art never growing or changing.

Ai can be a powerful tool to give inspiration, but using it to replace actual artistic effort and vision is a mistake that will lead to grave consequences I fear.

3

u/Stealcase avatar

Stealcase

•

2y ago

The Concept Art Association is going to be talking to congress about this issue, and are looking for anecdotes and stories of the impact of AI. This seems like a perfect fit.

Here's the form: https://forms.gle/NLuzffbyEgePxsdy8

And here's the fundraiser: https://www.gofundme.com/f/protecting-artists-from-ai-technologies

3

[deleted]

•

2y ago

The downside: studios now have access to a piece of software that can do the work of an entire team of artists with one prompter.

The Upside: YOU now have access to a piece of software that can do the work of an entire team of artists with one prompter.

You now have the same creative output ability as a major studio. You can actually compete with them inependantly. Comics, games, all manner of mediums that are in a creative pit currently.

One talented artist now has the power to outshine and outsell an entire studio with zero overhead!

If you are as staggeringly talented as you claim, put your money where your mouth is and take them down!

AI artwork will not be the end. It will be a Renaissance.

3

u/jcgdata avatar

jcgdata

•

2y ago

Good point of view. We have to start thinking bigger. I believe that as large corporations will accelerate layoffs, more individuals will begin their own entrepreneurship journeys and it will only ramp up the market competition for the client.

2

cummypussycat

•

2y ago

How many jobs were replaced by midjourney? And midjourney only has a staff of 11 people. 11 people replaced millions of jobs. Not even a year passed. And naïve idiots say there is nothing to worry.

3

NickBarksWith

•

2y ago

I'm depressed about it too, but there's no avoiding it. Spent years learning digital art, and I don't currently have a good job that's utilizing the art skills. I've been tied up making a self-funded film.

MJ is awesome for 2D but I haven't found anything to generate 3D models from it. Are you doing a quick 3D model by sculpting from the image it puts out or is there a plug-in or something? If you're still sculpting yourself, there's still artistry there.

2

[deleted]

•

2y ago

Im so sorry. I wonder if a lot of people using this would help poison the well enough to slow it down. It sucks that it feels like a big company like Disney needs to sue the shit out of someone for copywrite infringement to make this go away, like waiting for some of their shit to get scraped and used.

2

MiffedMoogle

•

2y ago

Just clicked on that link and I hope more people see it if it is actually legit.

It feels like too many scummy art thieves or bad/lazy artists have just jumped over to prompting while there is little to no visibility on anti-AI theft tools...

3

[deleted]

•

2y ago

I feel you. It's so much easier to give in to the rage fuel than working to do anything ABOUT it.

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

u/7734128 avatar

7734128

•

2y ago

No, that's basically just a scam.

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

I m sorry for that. I don’t work as 3D artist, but as software engineer. Since first MJ came, I realized our time has come. The industry has realized as well and big tech are already on the move. Recent layoffs were influenced by it. ChatGPT just confirmed the clear direction.

In the past, many other jobs have been transformed or replaced by machines, but most people assimilated, changed careers and carried over. I m afraid this time is different, as soon even AI engineers themselves will be replaced by AI. I wonder what gonna happen, as if there’s no chance for people to adapt, it gonna be a collapse. Big corporations won’t have a market to sell to, as they themselves layed the workers off. I can’t tell when or how, but now I feel soon societies will have to migrate to some sort of communism as alternative to chaos (to be clear, I am not a communism supporter). I hope that gonna take a while.

2

allbirdssongs

•

2y ago

your talking about the arrival of UBI, yeah it will come at some point, just not sure when

2

[deleted]

•

2y ago

arrival of UBI

exactly. something of that sort. I believe it gonna take a while for a couple of reasons, but I wonder if that can be faster than we can forsee, what would happen.

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

A majority of sw developers are still in denial .. some vociferously so.

My guess is that (at least for a while) the top 10% will use AI to be say x10 more productive.

They will need junior, bright assistants - say one per dev.

These assistants will in due course become the next generation of top developers.

That means that 80% of sw developers will fade away in due course.

2

u/doppelminds avatar

doppelminds

•

2y ago

Your joy and the things you can achieve with your art are yours, never deposit them in external circumstances, because companies are only in it for the money, and in your case, they've got the upper hand as they make the big decisions. That's the shit part of creative jobs, but if the artistic value of things was only about monetary productivity, no one would still sculpt with their hands, paint on a canvas, or make music with an instrument, yeah, it sucks that living from something you love will become harder and harder, but true art will never die, because, beyond its plastic value, it's about things a machine and a set of algorithms will never experience.

2

[deleted]

•

2y ago

Ah shit MVM is real

2

paxcoder

•

2y ago

AI can't do 3D models yet, can it? Can't you get a job where 3D modelling is still required?

2

u/_mariarzyt_ avatar

_mariarzyt_

•

2y ago

AI can do 3d models, I've seen a few already, but the topology is horrible lol so basically they're unusable, especially from different perspectives or they have a bunch of artifacts and obviously, they will look generic. That's why I have been wondering, there are still many companies that need a skilled 3D artist...

4

u/7734128 avatar

7734128

•

2y ago

They are not very good, but compare them to where generative 2D was 8 years ago.

https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/y9zxj1/you_think_thats_insane_heres_what_an_aigenerated/

1

u/JoshMobileCoin avatar

JoshMobileCoin

•

2y ago

This is the story of any industrial revolution.

I think we're in the middle of a new one, the Neo Industrial Revolution.

At each epoch of major advancement there are folks who studied the old way of doing things who cried out. Industry does not care.

Think about what it was like when the printing press came out. How did all of the people who made books by hand feel?

Think about how the printing press people felt when the Internet came about with all of it's 0's and 1's turning print into digital artifacts.

This is the story of the world.

Here's a bright side to help ease the pain a little bit: really good artisans make a very fine living in this life by being dedicated to their craft. There are people who make knives with techniques that are thousands of years old in Japan who have been doing it the right way for generations.

Harper's still puts out a magazine.

So much of what people think is valuable in this life is the story behind what you make.

I think that a lot of us will continue to value non-AI stories for a long time.

2

u/Striking-Squash2044 avatar

Striking-Squash2044

•

2y ago

ridiculous

do not encourage people to continue in fields where their future is being crushed like a bug

6

[deleted]

•

2y ago

This is the story of any industrial revolution.

I think we're in the middle of a new one, the Neo Industrial Revolution.

when whole industries included automation in their workplaces/factories (from the weaving chair to the printing press to conveyor belts to computers and so on), a lot of the workforce got made redundant and had to migrate to other non-automated and/or new sectors of labor. in the case of the last industrial revolution, it was the newly forming service sector that was in need of human laborers at a grand scale. now tell me what that scalable new work sector is for us to migrate to in the hundreds of millions, and one that is safe from automation? coding? automated. writing copy? automated. animation? nyet. customer care? food delivery? slaving away in some amazon warehouse? drive a friggin taxi? nope nope nope and nope. there is none.

6

[deleted]

•

2y ago

ABC_AlwaysBeCoding

•

2y ago

Wait 6 weeks.

Eventually, people will be desensitized to every possible combination of this AI art generation until it can be fed more creativity. When that happens, true creativity will be valuable again.

Do some modeling on your own time and hold on to it.

2

thomasbatey

•

2y ago

I've seen amazing art made by humans, and I've seen amazing creations made by AI. But the AI made them in seconds. And with companies like Adobe putting their entire library into copyright-free AI images, this trend is here to stay.

1

Mefilius

•

2y ago

Wait so are you generating images and processing them to be sprites, or are you just using the midjourney concepts to make your models?

The workflow I would have expected out of this post was 3D modelling something more simple than normal, and using an AI to complete the rendering to get closer to the final result sprites faster.

I'm not quite understanding where the AI lies in the order of operations here, but if you're still putting like 2-3 days of work in, personally I think acting like you aren't making art is selling your team short.

2

u/Unhappy-Unit-6412 avatar

Unhappy-Unit-6412

•

2y ago

I am coming at this late and probably it will get lost in the large volume of messages! But please don't get too discouraged. Two points:

Please know that things like chatgpt / dall-e, etc. don't just spit out work made from other artists, yes, it takes insight from artists all over, similar to how a human learns and takes insight from different styles, but , and there are a lot of reasons for this, i won't get into the details, maybe it might make you feel better than it's not just ripping art and recreating it from other artists. You can use it knowing that it actually can create innovative and new art that hasn't' been seen before based on your prompts.

The same skill that made you better than the other artist, still applies. It may just take a little bit different journey or some other techniques, but your skill is exactly what will continue to make you successful in life. Human ingenuity is not dead at all. This LLM phase is a bit overwhelming, but it has a LOT of limitations, some of those limitations i believe will never go away (at least with our current implementations) and your skill means a lot and is valuable and with some additional work understanding these new tools you can be even more productive and produce even better work.

2

4 replies

u/AUGUSTIJNcomics avatar

AUGUSTIJNcomics

•

2y ago

What always bugs me about AI, is that it shouldn't be legal at all. A company is making profit, or at least using, art from other people to make their own. The art is now part of their product, because without it, it couldn't make anything.

So, I'm not sure why this is even still legal, and I'm thinking it might collapse at some point. Now we're in the extreme wild west period of this where most politicians don't even understand the technology (if they ever will).

But this story is terrifying, as a graduating student I'm not looking forward to entering an increasingly AI infected art world. We might be able to use AI for good, but the job will probably attract different people.

Lastly, I'm not sure if consumers will even accept AI at some point. If we are told something was robot poop, will we still attach our own emotions to it? Will I walk out of a movie laughing, angry and crying because of what the AI showed me?

2

[deleted]

•

2y ago

Unfortunately they didn’t need to ask the artists’ permission because all the artists’ already agreed to most of it when we sign up to all these websites and free social media platforms. We agree to countless pages of terms and conditions, carelessly upload all our art and hard work online thinking it’s still 100% rightfully our property. It’s not, unfortunately. And just a heads up to anyone who may read this, stealing artwork styles is just the beginning, they’re going to digitally replicate and clone people online soon. And it’ll all be legal… 🫡

2

[deleted]

•

2y ago

I think human made things will always be valued. But not on the scale it used to be.

2

[deleted]

•

2y ago

Yes, if you are a good enough atist to sell your pieces for 5-10k a pop, you will probably do OK, like in a gallery. Otherwise, if you're not on that level of craftsmanship, good luck.

1

u/billyt555 avatar

billyt555

•

2y ago

OP could you post some example images? Your original vs ai generated stuff that you are working with?

2

u/0ctoxVela avatar

0ctoxVela

•

2y ago

wait. what kidn of mobile games are you making

2

u/AkizaIzayoi avatar

AkizaIzayoi

•

2y ago

I'm a bit scared. I'm an animation student. Though prior to taking animation (my school focuses on 2D drawing), I was into 3D modeling a lot.

Though I find that AI would struggle to animate very complicated scenes. Still, it can eventually catch up.

Getting a job in art and being able to get by is already a struggle. Now, we have this. So I guess it's R.I.P. to human creativity and intelligence.

Back then, aspiring artists also had to learn the techniques to get better at their craft. Now, they could simply write prompts or draw child like sketches and wait for the AI to fix it for them based on those patterns.

In the future, humans will definitely become more incompetent and soulless. Everything becomes easy to get by instead of putting in hours of sacrifice for such crafts and personal projects.

2

ACertainBloke

•

2y ago

I found your artpage and saw your work https://www.artstation.com/ichbinliese

Im sorry

2

alloedee

•

2y ago

We should stop calling it A.I.. it’s not intelligent and basically just a advanced sorting algorithm. I think robot would be a better term

2

[deleted]

•

2y ago

Congratulations, humanity. You have successfully speedrun AI cyberpunk dystopia. AI was a warning in science fiction, not an inspiration.

Dystopia doesn’t begin with spectacle. It begins at unglamorous spaces like an office. Company bosses and managers, i.e. the scum of the earth, will see AI as a means to save money. In their effort to cut costs, they’ll run cities into poverty and soon markets will crash because people’s spendings will plummet. And they’ll take entire economies down with them.

2

InfoOnAI

•

2y ago

Wow. I've got no words except that I has to write about this.

https://www.ainewsdrop.com/2023/03/i-lost-everything-that-made-me-love-my.html

We've barely scratched the surface of machine learning let alone genuine AI.

You are right. I've seen what's coming, and it's going to change everything we know about modern day work.

2

THE_MANTELOPE

•

2y ago

Ive played a game that uses AI generated art exclusively. idk if it looked okay for anyone else, but as an artist, it looked really bad. The characters looked different in different poses so it was hard to tell who was who. Idk what your portfolio looks like but I can guarantee at a certain level, your art will be more desirable than what AI can produce. AI averages. Humans create.

2

1 reply

u/tino89 avatar

tino89

•

2y ago

corporate slavery quits any joy of everything.

2

u/ThingSome1431 avatar

ThingSome1431

•

2y ago

Ah, the lightbulb... it haunts me in my sleep, for it threatens to replace my trade, my livelihood. I am a humble candlemaker, one of the few left in this town, and my craft is in danger. The newfangled invention, they call it "electricity," has brought forth the lightbulb, which shines brighter and longer than any candle I could ever make. And now, I fear, it will take away my work entirely.

I am not alone in my worry. My fellow craftsmen, who work in the gaslight and oil lamp industries, share my concern. We are all mere mortals, who rely on our hands and our ingenuity to make a living. But this new age of machines and automation threatens to make us obsolete.

2

EzTaskB

•

2y ago

This will probably get lost but if you do see this, I feel for you. But you shouldn't look at it like a loss. Look at it like an opportunity. You have options. You can train a model specifically on your own style of artwork and expedite your work to please your boss. With your new found time, you can pursue your own passion, use gpt4 or some other model to teach you how to make your own game and put your passion to your own project.

2

Wave_Walnut

•

2y ago

I like 3D models created by the handwork of the human artist himself. Because they are the embodiment of man's own curiosity and love, controlled and interpreted by his reason.

Capitalists praise and appreciate AI, because they are impersonal and productive. Very different from why I like the work of human artists.

If possible, I would like you to continue working as an artist in a more alternative workplace. What I can do to help you do that is:

- To avoid the folly of buying games with assets made by AI at full price

- To seek out games with assets made by human hands, get them, and enjoy them.

It might be interesting to crowdfund the funds needed to put the finishing touches on a new, non-AI, indie game.

2

u/EphemeraStardust avatar

EphemeraStardust

•

2y ago

I saw in replies that people compare Automating art with automating calculation with a calculator/automating server setup with scripts and dockers, etc. However there is a fundamental difference here - for those tasks what matters is the result, a correct number being calculated, a working server being set up, etc. Removing the tedious work between the problem and the solution helps everyone. But for art (and also creative writing), at least to some artists, the joy is in the process of creation. It's every choice of color, stroke, composition, etc., that makes an art piece an artist's self-expression. Of course not everyone values this - actually I think almost all companies and the overwhelming majority of consumers only care about the result (how the pic looks) and do not care if an art piece has something personal from the artist or not. Before AI, these artists can enjoy the process of creation while getting paid by those who only care about results when they also deliver the finished piece. Now in AI era, this ground disappears.

To me prompting AI generator is not much different from keyword search and watching the search result (perhaps also doing some final tune on the search result to make it more usable), only that the search result is not necessarily already drawn or drawn by any human being. Is there any "creation" or "personal expressions" in this process? Yes perhaps, at least I come up with "the idea" of what to type in the prompt. But it is very limited - as I said, just like a keyword search. It might be more straightforward in creative writing, a short prompt cannot contain the same amount of "choice-making" as in a long fic. But again, watching and reading the search result is already enough for most people. Substituting a search engine with an AI generator does not make much difference to them, and AI generator (which can generate what you search) is much better by removing the limit of search engine (which only gives back human-generated results).

Of course, perhaps in the next few years fewer and fewer people will value the joy and thought in the process of "drawing" or "painting", and value more the "creativity" or "skill" of finding what to prompt. It has already been a tendency. The things human beings value change all the time and it is hard to predict. But it doesn't stop me from feeling sad as someone who is still holding the "old value". Changing the value system is much more difficult for a person than learning a new skill.

2

vaderprime

•

2y ago

Hey man, you are a great artist not only because of technical skill, but also because of your ideas and creative contributions. I work in games too, and I know what you mean when you say it's hard. But you're there, and you're doing it. Artists have always had to learn new tools and mediums; Look at this as just another tool to learn and master, the same way you were able to work hard and master 3D. You can trust yourself as an artist that you are made up of good ideas in addition to your skill, and you sound like a really self aware and cool person to be around. No AI can replace that.

2

wreckmyplanss

•

2y ago

so sorry to hear this. having the same issue in the marketing space. AI is taking over. keep your head up :(

2

Candid_Total1737

•

2y ago

The fact that AI is taking over even creative fields is absolutely terrifying. We should tread very lightly in regards to undermining the quality of work that a human can produce over the production of anything done by an AI.

2

u/CinnamonSniffer avatar

CinnamonSniffer

•

2y ago

Just wanted to pop in and remind everyone that capitalism is the problem here, not AI art

2

u/emotion_something avatar

emotion_something

•

2y ago

Hey there, don't feel down! The world will still need real artists to come up with new stuff for AI to learn from. Sure, eventually AI might get a bit boring and repetitive, but artists will always be valuable. Think of it like handmade clothes vs machine-made ones - even though the world changes, human creativity is always worth something.

2

Sci-fi-Si

•

2y ago

I was in the games industry as a programmer for 14 years. I feel for you dude.

2

jasonbornee

•

2y ago

As a non-artist Midjourney is garbage. I hate it. It doesn't understand English like ChatGPT. It can't spell. It doesn't come anywhere close to producing a congruent character with congruent facial features. It's not one-shot. It's not multi-shot. It's "find someone else's prompt that looks cool and waste a bunch of compute time until it the random noise looks slightly better."

It works to steal money and compute and that's about it. It won a contest and it's milking it. Great business model. The images it makes are boring. If I get yelled at one more time for making porn because my scene has a woman's bare shoulder's in it, I might scream.

Edit: When I type Escanor in it, I get some alien that is not Escanor Lion Sin. When I type "Sabin suplexing the phantom train in the haunted forest. I get a beautiful woman throwing a punch at a man in a smoking jack at a rail station. The token recognition is absolute and utter shit. Even in version 5.

2

Lost_Reception_4443

•

2y ago

Never lose your vision. Especially over industrial and technological “advancements”. There are other artists like myself who need people like you to implement your craft in order that they may realize their own artistic vision. Regardless of these “magic wand” style technologies and their proliferation.

Furthermore, I believe that artists like you need to help guide the culture (especially in business) in a more holistic and sustainable direction. The knowledge base of someone who has been grinding it out for decades in the visual arts sorely needs to be communicated and established as valuable. In the face of these cultural shifts.

I’ve used midjourney for a few months now. I am not a trained visual designer. So for me, it’s been remarkable being able to play with a tool that can augment my abilities. However for me, the output of my work with midjourney is all in the realm of reference material and conceptual material. Something that I plan to use in the same way that those materials have been used in the past. Building assets for a human being to interpret and make practical as well as artistic sense of.

My prediction is that generative images are and will over saturate the media landscape. My hope is that the results will inevitably promote original human artistic creations, as these will stand out amongst a sea of high quality generative boring garbage.

Human beings are the crucial component in all of this. These technologies would not function without OUR computational and creative power. We can and should strive to continue to create our own artistic spaces no matter what happens.

-DV

2

MoiMarston

•

2y ago

you need jesus in your heart and/or get laid, with all due respect. Youre mad at something that doesn't exists, i'm doing midjourney to help me out with tattoo designs/ideas. You might think that that makes me lazy but in fact, that has helped me a lot to push myself even farther than i ever thought i would; so, i would recommend to come to terms with the inevitable and start looking for a solution (like using AI at your advantage) instead of grieving and feeling nostalgia about the old times. Push yourself harder! see the bright side: at least youre not looking for job!

2

AysheDaArtist

•

2y ago

Hate to hear that, same fate happened to me as well as a technical artist.

I was hired to do sprite work and very detailed backsplashes, and to implement animations into the characters through code. The work I completed has tiny details attached to the game's lore, down to the buttons on the Captain's coat or the way the hair flows as they walk.

AI just spits out generic looking soldiers and concepts now, and my non-technical team lead eats it up and complains that he pays me too much for what he can get for free. The praise and hard work I had earned for months was over night turned into a joke.

I left the team and two months later, their player base tanked and the team lead deserted everyone... guess ChatGPT couldn't code for him, or provide the artistic passion needed to put heart and soul into a project and have the dedication to see it to completion.

FOMO and Mob mentality has been condensed into a tool, and we can't put the beast back into the box. Best bet is to keep calm and carry on, fight AI by showing the true passion of a human artist.

Competition is good, those with an eye with detail, most always have deep pockets as well. Develop your style and shout it out to the world!

2

lilgothTwink

•

2y ago

Jesus christ..i know it's old but the people here saying 'train your own ai' ,'adapt'..sure we can 'train our own AIs'..so a machine can do the work we enjoyed doing. Nice. What a depressing fucking future

2

InfraredGoat

•

2y ago

I'm studying vfx currently, an industry which is very much working with 2D, ai is eventually going to get to the point that it'll be able to do a lot of vfx that was done by people before. Although I'm not really worried about it because someone's still going to need to work that ai, but ai is a ways off from being able to 3D model, once you're on another project it'll be back to 3D and you won't have to worry about ai

1

Jinn6IXX

•

2y ago

this is just how it works when advancements comes, it happened for the factory workers now it’ll happen to us soon it’ll happen for everyone it’s just the way it is in a technologically advancing society

1

u/OrokaSempai avatar

OrokaSempai

•

2y ago

Kinda feels like when the first WYSIWYG website software came out and I didnt have to write out websites in notepad... they were great programs, but were never quite right, so my ability to code allowed me to tweak the generated code to look right.

I dont know what to tell you man, my brain has been on a slow motion explosion for a few weeks as the potential implications of this new actually useful AI sinks in. So much potential for good, but there will be big upheaval for a lot of people.

1

Marcuskac

•

2y ago

It's time to change companies, or try making 3D models and selling them on SketchFab, since it's implementation un Unreal Engine for Fortnite it will see a large influx of users for sure.

1

accessfault

•

2y ago

Can i dm you?

1

Sternsafari

OP

•

2y ago

You should be able.

1

u/RealAstropulse avatar

RealAstropulse

•

2y ago

Its almost like you’re in an industry that values speed and quantity over art.

I’m sorry your creative skills aren’t valued.

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

This is clickbait.

1

u/ubermole avatar

ubermole

•

2y ago

This really sucks for you personally. I emphasize - and all additional comment is trying to be helpful, not cold.

But maybe some perspective helps: A hundred years ago it took 100x more people to grow the same amount of food. Until the tractor appeared. A newspaper had to be manually type set. Bank accounts had to be manually added.

This has been happening for a long time, all over. Don't be mad at your colleague. Don't be mad at your boss. Being angry will not help you. It might even hurt you.

Lean into what you are good at. The fact that you care. There will be demand for good artists. You colleague might actually be in more trouble in the long run. Mass farming also created farm-to-table farms. Ikea also created an opportunity for bespoke woodwork.

It's not going to be easy. But it's possible.

Be angry and sad for a bit. That's ok. But it's not the end of the line.

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

Why don’t you use your “creative energy to create” at home on your own personal projects? Your company pays you to do what they want you to do, not to provide an outlet for your creative energy.

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

Wunschkonzert

•

2y ago

The key here is: adapt. Use the new tools that are given to you and implement them into your work flow. By being good at what you do, you have a big advantage. You can put everything into context. AI can only execute what you tell it to do. It does not plan and can not create stuff that has to fit into the bigger picture without your guidance.

1

u/Striking-Squash2044 avatar

Striking-Squash2044

•

2y ago

you don't understand people

it's not about adapting and increasing productivity. if artists were about increasing productivity and salary, they would have gotten into other fields in the first place

4

3 replies

sadmadtired

•

2y ago

I know it sucks and this isn’t what you wanted or expected for your career, but it’s happening and it’s not changing. Think of it as being paid to learn the next generation of tools for the creative process. Master it, and become irreplaceable. Because the Venn diagram of “fast, cheap, and good,” is going to get real small real quick.

On the side, practice the skills you have, and how you create your designs. Your imagination and originality will see you through this transition time. And there will always be people somewhere who value artistry over ready made commercial pieces. Like the difference between hiring a master craftsman woodworker vs buying good enough furniture at ikea.

And prepare. Your art skills and design sense don’t just live in 3d space. Maybe take up another hobby to develop just in case, so you can land on your feet. (I chose woodworking, there’s a market, and it’s very creatively and physically satisfying).

You can do this. You’re an artist. You were made for this time. Go and create

1

1 reply

u/Zer0D0wn83 avatar

Zer0D0wn83

•

2y ago

It's really fucking harsh, but the world doesn't guarantee anyone a career as an 'X'. Having to retrain, learn new skills or upskill is jus the way things are, and it's going to get faster and more wide-ranging. As a developer and a small app dev business owner, this is going to sweep through my industry in the next 6 months or so and I have no idea what is going to happen, but I know I'll adapt.

You will too

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

DeadSerious_

•

2y ago

I mean, you still have a job. Make the most out of it, learn how to do more with this new tech, keep refining your current skills etc. You can try to find a new position elsewhere, who knows? The way I see is that you are gonna have to adapt.

That being said, I'm sorry this is affecting you in a negative way

1

Sm3cK

•

2y ago

" I don’t want to make “art” that is the result of scraped internet content, from artists, that were not asked. However its hard to see, results are better than my work. "

I think your priority is to work on this.

1

wNvJungle

•

2y ago

If I understand correctly, you are eventually generating 2D images, rather than models in FBX/USD or other 3D formats.

Then I would call you a 2D artist using 3D techniques. But since you have those 3D skills, maybe you could find another job in a 3D game company. Painting AIs like Midjourney currently pose no threat to 3D job positions.

1

Richard_Savolainen

•

2y ago

Hot take:

You can still do that but you're deciding to be lazy if you're using it as an entire process instead of a tool that you can use as a base. I believe that all prompt based art sites are a big gimmick since theres one thing that they lack is control. Keep in mind that AI isn't a mind reader and AI can't really surpass traditional art due to art being subjective by nature. The real AI technology that will have an impact are tools such as RTX and in the future it will affect physics and animation

1

6 replies

u/m3kw avatar

m3kw

•

2y ago

I suspect there will be dedicated companies that sell original training materials for AI companies, so stay tuned

1

1 reply

suchoudh1

•

2y ago

really feel bad .. The cat is out of the bag

1

avshrikumar

•

2y ago

Let's hope regulation emerges that bans models trained on unlicensed artwork from being used for commercial purposes. Then, "ai model training data creator" will be the next big gig - and the improved quality of your artwork would be very welcome there.

1

Eggo-Meh-Leggo

•

2y ago

this shit is fake

1

aivi_mask

•

2y ago

Sorry this happened to you but it's just getting started. Im with a design company and we now have local AI software installed on our machines and kick out better results faster.

0

Adorable-Contact1849

•

2y ago

As I understand it, AI-produced art is not copyrightable. So your employer had better be OK with producing assets that are (or may be) in the public domain.

1

u/keklsh avatar

keklsh

•

1y ago

no such thing as boss x or etc, idts

1

[deleted]

•

1y ago

What company are you working for? I need to boycott them.

1

u/Competitive_Stick147 avatar

Competitive_Stick147

•

1y ago

In my case i was thorn between too many sides at once and could not keep up, well that is my own fault since i bit of more than i could chew but i get where you are coming from my job is also hard to get and easy to lose without the right connections.

1

u/MrBeanCyborgCaptain avatar

MrBeanCyborgCaptain

•

7mo ago

It sounds like you're in a very niche job, a 3D artist that produces 2D results. If you worked at a studio making actual 3D games, you wouldn't have to deal with this. I mean easier said than done, there aren't a lot of jobs out there at the moment.

1

u/Majestic_Focus_420 avatar

Majestic_Focus_420

•

6mo ago

Everything you said in that post was what cel animators said about 3D. Guess what - Animated Spiderman movies. Best of both worlds. Never been a better time to be an artist.

Use your art skills to make better images. The tool was not your strength, or your technical abilities. It was your understanding of what makes a good image, regardless of the tools you use to make it. It's a chance to artists to really shine. Think of the new ground you can cover. Artists will always outcompete technicians. Just learn these new tools as you did every other one.

1

BudFugginz

•

4mo ago

Right, adapt and keep moving, I hear you. John carpenter hears you. You like what you do, you can do that, but gotta adapt to survive

1

u/RedditBlackKnight avatar

RedditBlackKnight

•

4mo ago

The future is grim. This is the reality of business, nobody cares about how you feel , it’s all about the bottom line and the product.

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

Incognit0ErgoSum

•

2y ago

How is Midjourney speeding up the process of creating, rigging, and animating 3D characters?

0

u/Choomba12 avatar

Choomba12

•

2y ago

Does mid journey v5 output 3d model files or just 2d images?

0

u/highmindedlowlife avatar

highmindedlowlife

•

2y ago

They' tAkIng our JERBS

-1

tiredhunter

•

2y ago

terk uhr jerb

2

Goldenratio87

•

2y ago

If I were you I done the job and beside that build a portfolio and 3 months later you find better job where you work. And yes we get it A.I improve productivity but which peoductuvty? greedy fucking employer company productivity. They literally give nothing their employee now they want that nothing too.

1

GodGMN

•

2y ago

For my boss its just a huge time/money saver

And that's how it is for every business out there. It saves money and time? Let's use it for bigger profit margins, as simple as that.

If you want to do your own art, you should do it for yourself, not at work.

0

McCaffeteria

•

2y ago

Can you explain a little bit more about what the old workflow was compared to the new ai workflow? I’m not sure I understand and it seems like people in the comments dont either. I’ve seen someone saying that you can just move to a type of company that works on 3D models that aren’t just for rendering sprites, but I’m pretty sure you said that midjourney can make fully rigged 3D models?? This is news to me that midjourney can do that but I also wouldn’t be surprised since things have been advancing so fast. Does that mean that you are still posing and lighting the ai produced models? Or is the ai posing them as well?

I just don’t fully understand the severity of the AI takeover based on your description.

0

u/SteprockMedia avatar

SteprockMedia

•

2y ago

Thanks for sharing this. I hope people have helpful input for you.

1

Martholomeow

•

2y ago

What game?

1

u/StrangeGrass9878 avatar

StrangeGrass9878

•

2y ago

It's a hell of a phenomenon. You could try showing in a very visible way what makes your handiwork better than an AI's, but chances are very high that you won't humanly be able to do so.

If you can't beat em, join em. Use MJ for your own projects. It might be the last best way for you to flex your artistic creativity.

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

Honestly, if it takes everyone’s jobs, we might just become socialist lol

1

KestreI993

•

2y ago

Upgrade yourself to 3D games and engine like Unreal. AI still, and I doubt it will ever generate 3d models that won't need any retouching.

1

u/DustinBrett avatar

DustinBrett

•

2y ago

Maybe it's time to start your own game company. Use these tools to super power your creativity.

1

Conneich

•

2y ago

Just remember: when they inevitably lose patience with MJ, or some new legislation void the usage of assets produced by AI (like the fact I’m pretty sure all these AI programs say they hold the rights to anything generated and can use them whenever they want), and they come looking to reemploy you too up your pay rate and you work as a contract employee.

1

encoder-

•

2y ago

I expecting something like this will happen in few more years

100% human art at $$$$$$$$$$

AI art at $$$

1

u/Striking-Squash2044 avatar

Striking-Squash2044

•

2y ago

I'm in the same position as you are, it feels terrible.

May the heavens bless you (and us), that we can reach a better conclusion at the end of all this imbroglio

1

TychusFondly

•

2y ago

This will eventually hit hard when people will realize singularity is about to happen in 5 years to the most. It will look way subtler than cyberpunk 2077 and way more postulating than all wars combined. We will live until the universe will collapse in the world of ideas where we are the gods knowing or unknowingly. Does it sound familiar?

1

beardyramen

•

2y ago

I am sorry you are struggling mate.

I sincerely hope for you that stuff gets better.

Still tech has frequently attempted to take over the work of man, yet one way or another man has always found a way to add value that tech has never been able to.

I am sure you are a smart person and a great artist. AI is just a f-ing tool. Taste, intuition, creativity will still (for a long time at least) be only yours.

When photografy came out people tought that art was dead... Yet some of the best artists of the whole history came out in response of tech trying to take over.

This situation is a total shitstorm for artists, but we can come over it

Lastly, if you like johnny cash... a bit of motivation

1

u/eldron2323 avatar

eldron2323

•

2y ago

You will have to get better at the new tools that are developed otherwise you will be out. It sucks in some aspects, but is liberating in others.

0

VyneNave

•

2y ago

Sad to hear, that your job changed so much. But since it's 3D that you like, maybe consider searching for a job where you actually use the 3D models in the final product. Because it seems right now you where using 3D to create 2D, which in the end is not as effective. Working with 3D for the actual result to be a 3D model, is something you still can search for in a job.

1

u/oandroido avatar

oandroido

•

2y ago

FWIW, I'll be impressed when we don't have to deal with 18th-century UV mapping. It's archaic, and I think a lot of people will be happy when we can just create instead of needing archaic, highly specialized knowledge.

1

bunsofcheese

•

2y ago

Lots of people work in jobs that slowly suck the joy out of their lives, this is nothing new. You were one of the lucky few that had a job you enjoyed. The choice you make now will affect the rest of your career: get your portfolio together, and look for another job that cares more about creativity and expression than making a Buck - or have you considered becoming your own boss and creating your own company? Freelance on the side, build up a client base, forge your own path.

0

u/Distinct-Tune9870 avatar

Distinct-Tune9870

•

2y ago

First, I'm sorry for this change and the disruption it's caused you. Losing something you love about your job is an awful feeling.

As an unwilling expert in this disruption can you tell us if you see 3D having any role in the future of your work? I was under the impression that with control nets you benefit a lot from having a rigged 3D model to set the composition of a piece before you have the diffusion model "render" it.

0

u/inspectordaddick avatar

inspectordaddick

•

2y ago

These moments have happened over and over again throughout history. And history was always filled with people mad at new technology. This chance just seems extra “dystopian” because we made dystopian movies about it.

You have two options, implement these things into your workflow or don’t. The choice is yours. You are not helpless, this isn’t happening TO you, it’s just happening.

You still have what makes you better than your colleague, you just have to figure out how to tap into that with these new tools at your disposal.

0

[deleted]

•

2y ago

"from weeks to days"... maybe some of the early access games on steam will get get finished!

0

[deleted]

•

2y ago

Kinda seems like they’re purposely giving AI a massive advantage and head start over people, implementing a sense of ‘we’re falling behind and becoming inadequate’. …then the magical solution to give us the advantage will be to get microchips in our brain and jaw. ‘Get fully connected’, avoid that sinking feeling again..

1

u/Sad-Contribution866 avatar

Sad-Contribution866

•

2y ago

I think that people in this field are mostly safe for the next 2 years. Yes, there will be some unfortunate cases like OP but I believe it is going to be not very typical.

Now, 2 years may sound like a short amount of time but the thing is that there are many professions which will be impacted even earlier.

I believe that when 3D artists will be hit significantly, there will be so many people impacted that it is going to be a huge political issue.

I have no idea how it would be addressed though.

0

u/madaxe_munkee avatar

madaxe_munkee

•

2y ago

Give it time while the industry finds a new equilibrium. You may end up rebranding as a boutique house doing bespoke hand crafted animation.

It will take people time to find the limitations of this new approach. As someone who has actual talent you are in a better position to exploit this than others.

On the one hand, never really know what’s gonna happen but on the other this has also happened many times before with industrialization etc.

Try not to feel totally hopeless and I can relate to your reticence to using a tool built from stolen art but also you can’t help the (crappy) situation you find yourself in.

Regardless I hope you take care and figure out a way forward, and hopefully help other artists like yourself also.

1

u/ProbablyInfamous avatar

ProbablyInfamous

•

2y ago

Advice from my older self to my younger self and current self:

"When you're the only one that cares about something, you're gonna have a bad time..."

The world is in for a dramatic shift in the coming weeks/months. Not just financial reality/crisis, but the reality that a massive percentage of persons no longer have employable functions, particularly within the white collar, non-executive fields (if your job requires sitting in front of a computer at any sort of entry-level position... >tik|tok< ).

Before 2022, my greatest fear/pondering was "what happens when AI replaces the largest employer of men in the US, truck drivers?!" And now the question has expanded to "what happens when AI replaces the vast majority of entry-level, non-executive middle-class careers/opportunities?"

For my boss its just a huge time/money saver.

It's going to be tough swallowing, and we'll have no choice but to accept massive re-employs/UBI/chaos as this quick adjustment is accelerated and enjoyed and utilized and made reality. These systems are here, and they don't cost much.

1

Oli_Picard

•

2y ago

I’m a cyber security analyst and we are feeling the pinch of AI too. Last week over 500 people was told they would be fired due to AI efficacies and my bosses have told me to start looking elsewhere. I have a first class degree in my subject matter and 8 years of industry experience. Now AI is taking over I feel like I’m without a job. Coding was my creative pathway but now ChatGPT can churn a script out that would take me a few hours to make in a matter of seconds. Life is moving rapidly in a direction I do not like. I am so sorry your going though this in the creative industry too. It’s maddening that we are letting the machines take over creativity.

1

u/Sockway avatar

Sockway

•

2y ago

I'm kind of surprised about this. I know AI can automate parts of security, but the "bad guys" will have access to AI tools too, they might know how to bypass them or even poison their training data to alter their behavior. Are companies serious cutting back on cybersecurity investment now?

1

Oli_Picard

•

2y ago

Microsoft has just launched a ChatGPT based tool while laying off InfoSec staff. I won’t name the company I’m from but they are laying off people left right and centre mainly citing AI as the reason for the axe.

If you work in compliance a lot of the work is repetition. Grab data from different places and present it in a report. Write a summery of your discovery.

1

oferben

•

2y ago

I have to say that AI is not what i expect it to be. it is a lazy worker who is not willing to get of the chair and do the hard work. it would not pick up fruit, do dishes, plow fields, weld, get actual work done. all it does is sit at a computer and spawn stuff out. this is not the technology we where hoping for. get it to work. let it get its hands dirty.

1

u/Jacmac_ avatar

Jacmac_

•

2y ago

Dude, this is the future of all jobs, not just yours. We aren't at a general purpose AI that can kill almost all jobs yet, but it's going to happen. I wouldn't call job replacement by AI, "dystopian", but I'm a bit worried about humans viewing themselves as irrelevent on a mass scale. You hear quite a few AI pundits talking about UBI and all that, but really, the problem is going to be bigger than money. It's going to be largely psychological, about relevence. I consider the OPs post to have been the tip of the spear. The shaft is comming over the next 20 years.

0

perplexedvortex

•

2y ago

It sucks. All the creativity and skills that made the job fulfilling is pretty much taken away. There is no more creative development or exercising your creative muscles which leads to stagnation. Much less enthusiasm left to roll out of bed every morning and spend 8+ hours a day doing. I’d much rather be creating than art directing.

Regardless I am personally determined to stay in this industry. All of my creativity will have to be poured into personal projects to stay stimulated and sharp. If the company makes me prioritize productivity over creativity to get a paycheck and put food on the table, it’s out of my control. After thinking it over a bit I realized I’d still choose that over working in non-creative industries (assuming they don’t give those positions as massive paycut) I’ll still strive for fulfillment in personal projects and you should too. Never stop creating.

1

u/Omri1324 avatar

Omri1324

•

2y ago

3D Artist here.

I'm sorry to hear about you losing your job. It's heart breaking.

That being said, I think AI is going to do what machines did to the automotive industry. That is, you need less manual labor and more creative thinkers who can put the whole thing together. Machines did not replace car designers and engineers, they replaced the people who did the repetitive, manual labor of, idk, creating the nuts and bolts, or lifting parts around the assembly line. The same goes for "3D Modelers". Modeling is a technical labor that, like UV mapping, is doomed to be replaced by AI, sooner or later.

Yes, there will always be a need for hand crafted pieces of art, for that fine human touch. I believe. But most projects will at some point use AI for 80% of the work. Like in any industry affected by the industrial revolution.

I personally wouldn't invest in learning 3D modeling per se. I'd invest in my ability to deliver a compelling 3D scene. That includes the lighting, textures, effects, shaders, and most importantly strong story telling and atmosphere.

1

pedrofuentesz

•

2y ago

Bro, you know you can use Stable Diffusion with control nets to create the character and props you need right? You don't need to "just prompt" in Midjourney. You can combine different AIs and have a much controlled environment and results. You can train an SD model with the results of your work In Midjourney, then make 3D shapes for the SD control net to interpret. It will give mostly better results and you will be working in 3D again. You can sculpt detail and render close up depth maps for the AI to add those details to the resulting images.

Also, as a side note, it feels so weird and uncomfortable that you talk that way of your colleague. "Oh I was happy because I was better then my colleague, now I'm sad because my colleague is better than me". This happens all the time. And you have to be respectfully and mature about it bro.

1

u/AlephFunk2049 avatar

AlephFunk2049

•

2y ago

Doubling productivity at the price of a few artists' sanity. Better make crazier games.

1

u/soakin_wet_sailor avatar

soakin_wet_sailor

•

2y ago

This is how I feel about Substance Designer. Its one of my favorite tools, and it's still extremely in demand for my work projects, but I stopped using my free time to progress with it because I see it being obsolete in a few years.

1

u/RaceHard avatar

RaceHard

•

2y ago

nine chop gray elastic society memorize whistle arrest rhythm escape

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

1

Pretend_Potential

•

2y ago

to continue on with what I said earlier: Dali would look at you and tell you that it isn't the tool that makes you an artist, it isnt' the final result of what you create that makes you one either. It's the reason you create, the passion you have for the process of creation. If you want to model by hand, you have plenty of hours when you're not at work. But like any other job, you use the tools, and do the work, the person you're working for wants you to. If you were building a house for someone, and they only wanted you to use one specific sort of hammer and nail - and you wanted them to pay you - you might be unhappy with their requirements, but you'd use their tools and work to their specs. The fact they made you do stuff that no sane carpenter would feel was good wouldn't make you not a carpenter. And who knows, once you get used to the new tools, and ways of doing things, you might find new valuable skills that will expand what you can do with the tools you already use.

1

u/Efficient_Star_1336 avatar

Efficient_Star_1336

•

2y ago

You can prompt three-dimensional models, now? I'd seen papers, but the results always looked somewhat lackluster.

1

Ashiyawolf

•

2y ago

As an artist, there have always been those that make art that is better than mine going back centuries. My purpose as an artist hasn't changed: to continue to study, and develop my process and create art. In this sense, fine art hasn't changed whether it's the invention of oils, photography, computers, etc.

However, when it comes to making a living that's a different story. I'm sorry to hear what has happened to you and we're going to hear these stories increase exponentially as A.I. displaces humans in the artistic field.

It's hard to predict where viable art jobs will even be in a year or two. My niece is studying digital art at a university now. What does she focus on? Where will she have job security? I don't know how to advise her as even as I look at my own work in the motion design field for the past 25 years and am trying to figure out if and where to pivot.

It reminds me of the dot com boom. Everyone was becoming a programmer and college was being skipped since you could get a certificate and make 40k+ immediately. My friend was a senior developer and he warned us that if we got into the field getting a bachelor's would be a huge advantage once the field become oversaturated and employers became more picky. And he was right especially when the boom imploded. I'm not sure how to apply that thinking here, but there might be a way to approach this as we see things develop further.

But I would say be adaptive and ready to shift gears and don't be entrenched in your ideas as we move into a radically new period that up to now has been fiction in sci-fi stories. The younger you are, the more capable you probably are of accepting new ideas which can be a great strength.

1

dukemagus

•

2y ago

Stay positive: you still have the foundational skills to evalute MJ's output and STILL HAVE A JOB.

And since you have a job, you can keep working on your art in your free time, with all the passion and no job related burden

1

Chef-Upbeat

•

2y ago

im really sorry that you have to find yourself in a situation like this. Im trieing to get an artistic job for quite some time now and ai snatched the oppurtunities i had right out of my hands quite a few times so i can very much relate to you. I hope you can find the spark for 3d art, that ai has taken from you, and light it to be a fire once again. maby you can no longer do this for a living but that doesnt mean you have to stop making art. we cant forget that having your hobby as your job is a privelege and even having the ability to persue your hobby is not a given. Embrace that we dont need to cheat to make artpieces but can create them ourselfs. I hope you get through these times easily to enjoy 3d art like you used to before.

1

u/DrowningEarth avatar

DrowningEarth

•

2y ago

I’m gonna call BS on this. We’ve all seen the “AI is coming for your jobs” fearmongering hit pieces and there’s little to no credible evidence of any mass layoffs of creative professionals or otherwise having the scope of their work changed to AI.

Some people cite that one Netflix anime short that used AI enhanced backgrounds, except the only recent documented layoffs at Netflix came from cancelled shows/projects that didn’t involve AI.

Stories like these only pop up on reddit/twitter and there’s always details that don’t add up. You mention Midjourney (MJ) and rigging/animating; MJ does not have any in house animation capabilities, and even Stable Diffusion (SD) has challenges with animation jitter (which is fixable to a degree, but it is not something you can learn overnight, and manual corrections are necessary to completely remove it.

Unless your leadership has a low expectation for quality, it’s not plausible that they would reasonably expect your team to adopt a massive workflow/suite change in short order. While it’s true you can hammer in a prompt and get a pretty or cool picture, anyone who has used AI extensively knows it’s also very easy to get garbage output, and there’s a high degree of randomness. The sudden shift to AI also means you may now have significant inconsistencies in style for any previously made concepts or assets.

As much as people like to put down the professed “prompt engineers”, it does take considerable familiarity with the tool in order to produce images that are consistent in quality and true to the intended art direction. Otherwise you’ll be stuck with characters with bad anatomy and inconsistent looks across each iteration. Furthermore, any boss worth their salt would need to trial new technology before potentially disrupting operations.

Also, why didn’t your boss have a choice? Surely the project management was originally budgeted and scoped around your team’s 3d skillset. Is your team being held hostage by financiers/lenders/investors saying “use AI or else?” Is the project severely over budget/past deadlines that AI is the only way to save it, even though there are no guarantees it will?

Now if this was true, I’d say it’s time to find a new opportunity; you are not going to realize your passion working for a cheap/low-budget studio that’s easily bending to every tech trend without carefully evaluating the situation.

0

AmarildoJr

•

2y ago

This goes perfectly in line with a post I made a few days ago.

https://www.facebook.com/a.santini.junior/posts/pfbid02Luujjo89KBcuvtequqXVDeMuoLTKavcCnsxvTYbs5uoeoBr2HrYk9eqPjNerVrCCl

1

u/AstraDatBoi avatar

AstraDatBoi

•

2y ago

You should look and get a job for the indie game industry or build a Patreon account.

1

Soldier_Of_Cinema

•

2y ago

It'll be a massive inflation of the currency that is art. Similar to what happened to photography about 10 years ago.

It'll also put amateurs on the same level as trained artists WHEN seen through the eyes of an incompetent manager. And there is an abundance of incompetent managers out there.

In the end it'll diminish the meaning of creativity, art and expression itself. People will be extremely productiove but the productions will be perceived as worthless. Which, historically, also drowns the few genuine productions within the mass of generated content.

As a consequence of that - Genuine art productions will soon be too risky and therefore die out. And all the "super productive" artists will have to find another way to make money - most likely working for a big corp on a well known IP.

It's a sad but unstoppable development that will hurt the people with skills the most. Another corner stone in our rapidly accellerating process of cultural and intellectual devolution.

1

Ange1ofD4rkness

•

2y ago

I am sorry to hear, but sadly, it does happen. Throughout history advancements in technology have cost many to lose jobs they worked.

That being said, all may not be lost. Sure AI exists, but, doesn't mean the quality is truly all the same. For instance, Vinyl records still exist, despite many forms of media following that can't seem to replace it.

The best I can offer now is to find a way to expand that skill set, or branch outwards. While you dream job feels crushed, there easily could be maybe something else out there. While I'm not expert, I would be willing to bet your skill set could be adapted to serve something new. Something maybe never thought of.

Also remember that AI is still limited in what it can do. Sure it can make a model, but I am pretty sure there's still something it lacks you could show and prove. Sure maybe not your current place of work, but maybe somewhere else.

1

sinjapan

•

2y ago

As an artist, it is crucial to consider the purpose of your work and how it impacts your audience. Whether you are creating art for commercial or personal reasons, understanding the role your art plays in entertaining or enriching people's lives is important. If your art is intended for a commercial project, ask yourself whether it attracts and engages your target audience, and whether it enhances their experience. If your art is a personal expression, consider whether it resonates with others and has the potential to evoke emotions or inspire reflection.

Ultimately, the purpose of art varies based on the artist and their goals. However, focusing on the impact of your work on others can help you create art that is meaningful and impactful. So, take some time to reflect on why you create art, and how it can best serve your intended audience.

1

xcto

•

2y ago

ai was supposed to automate boring shit and leave us time and freedom to explore art....

instead it automated art and turned it into boring shit

1

demontage

•

2y ago

Sooo can MJ be used for optimising gigantic BIM models? We spend most or the time on that, going from hipoly to lowpoly. No modifier can do that reliably without messing up. That's something my team does but it's a monkey job and everybody hates that. So I can see this done by AI and leaving my team with the creative part. Lights, mood etc. Our output is a Unity VR

1

u/eliaweiss avatar

eliaweiss

•

2y ago

It's time to learn how to create ai models and use them That maybe the only future that is certain... Or maybe not... Probably ai will also create ai models in the near future

1

mbarkhau

•

2y ago

I'm a programmer. If it were up to me, I'd spend all my day solving puzzles that have no commercial value. I could say, welcome to the club, but I think really, the best advice I can give is to find portions of your work that the computer can't replace and see if you can find fulfillment there.

1

u/QuadNarcaLover avatar

QuadNarcaLover

•

2y ago

Maybe you could learn a real job like plumbing or electrical work.

0

u/TreviTyger avatar

TreviTyger

•

2y ago

It's in most countries constitution that people can choose their career.

If you want to be a plumber you have to choose to do that. Not be forced into it against your will.

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

No-Intern4187

•

2y ago

I work in a distillery about to undergo a transition from very much manual labor to being overall automated, there’s a lot of data and spread sheeting AI can easily cover, but thankfully it cannot taste.

1

ForgingMyOwnDestinyy

•

2y ago

Seethe and Cope

1

FriendlySceptic

•

2y ago

If we get any AI related regulation (which I think is inevitable) it will relate to using copyrighted artwork to seed an AIs training.

I could definitely see a world where a company was forced to employees you as an artist to create the seed material the AI uses for modeling. You would handle the creative end and the AI would handle all of the animation or iterations of the original design.

1

fransunset

•

2y ago

Let's just avoid ChatGtp and midjiuryney. I used midjourney till my trial ended, but I'm not gonna pay for it the subscription, no no. Maybe a lot of people will tho. But well we are doomed...

1

u/bergjuden2006 avatar

bergjuden2006

•

2y ago

Well, thats exactly why gaming industry needs a union. And IT indystry. Like the movie industry does, where you just cant tell scriptwriters „you’re fired, AI will do the writing now”.

0

The_Cold_Side

•

2y ago

Don’t cry about change, you artist predecesor was pissed off when u took over with your fancy computer graphics, the delicate touch of the brush was lost… or not… embrace the change or die unhappy at everything changing

0

[deleted]

•

2y ago

I mean its sad but also oh fucking well. You imagined you were part of the protected class in capitalism and then found out you arent. Same thing happened to me in my TV work. Start working to fix capitalism, otherwise your problems will keep growing.

0

National_Apartment89

•

2y ago

I want to agree since I'm an artist myself, but I really can't.

Every time a new technology comes in, it takes jobs. It happened before with the steam engine revolution, with the electricity becoming a common thing, with whole industrialization, with computers and their calculation capacity and even when internet came in. It's always sad for the single person, but you wouldn't want to resign usage of internet in the sake of mailmen jobs.

My advice is to broaden your scope. Re-invent yourself. Create a thick line between job and hobby, maybe even switch the industry whatsoever and keep doing your art as a uplifting hobby and passion, and not depressing another day in the office fighting machines back. Good luck.

0

u/GenderNeutralBot avatar

GenderNeutralBot

•

2y ago

Hello. In order to promote inclusivity and reduce gender bias, please consider using gender-neutral language in the future.

Instead of mailmen, use mail carriers, letter carriers or postal workers.

Thank you very much.

I am a bot. Downvote to remove this comment. For more information on gender-neutral language, please do a web search for "Nonsexist Writing."

0

Bibelo78

•

2y ago

Hello

The word Hello comes from an Old German word, therefore using it is a cultural appropriation.

Instead of hello, please use Salutonize, which is an AI generated greeting that has no root in any human culture, as per a ChatGPT answer prompted by a bot.

1

Mammoth_Negotiation7

•

2y ago

Just accept that you are working for someone else. That always means compromising and doing what they need and not what you want. Your wants and their needs coincided for a while but that changed.

If you want artistic freedom, work for yourself. I took a quick look at your art (link posted in the thread), and I'd bet you could make a go of it working for yourself generating STL files for 3D printing communities.

1

theman8631

•

2y ago

What is your process? I am interested in doing something similar but I can never get mid journey to put out what I need

1

Crimisya

•

2y ago

Just going to jump in here really quickly as a 3D artist myself, and someone who uses Midjourney for character design ideas:

This is not how 3D modelling or Midjourney works.

Midjourney, at its base, creates something using key words (or 'prompts') to generate the image. The more descriptive the prompt is, the more design elements put into it, the more 'precise' a piece becomes ... but it's nowhere near perfect. What it cannot do is create assets for 3D modelling like OP is claiming that it's doing.

What I can believe is that they're using Midjourney for character design ideas. OP would still need to model, texture, rig, and animate this design. For quality models ... that takes longer than a few days still even with the help of an AI bot. For mobile games I suppose I could see it if they're generally low-poly, but you still need to put in genuine hands-on work to make it even compatible with whatever it is you're making it for.

Since OP mentioned sculpting though, I can safely say with confidence that what they're describing is ... not what's actually happening. Midjourney wouldn't even know what the hell you were asking for if you gave it a prompt that's asking for 3D assets, or sculpted models, or anything that still requires days of work.

All of this has become a fear-mongering campaign against this new medium, and honestly it's getting old.

1

TheManni1000

•

2y ago

yust say that you will not have copyright over the ai sprights then you boss will chage it back ;)

1

u/Merikles avatar

Merikles

•

2y ago

Not sure if it helps, but very likely, all the other jobs are soon to follow. You will then be able to do what you want, whenever you want, and you will probably be more wealthy than you were before.

We are about to fall into the tech singularity, and your job was simply one that got fucked up a bit earlier than others.

1

Bibelo78

•

2y ago

Learn new skills that AI can't do yet.

When AI can do them, learn another skill.

Your success will depend on how faster than others you can go.

It's still time to accept and embrace AI.

Or learn to build wood furniture. Not that AI won't be able to do it one day, but as I see it, human made furniture will pay more, as today handmade crafts are more expensive than industry made ones. I'm actually seriously thinking about doing that.

From a sysadmin who's terrified of AI.

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

There are no skills to learn that will not soon be taken over except physical labor but that will likely also be gone within a few years. At that point, we will all be paid to stay home and do whatever without working. That is almost certainly what is in our future.

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

bjyanghang945

•

2y ago

Saw an image on LinkedIn of this post. I am truly sorry of what you are dealing with. Hope you can find a way through it!

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

Artists can still help improve AI, remove its errors, and earn a hefty amount. AI models always need a dataset to be trained and sometimes some models require a more tailored dataset than whatever is currently available on the internet, to achieve its target. Hence, I think the job field in the creative industry will merely change rather than vanish. Also, most people are incredibly sadist to make others believe they will lose their job because of some technology. The same was predicted when computers were getting popular. Therefore, I don't think you will lose your job field, but your job description will change slightly. So try to see if you can work for mid-journey or other AI companies to make their model better. And since you said, you are really great at making your art, you can create something like mid-journey but specialized in 3D models yourself with the help of engineers, and make millions even!

1

nyanpires

•

2y ago

So, what happens once all the 'kinks' are out of the machine? They don't need us anymore? Cmon.

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

I don't understand the part of your question regarding "kinks are out of the machine". However, "they" will always need you, the only problem is you have to let "them" know by taking some initiative first. If you can show that using a better dataset (created by artists) the model generates better images, then the demand for artists in AI companies will definitely increase.

1

1 reply

looak

•

2y ago

Why aren't people as enraged about advancements in procedural content as they are with these generative ais? That Unreal demo released the other day with the Rivian driving around in a canyon is much more impressive than the odd images that Midjourney produces. IMO.

1

BuzzkiII

•

2y ago

I feel for you. I do 2d illustration but never realized the impact it has on the 3D field - That said, I did see AI being used now to generate things like movements and walk cycle animations and what not now. It's scary how much is being overtaken by it.

1

u/Beitje avatar

Beitje

•

2y ago

You have to unleash your creativity in other ways. If AI can do the design, modeling, etc that makes it easier for you to design your own entire games and worlds. It sucks that your specific skill feels less valuable, but you can find other ways to get the emotional payoff you get from doing it.

1

KesanMusic

•

2y ago

This is what always saddens me about the most recent wave of AI progression.

As someone who is currently developing AI/Neural Networks for audio applications and a musician. It's terrifying to see how "automated" the creative process is becoming. All resources in positions like these will be solely AI orientated i believe.

While it won't "replace your job" it will almost nearly do as you spoke which is lose the love of your job.

I will say if your in a small 10 person company, try and talk to your boss about finding a silver lining between AI automation and human creation, find the medium between human passion and artificial precision, that's probably the most utilized/ideal situation for this.

Sorry to hear about this

1

everyday2013

•

2y ago

side note -- don't ever be "very sure" you won't lose a job because you are better

one job I lost was because my boss's son in another dept. was being let go (downsizing), so she gave him my job

she told me, while she was crying, that I did better work, but without a job he would have lost his condo

over time, many people have told me "you're irreplaceable!" -- nope

1

Battousai_1806

•

2y ago

I don't know maybe for now try to move to a studio that actually works with 3D art? this AI revolution has been very fun to me so far since I'm an engineer in profession and I always liked modeling an animating, but creativity has always been my weakest aptitude by a mile, actually it was that what ended up dragging me away from arts I could learn to paint and the lot, but I could never get to conceptualize anything that came out of my mind 100%, the mere thought of having to do that was scary and I limited myself to copying official artwork for all of my adventuring in drawing as a teenager.

And well it's just not fair when you have a living out of this. I'm also having fun in my real work due to GPT getting any modular thing I ask it to in a second, but we'll eventually get to a point AI can conceptualize and derive full software as well as produce it from start to finish. The fact we're all doing these things out of need is all the problem here and the source of our fear and apathy towards this upcoming technological singularity, really.

1

u/WonderfulWanderer777 avatar

WonderfulWanderer777

•

2y ago

r/ArtistHate

1

u/OutOfBand3 avatar

OutOfBand3

•

2y ago

"I am employed as a buggy whip craftsman in a small company ..."

These things happen from time to time.

1

-perseverence-

•

2y ago

I would suggest giving this time, I believe it will come full circle, in the long run humans don't want shit produced by an ai , it's plastic flowers, the reason we liked the art in the first place is because it represented the beauty and excellence of humanity

There will be a certain market for ai produced crap but believe me humans want human created stuff

Maybe this ai just keeps us clear out a lot of the useless cookie cutter type stuff and Javed you to produce creative material that is forward looking and sets new trends which ai will never do

1

bosharpe1

•

2y ago

How on earth did your company implement this so quickly?! Can you elaborate on how they’ve integrated it, and what you noticed changing first? Terrifying..

1

u/ViRiX_Dreamcore avatar

ViRiX_Dreamcore

•

2y ago

Hopefully they start making actual 3D games. That’ll bring things back for a while… but the problem isn’t midjourney… it’s their boss.

“I care, he doesn’t.” It was always bound to happen, AI or not.

I bet you if the games they make have an actual fanbase, they will notice. If they just make shevleware games for the lowest common denominator, then there was no love or care to begin with.

It’s the equivalent of wanting to be a world-class chef, so then you go work at McDonald’s. You make the burgers they want you to make. ￼

1

u/Still-Bit-8897 avatar

Still-Bit-8897

•

2y ago

Hmm .. something doesnt add up:

you are a.3D modeler or aspiring to be a 3D modeler

you are using midjourney to produce /rig /animate an asset ?

Midjourney does not do that and at least for now have the ability to create/animate and rig 3D assets ... You still need to sculpt / topo / rig and animate the same way you would normally would after.. the only artists who should be worried would be a 2D character illustrator or concept artist and which you don't seem to be ?

So if this story is genuine, you might want to dig deeper on why you have actually been let go ?

1

nyanpires

•

2y ago

The rig thing is definitely something, vtuber makers have said they won't rig AI images because they are a pain to do but it can be done because people sell them on fiverr and they are not professional looking based on how they are cut.

1

oceandos

•

2y ago

saw your post on twitter. im so sorry that happened, i know you must be really sad bc who wouldnt. but i'll be hoping you eventually find something even better. maybe things happen bc even gooder things are coming. nd maybe you dont want those cliche words but i'm sure you will find a better job and get to work with what you love

1

Sternsafari

OP

•

2y ago

Thanks. Would you mind letting me know who posted it on twitter?

1

1 reply

GalileoGalilei2012

•

2y ago

Telegraph operator angry at the invention of the telephone

1

u/bebopblues avatar

bebopblues

•

2y ago

There are still plenty of 3D jobs that will always be unaffected by AI art. I can see AI generated stuffs replacing matte painters or maybe certain types of photography, but not most 3D Art.

Applied elsewhere if you are unhappy with the current job.

1

chesterT3

•

2y ago

I know the feeling. I stopped writing scripts and trying to be a screenwriter because all the meetings I got were to make content for YouTube creators. No thank you. I did not go go film school and dream of creating iconic movies so I could write some bullshit for a YouTuber.

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

Congrats OP, your post has been covered by Joseph Carlson’s YT channel: https://youtu.be/YyFX5IgOz54

1

run_zeno_run

•

2y ago

Craftspeople of trades that were industrialized have been dealing with this for a a couple of centuries now. I guess we all need to learn to divorce our creative passions from our professional jobs. There are some lucky people who manage to do both in automated industries, like artisanal crafters, so maybe that’s an avenue for some digital creatives as well, but not for many.

1

1 reply

u/MondayDestroy avatar

MondayDestroy

•

2y ago

What game is this so I'll know not to buy it : )

1

Danger_Fox_

•

2y ago

The toolset is changing. Do you think when CAD came out the guys that drafted and designed by hand had the same feelings? Best to get ahead of the curve and be able to utilise these tools more effectively than others.

1

2 replies

troonsslayer1488

•

2y ago

You more than deserve it for being a redditor.

1

saltysnatch

•

2y ago

Good.

1

1 reply

u/dineramallama avatar

dineramallama

•

2y ago

It's a continuation in a long line of work efficiency improvements that came at the expense of quality and artisanal skill.

Arguably it started in the industrial revolution when people were suddenly attending machines all day instead of handcrafting textiles.

It truly sucks for people like yourself when you work hard to hone skills, only to see them get partially/fully automated away. I work in software development and fear the same will happen to my job in the not too distant future.

You have to be thankful that you still have a job and that your ability to integrate with these technologies will make you more marketable in the short to medium term, even if that's in a role you don't particularly enjoy. The alternative is a moving to another industry altogether and then the question is can you afford to step down to junior level while you build up your new skillset?

1

u/Narroo avatar

Narroo

•

2y ago

I did start in earnest during the industrial revolution. The tradeoff was that it allowed people to have simple things that they couldn't before, such as clothing and furniture that wasn't absurdly expensive. It allowed them to have leisure activities and hobbies. But at the expensive of artisanship.

The real problem seems to be that society can't take things in moderation--it seems that everything either needs to be fully artisanal (which is impractical) or automated (which is soul sucking).

1

u/corsicanguppy avatar

corsicanguppy

•

2y ago

But leaving a company and a nice team, because AI took my job feels very dystopian.

This reads Very Differently when you notice the second comma is gone.

1

u/kyriefortune avatar

kyriefortune

•

2y ago

With more and more people risking their job to AI, the welfare system will crumble. Too many people will be laid off because the AI can do their job, too many people will have to get welfare and won't be able to pay the necessary taxes to pay the retirement of the aging population which just keeps growing and growing in size., needing more and more money for retirement because they would be too old to get a job they won't get because of AI. If the chip shortage or a well-places lawsuit doesn't destroy AI, the economy will.

1

Pinnywize

•

2y ago

That's not a welfare system that's Capitilism crumbling under its own stupidity.

1

fernandanb

•

2y ago

Hi Sternsafari! I'm sorry to read this post. I'm writing a story for WIRED about AI and videogames and I'd love to talk further with you on this. We can keep the conversation anonymous if you'd like. Please reach out.

1

u/BeerNirvana avatar

BeerNirvana

•

2y ago

Time to reread Player Piano by Vonnegut.

1

u/Individdy avatar

Individdy

•

2y ago

We need to go back to when people had to build computers by hand, and program the software with switches on the front. Imagine how many more jobs we'd have. Sure, far fewer people would be able to even afford or use a computer, but we'd have more employment.

1

8 replies

Myrkull

•

2y ago

Sucks to suck

1

u/Narroo avatar

Narroo

•

2y ago

On one hand, it's never a good thing for an industry to change in a way to make someone's job boring or tedious. One the other hand: The way this is framed does come of as extremely "entitled" in a few ways.

Most people don't have the pleasure of having jobs they actually enjoy or love.

Even when people do have jobs they liked, they're eventually forced to change jobs anyways for one reason or another, so fun jobs are usually fleeting.

And, isn't this a bit similar to what happen when digital art came out? I vaguely remember that traditional artists were pissed at digital art for similar reasons when it started picking up.

So, on one hand I sympathize with someone having the fun and creativity "sucked out" of their own job overnight. But on the otherhand, that's actually the sort of thing most people have to deal with one way or another.

(Also, the whole "I'm mad because I was better than my cowoker before" angle is a bit of office politics BS.)

1

blogical

•

2y ago

I appreciate your recognition of the emotions you're facing. As someone with decades in tech, having seen a string of roles obviated by technology, here is my approach.

You had an idea of what it would be like performing your role, which included doing what you enjoy. That's necessary to have hope, and get the positive emotion cycle going. Super important to avoid burnout. Your position emotionally, in grief and anger, is a response to this loss, and provides the perspective and energy to find a new approach. Do that as soon as possible. You could find a new position where you'll be able to enjoy what you like doing, but it will be harder now. You might also simply shift that to personal projects and side gigs, which will allow you to do even more of whatever you enjoy without sacrificing to meet others' demands, like efficient production of necessary assets.

Keep finding new things you enjoy doing. You won't know what they are at first, but keep iterating and playing with things... empowering technology changes make this accessible to less competent folks, but they also remove the grunt work from talented folks. You should have more time for this... unless your boss has already absorbed that value (your output expectations have increased while your time + compensation remains static.) This is the other problem with automation, the displacement of workers. That's another problem entirely. I hope this AI ride we're getting on is more empowering than not for everyone, but the emotional effects of work displacement really hasn't been addressed. I wish you the best in finding what you'll love about your role next, or your next role. Good luck!

1

u/MuggyFuzzball avatar

MuggyFuzzball

•

2y ago

This doesn't sound real. I have a lot of friends in the industry working for all manner of companies and I myself worked as a 3d artist for 7 years. Nobody I've spoken to has said anything about Midjourney replacing their 3d modeling skills at their jobs.

1

1 reply

OptimisticSnail

•

2y ago

There is a short book “who moved my cheese?” - this may offer good advice

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Moved_My_Cheese%3F

1

u/cannikin13 avatar

cannikin13

•

2y ago

Adapt to survive or get left behind,

1

argentin0x

•

2y ago

But luckly ther's a step ahead to think about, with AI art a company can't implement Copyright and it is a real problem if you need to monetize your work!

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05321/copyright-registration-guidance-works-containing-material-generated-by-artificial-intelligence

1

u/travelsonic avatar

travelsonic

•

2y ago

I'm not sure I follow - sure, just generating a work with the likes if midjourney isn't copyrightable, but IIRC if you make a bunch of them and assemble them into some sort of combined work I've heard mixed opinions on whether it'd be transformative enough to be copyrightable.

1

Forsaken_Media573

•

2y ago

I don't think 3D modeling can be easily replaced. The biggest difference between 2D and 3D is the source of learning data. Currently, there are no high-quality and abundant 3D files available for learning. I believe that AI-generated 3D is still far from practical, and although I know that it will improve over time, it is different from 2D images, where the amount of data is significantly different.

I am also interested in the technology of 3D generation, and I am looking forward to its progress. However, I think that at best, it can only provide a proxy function, allowing us to build high-quality models more quickly. But there are already many tools available to us for this purpose.

Almost all AI-generated models are pre-rendered, but it doesn't seem to have much impact on real-time rendering.

1

MyAccountWasBanned7

•

2y ago

I'm a developer. More specifically, I work as a senior data analyst, report writer, and build efforts and apps with no-code tools like Power Apps.

AI can and will replace me within the year. And the folks on my team creating JSON and YML pipelines? They'll soon follow.

AI can write the standardized code even more efficiently. It can generate reports with data transformations. It can spin up apps with the necessary specifications.

A lot of computer-based jobs are on the way out. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out.

1

si828

•

2y ago

I’m finding a similar thing with software engineering, I liked tackling difficult problems that really required thought and crafting solutions.

Now I just pop it into chatgpt - I can’t even be bothered to think now I just ask chatgpt to do it.

1

u/IngenuityHot8598 avatar

IngenuityHot8598

•

2y ago

You could always train your own model with a dataset comprised of your own work. It sucks you can't create at work anymore, but maybe you can stand out with your own proprietary dataset. Just never share the dataset and your AI model will be your own private source of art.

1

takamorinki

•

2y ago

You are making 3d models to input to AI with prompts to make 2D sprite 😒.. I don’t think 3D modelers will lose their job as it’s needed in the pipeline for the animation/gaming Industry. Retakes are bound to kick back to modelers and then riggers and then animators.

1

nyctibius_grandis

•

2y ago

why not join an augmented reality company Thats us we are 3d artists and we need a 360 view of the clients item for AR purposes Its when you scan an environment and put your 3d model in the real world with accurate measurements AI cant do that Idk if this helps i hope so. Yo i hope youll be ok

1

Cyber-Cafe

•

2y ago

I’d kill to output low effort crap all day so that I could use my free time to make the art I actually want to, but different strokes for different folks.

Personally, I got burnt out from making art all day for money for over a decade.

If you’re passionate about 3d, like, do your job. Phone it in hard. Go home, and work on 3D.

1

nawtydawg2001

•

2y ago

Of it makes you feel any better I wish MY job included using ai yo generate art...so you're a lot happier than me!

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

Going into the gaming industry thinking you were going to freely create was your first mistake

0

Stunning-Car4860

•

2y ago

Whiner... if you are a true artist, you will do SOME job to pay for what you need, and create art in free time, but what you call "art" is just a job, true ART is not about creating models for some mobile game, you got yourself confused. Also, "manual" animators and painters before you felt like digital artists like yourself are taking their jobs, but hey, do you see those professions and hobbies extinct? Do you see hand-made craftsmanship disappear? Even film photography still exists and is paid well if photographer is good. So suck it up, grow up and reconsider your values.

0

[deleted]

•

2y ago

What an absolutely pathetic response. Why are you even on this subreddit?

3

Stunning-Car4860

•

2y ago

What an absolute pathetic reaction to a different opinion.

But since you asked, maybe I'm here because I have something to do with digital art, have you considered this possibility? Don't you think that I might be related to the industry/profession, go through the same global transformation and still disagree with the author? Oh, right, I forgot that having opinion is not allowed anymore in the society, everyone is the victim and must be sympathized with, period.

0

Pinnywize

•

2y ago

I'm glad I have the skills to communicate with out losing empathy. Sorry your parents failed you, and their parents failed them.

3

u/Threefactor avatar

Threefactor

•

2y ago

I would say that AI-based APIs will eventually reduce the workforce by 40%. No need for legal aid, just the lawyer, no need for radiologist, just the doctor who get receives the AI-based decision, no more tax filing specialists, and on and on. Government should start planning for this now by having things like basic income for people whose jobs are wiped out.

1

_LLORT_NAISSUR_

•

2y ago

You need to be better than a computer then or skynet will prevail!

0

minhaajrehman

•

2y ago

This is the least i can do for you: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/minhaaj_chatgpt-tiktok-midjourney-activity-7046907144524247040-FJ33?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

1

solefald

•

2y ago

You want motivation? Sure. But before that I’m going to deviate from all these feel-good words of support and give you some harsh ones. No offense, but all of this is no one else’s fault but yours.

Cycling is a sport of ultimate pain and suffering. It really is. So, cyclist have a saying HTFU. It means Harden The Fuck Up. Because you really do need to do that

Another phrase you need to learn, the phrase I used when my teenage kid was throwing fits. The phrase is That’s What A Little Bitch Would Say. Because you are being one.

You sitting here and complaining that a company that pays you to do your job is paying you to do something that does not interest you. Well, you know what? Find yourself another job. No one is forcing you to stay at this one. Or, if you always want to do what you want to do, open your own company. This will solve this problem.

There are thousands of 3D jobs out there. THOUSANDS. And everyone owns 3D printer now day and people buy 3D models. Just go to cults3d.com and see what kind of incredible models people sell there. So, make whatever you want and sell there

As for motivation, here:

This guy became a DJ without having any equipment whatsoever. https://youtu.be/LLXxrwPraxE

And this guy became a DJ without goddamn arms. https://youtu.be/LLXxrwPraxE

The time it took you to write your pointless post, you would’ve applied for another job already.

HTFU

0

u/sometearsareforever avatar

sometearsareforever

•

2y ago

It would be cool that IF it saves you weeks, you could take the time off you save lol. Or let‘s say 50% of it.

So in your free time you could create that handmade, original 3D art :)

We have to rethink the way we work once more.

0

send_trivia

•

2y ago

It is bound to happen.

But that does not tantamount to dystopia. The same replacement by technological advancements have been happening throughout history.

"60% of workers today are employed in occupations that did not exist in 1940, implying that 85% of employment growth over the last 80 years is explained by the technology-driven creation of new positions" (Autor, 2022). https://www.nber.org/papers/w30389

0

reconditedreams

•

2y ago

womp womp

Why should I care about whether some shitty mobile game company employs passionate artists or AI to churn out sprites? Do you seriously believe that what you're doing is "art"? You're just manufacturing a commodity. If you want to make actual art, you are perfectly free to do so on your own time.

0

u/Synizs avatar

Synizs

•

2y ago

”I don’t want to make ”art” that is the result of scraped internet content, from artists, that were not asked.”

Your art has obviously (similarly) been near completely the result of other artists.

The first ”artists” didn’t do anything near to what people do today…

And the tools you use have been created entirely by other humans, etc…

0

flatcircledarko

•

2y ago

Think about it this way. Games require a lot of assets. How inspired were you in the creative process spending 3 weeks on the trash can or bathroom. Ideally this will free you up to put your creative energy in more meaningful tasks. Maybe even tasks you didn't have time to contemplate in the first place.

1

pingucat

•

2y ago

he might want to consider the copyright implications of doing that.

1

DareScorp

•

2y ago

Here is my take. The AI tools cannot take away all the work we are doing. It can perform a sub set of the tasks and can replace human effort for certain type of creatives/chores. But not completely. I am envisioning it as, this is going to be combined with a human art + an AI enhancement.

1

noealz

•

2y ago

The way I feel about this is that it is a job and you have to do what is best for the company because that is what you are getting paid for. No one's stopping you from doing art and the things you love in your own time.

1

Steven-Maturin

•

2y ago

In photography we used to have to mix up our own chemicals for developing and fixing. Then they came pre-mixed. Then digital happened and nobody used chemicals. I used to love being in a dark room and using my dodging and burning skills. Pushing film 2 stops, doing cibachromes with medium format Velvia - all that good stuff.

Now people press a button on a phone.

1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

Lern2code.

1

margdikjuice

•

2y ago

Learn to code

1

BeginningLecture6975

•

2y ago

Before Midjourney, you were still making art that was "scraped internet content from artists, that were not asked", only the algorithm doing this was your brain. No artist works in a vacuum, they all require inspiration, and image generation algorithms are no different. As a software engineer that now generates code at work via GPT4 despite loving the process of writing code myself, I have to say quite honestly that no one owes you a job, and this tech is not going away. If you really love art, then you'll do it on the side for the sake of the art, the way I still do with coding. If you don't want to do this or don't see the point, then maybe you never really loved it to begin with, unless there was a paycheck attached.

1

erichb1

•

2y ago

Be thankful you still have a job. Soon you won't in that industry. Go back to school asap and get different schooling.

1

Ethario

•

2y ago

Good progress means culling the weak who can't evolve. It means stuff is moving along.

1

u/TestCalligrapher14 avatar

TestCalligrapher14

•

2y ago

“I am angry. My 3D colleague is completely fine with it. He promps all day, shows and gets praise. The thing is, we both were not at the same level, quality-wise. My work was always a tad better, in shape and texture, rendering… I always was very sure I wouldn’t loose my job, because I produce slightly better quality. This advantage is gone, and so is my hope for using my own creative energy to create.” it is good to try to evolve. You may not have to be exactly as good as him or your past self but in the same general level so you don’t get canned. Don’t forget to try to have less ego outside. This happens in many other jobs and fields, and perhaps is not wholly bad

1

chmendez

•

2y ago

We still buy handicrafts for a reason even though industrial products are usually cheaper. There will be a market for creation by human artists. The key would be the human story and knowing about that artist and not just the creation.

1

notsocharmingprince

•

2y ago

I’m really sorry you are having a hard time. I can see that you deeply care.

1

Revolutionary_Lie631

•

2y ago

I’m sorry but you shouldn’t hold back the future out of spite, automation is a good thing.

0

u/HelloACiDDD avatar

HelloACiDDD

•

2y ago

i want your job

1

u/Strict_Ad1821 avatar

Strict_Ad1821

•

2y ago

I don't think AI will take over artists' jobs.

1

u/davecrist avatar

davecrist

•

2y ago

I’m curious about the ultimate output quality difference. If it’s the same or negligibly worse than can you blame the company? That’s an incredible cost savings. At the least it can enable you to make multiple versions of the same products in the time it used to take to make one.

1

anna-lytica

•

2y ago

You mention the stolen open copyrights - the net community provided the data for exploitation. That is now the price we are all starting to pay. - Weren't we going to work less anyway? - But how do we secure our income this way?

1

CincyPepperCompany

•

2y ago

I think the key thing to remember here is that GPT opens up worlds of opportunity for non-professionals who happen to excel at prompting.

It will be very difficult for companies to stay competitive in markets like advertising if competitors are paying “prompt engineers” a third of traditional wages to churn out the same, or slightly worse, material than professional copywriters.

It’s definitely a new world where the old rules for forecasting employment are, at best, all loosey goosey.

Radical change is the only thing that’s certain.

1

u/jbperez808 avatar

jbperez808

•

2y ago

first world problems

1

u/ackza avatar

ackza

•

2y ago

and? when photoshop came oit a lot of manual graphics peoppe became obsolete...what about video editors? anyone can use ai to edit a video now...3d modeling was mever suposed to be hard

also i never hor paid for my 3d work youre lucky...you had a good run...nothing in life is garunteed

you were lucky. again you were lucky you got s job you loved for as long as you did and if you were smart youd find ways to use himan + ai to make more unique art

seeiously tho this is such an entitled atitude

plenty of people have no job and cant make any money off their art

i trained for a year doing rotoscoping making movies into 3d and i was happy when they made that automated and rightfully so

when 3d printed homes come out will you feel bad for people who trained whole lives to hah be home builders ? what if the 3d printed homes bring billions out of poverty ? is that nor worth a few hundred thousa d people having ro find a new job?

welcome to earth dude you were making money off technology and now technology has evolved snd you eere never garunteed that job for life ...lol like seriously this is rediculous to think any artist deserves to just get paid forever when we can now automate things fast like they should be

sure go ahead downvite and report me for having an opinion and telling tye cold hard unpopular truth but seriously dude...i know youre not whining but like my message to eveeyone is keep thinking of examples of life changing tech that makes the world better

when chainsaws came oit im sure lumberjacks that lived cutting down trees with saws thiught they should mke the chainsaw illegal lol

or how about when science came out? and real medicine? you rhink witch doctors were like "oh my lifes work is over and this damn medicine has ruined my alchemy career" lol thats how people sound

1

u/ackza avatar

ackza

•

2y ago

oh and you cant own an art style. midjourney can zero in now on the exact reason why an art style looks a ceetain way and leave out an artists name. it is just geometry dude it comes down ro this. sorry you cant copyright the triangle or a color pallete (maybe they will let you in the future of u whine to a socialist government long enough at the expense of the same progress that affoeded you all the harfware and software YOU worked on for years built on the shoulders of giants

you didnt program belnder or photoshop sooooo yeah

as someone whose never gotten a living off my 3d work and onky had a few years of gigs i feel like youre very entitled ro be angry and regurgitate all these cliches from google news about "oh its stealing other peiples scraped art" and artusts arent stealing all the inspiration from the world in their visual cortex? art is never made in a vacuum

what about everyone who never got paid for any of their art? so you deserve all the money but we dont deserve to make art is what im hearing because you believe in marxist labor theory it feels like as if u rhink u are owed something for having soent time on it when no sorry value has norhing ro do with how much arbitrary time u spend

work smarter faster not longer

if you were talented youd adapt nd use ai and remix it with human art and find ways to learn to code like everyone else has to now insyead of resting on your laurels like u mist have been doing for years in your "career" that im happy is over now so you have ro live in the reql world and find a real job now like everyone else

sorry but we dont need you nd you cant copyright a geometric shape or color buddy

1

u/SexyWhiskers avatar

SexyWhiskers

•

2y ago

I dont wanna sound innapropriate. But how does he create, rig and animate a character in 3d in 2-3 days from a still image?

1

SweetyMcQ

•

2y ago

You could try a new career. Maybe learn to weld, coal mine, or code?

1

u/max1c avatar

max1c

•

2y ago

Hopefully now you can relate and feel for the folks in the coal, oil, vehicle, and other industries.

1

Magnetic_penis_strap

•

2y ago

I came here from r/subredditdrama just to laugh at the artists.

1

u/docwhat avatar

docwhat

•

2y ago

I'm sorry it is rough at the moment.

I would expect that in the future, as the technology settles down, what would happen is you would take your own art and 3-d models and use it to train your own AI.

This would let you act as a (last-year) team of artists all in your style.

Unfortunately, during the transition as the technology changes, it'll suck some.

I'm sure you'll figure out how to leverage AI technology to make your job fun again. I hope it doesn't take too long.

1

u/New_Actuator5040 avatar

New_Actuator5040

•

2y ago

Comment Image

Abdulkadir Özbudak Abdulkadirozbudak42@gmail.com

1

u/SubjectCustomer2167 avatar

SubjectCustomer2167

•

2y ago

Check art here: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cq2PeqYuXUf/

1

MagosBattlebear

•

2y ago

I hear from my friends' arguments about this being art version machine. I see it as workers' rights issues. The never-ending fight between automation and human work

BTW: I'm one of those people who refuse to use self checkout lines.

1

sepremento

•

2y ago

I don't know whether that point came up before or not, but I've noticed that industrial revolution had not made craftsmen obsolete. Yes, smaller fraction of people goes into craftsmanship then in the Middle Ages, but they do that only because there are other things to do. People that like making ceramic pots, furniture and other beautiful handmade things actually flourish nowadays and are able to make a living. I guess that something similar will happen to digital artwork. Despite Midjourney ability to make pretty pictures there is still space for human creativity and new styles. So I guess there would be mass produced games and carefully human crafted games that will just be two different market niches.

1

Notkeen5

•

2y ago

Loose and lose are different words

1

nfisrealiamevidence

•

2y ago

Came here to this post from Tim Soret tweet, he is the developer of The Last Night #93 most wishlisted game on steam.

1

u/Silthya avatar

Silthya

•

2y ago

Is that the length of your ambition?

1

ElectronicKandy

•

2y ago

But look at it diff. Conquer wordage.

1

DadAlphaDad

•

2y ago

I made this with a one-line prompt, based on your post. No polishing or finishing. You have my sympathies.

Comment Image

1

u/JoBloGo avatar

JoBloGo

•

2y ago

I’m a creative too (illustrator and designer). I rarely get to work on projects that give me carte blanche to do whatever I want. It’s always about budget, trends, metrics etc… unless you’ve made a name for yourself you’ll rarely get the chance to try something new (it costs money and it’s risky, better to stick with what you know works). It often feels like you should be hired for your creative thinking and expertise, but most of the time you feel like a tool…or a monkey, just “putting to paper” exactly what you’re told to. As long as you understand the basics of design and typography you can churn out work. I’ve been around long enough to have experienced several changes in how design is produced, in order to stay relevant I’ve needed to embrace new tools, and forget methods that I considered “a craft.” I’ve needed to learn to transfer my skills to new tools. I think this is just another tool, creativity, and eye for design, understanding movement, etc… those are skills that can’t be replaced by AI (at least not yet).

Can you take on some personal projects?

1

u/dawnsparkle avatar

dawnsparkle

•

2y ago

Even as someone who loves these models and what they could possibly do for us, you should not be forced to use them if you don't want too. Unfortunately, that exact kind of "grunt work" is what's going to get eaten up by them. My best advice is to take this as an opportunity to make money doing the prompting, and then put your creative energy into things you actually care about, models you live and can spend as much time as you want on because you are not restrained by deadlines, thematic coherency, efficiency, all of that stuff. I look at artists like derek hetrick for that kind of thing, he works for schell games, the people who made the mmos for Disney. His personal work is wildly different, but because his job keeps him afloat, he has time and room to make things hed never be able to make a industry level income on. Midjourny can't really get the same split second decisions that leads to the little quirks, the differences in how you work very awake vs kinda tired, how you are emotionally. the entire human experience goes into making art, and models can't replicate that. And as the saying goes, it's always the little things.

1

u/painki11erx avatar

painki11erx

•

2y ago

I suggest at the very least you keep learning 3d on the side. If you love it, then at least do it for your own enjoyment in your free time.

1

u/pbeta avatar

pbeta

•

2y ago

I think you have to let works be works. Adapt and use all the AI you need to produce best works in least amount of time. Then let your art be a free time hobbies. In the near future, the days will be gone where you get paid to work on one high quality model over weeks. The industry will expect you to ditch out a lot of high quality models within a day at a lower payroll.

I don't see how people will stop the AI. It's similar to how industrialization disrupt the blue collar jobs. Even when there were protests and complains, nobody can (nor will) do anything about it because of its cost efficient.

Imagine, one country banning AI for 3D modeling, while its neighboring country embraced it. All the industries would hire "3D modeler" from the neighboring country, since those "3D modeler" can print out high quality 3D model at super fast rate and much much much cheaper cost. Perhaps even at minimum labor cost, since AI is accessible to everyone.

1

No_Dig_7017

•

2y ago

Hey man, first of all that sucks. I read your words and I feel your story. Envisioning the way you work, the things you like about it and the things you're good at and having all those changed in a day feels terrible.

Second thought though, is that all there was to your profession? My thought comes from that it sucks to have a change imposed into you like this, but change always breeds opportunity as well.

I'm a software engineer (actually working in AI, but nothing like generative models like Midjourney or ChatGPT, I'm doing classical ML stuff for pricing) and ChatGPT has also taken over some parts of coding. Just yesterday I wrote it a one paragraph description of a non linear least squares problem that I wanted solved and I asked it to do it. He gave me in 3 minutes an answer that had a single error. In another time, that would have been my work and would have taken me 2-3 days maybe.

But the key stuff is that there is so much more to software engineering than coding, there's understanding the requirements, designing the solution, and the architecture, connecting the software components, and finally coding and documenting. ChatGPT can do parts of the coding and documenting much faster than I could, but it still needs my input to understand what needs to be done.

I wonder if that can translate to your area as well. Midjourney can't define the visual style for a game, the color palette, the message you want to deliver with your visuals. Wonder if it's possible to incorporate the new tool to enhance your workflow, but keeping it's soul where it belongs.

1

u/muyyuddinmati avatar

muyyuddinmati

•

2y ago

Before covid lockdown hits everyone globally, I was working as a chef in hotel located in the city center. I also ran a side hustle my own little company that supplies food-service equipment and machines within the same industry, doing quite well until the lockdown hits us with so many rules it actually effected the whole service industry tremendously. And who would have thought a hotel can be shut down because company can no longer keep up with the 0 income period while still pays every staff member. This led me to become unemployed overnight, but that's okay i thought to myself, I can just create side hustle to make it up; but good ideas sometimes doesn't work out as expected. I wasn't the only chef who went out of job, there's so many hotels who suffered the same faith.

While still struggling to maintain my food delivery business in this great competition, I realized many competitors were facing 1 major problem is not knowing how to manage their operation system over the web, except for me because I have always have interest in computers but I just like culinary more than computers as career. Though many of them are competitors, but they are also my good friends in the same industry, and I started to get countless request to help them build/setup business operating system using website/app, in return with pay of course.

The request for so great I decided to just go full time doing this because my home is just not design for commercial cooking. And then after a few months, I transformed myself into what many refers as front-end developer. While at the peak of lockdown period, being forced to stay at home gave me plenty of time to take more advance coding courses, like python, js, scss, you know the more advance stuff, now I just use vue js or react into my recent projects.

Although I'm not qualified to work for google, but job request from small business owners have been supporting my side hustle until it becomes my full time job. I don't know anything about games, moreover mobile games industry, based on popularity of games among the young generation I'm guessing it's a pretty huge industry next to FOOD, sometimes I see young people can neglect eating by playing games. My advice is, if a chef can become a web designer, I think with the skill you have, you can create far greater things than me.

1

u/International_Rock13 avatar

International_Rock13

•

2y ago

Adapt and use it as leverage like your colleague. The people who assembled by hand said the same when factories came out. You design art the computer and don't have to deal with mediums such as paint were you can't press the undo button. I started as a child drawing and lost that skill as I got older working with photo shop. Plus some designers or workers in industries got lazy but demanded more money. As a paying manager I don't have to deal with the attitudes or extended deadlines. I'm still finishing my degree in IT, but what's the reason?

1

Mankemista

•

2y ago

Man that’s fucked up.

I hope you found a solution to this problem. Didn’t know studio’s already went the AI way

1

u/Careful-Mouse-1521 avatar

Careful-Mouse-1521

•

2y ago

I got idea for you why don't you create your own Fvcking video game.

1

aryan6226

•

2y ago

Sorry for you man, i got to know about you through a youtuber Link

There's still time Hope you'll start to use stable diffusion, buy a high vram pc around 16-24 vram at least for your work

1

MOYOMOYOMOYO

•

2y ago

They took our jobs!

1

u/LowBandwidthAI avatar

LowBandwidthAI

•

2y ago

Banking on one competitive advantage shows you weren’t cut out. People who succeed don’t complain. They roll with the punches. Ride the big waves. And make new roads. I used AI to enhance my work not to replace it. Find a new way or you’re not being creative enough. And don’t ask me how I figure out my own complex problems all day. Giving up is easy. Leave if you want. Go learn to weave baskets or be a cook if you want something easy.

1

Ostmeistro

•

2y ago

pure bullshit this. we don't have 3d generator yet. that makes the rest pretty transparent

1

u/malakon avatar

malakon

•

2y ago

agree it sucks. As a full stack developer I'm sure this stuff is coming soon for our jobs. The generation of entire framed out websites with code and assets based on asking for them with prompts. I'm sure that the results will need careful reviewing and rework but its gonna happen. All we can do is adapt, and try to position ourselves as employable for whatever the new paradigm is.

What sucks, like your case is the AI will be trained on open source codebases made by humans and will use chunks of it with no attribution, no contributing improved code back to open-source etc. Just a giant sucking noise.

-1

u/CheckMateFluff avatar

CheckMateFluff

•

2y ago

To be fair, a lot of open-source codebases are made by humans and use chunks from others with no attribution, no contributing improved code back to open-source, etc.

3

thomasbatey

•

2y ago

I'm a solo developer and I love AI, it has increased my productivity and knowledge acquisition 10-fold. If your job only makes a tool out of you, no wonder it's easy to replace you when a better tool becomes available. So don't be just a tool, be more!

1

2 replies

ANENEMY_

•

2y ago

Makes me sick to my stomach that there's really only one option in the long term; embrace it, or else let it crush you. I'm just coming into the industry and AI art proliferating has all but flattened my enthusiasm for having my work and time even matter. But it's not like there is any "putting the genie back in the bottle" possibility here. It's wonderfully powerful tech and scary af

-1

neilhighley

•

2y ago

3d art has also seen changes since povray and then zbrush

-1

EverretEvolved

•

2y ago

Lol I would love to see this work flow. Lots of industries are changing. You guys were using 3d models to make 2d sprites? I thought that shit was done with back in the suoer nintendo days. What game engine can't handle 3d stuff. There are millions if 3d mobile games. Sounds like your old proces was dated by about 20or 30 years.

-1

epSos-DE

•

2y ago

Who stops you from applying personal details to the AI art ???

-1

u/JacksCompleteLackOf avatar

JacksCompleteLackOf

•

2y ago

And I am sorry for using your Art, fellow artists.

I'm sorry about your job situation, but you were using other artist's work before GPT in essentially the same way that GPT is now.

-1

unity100

•

2y ago

Wont AI enable everyone including artists to do more like every tool before it, and make it possible to create even more... I am especially looking forward to games having bigger, more detailed, more believable worlds. As I understand, creating models, textures have been a pain in the a** for a long time. It slows down games and reduces their scope and makes them more expensive. I read that even ESO is still using a lot of art that was made for much earlier single-player Elder Scrolls games. Its worse for smaller companies - they cant compete with AAA games in detail and immersiveness because they can never have the budget for it.

About time too - I personally was fed up with how games teased us with ever-expansive, immersive worlds and realities and yet they remained shallow for a long while.

-1

u/havoc2k10 avatar

havoc2k10

•

2y ago

those who are unable to keep up with tech will always be left in dust with nothing to their name just like Nokia and Motorola they were unable to catch up with innovation where are they now? those who can turn things to new opportunity are the ones who wins and thats the bitter reality

-1

Syziph

•

2y ago

You just have to adapt. Learning new tools and methods should feel refreshing. Just focus on learning the new skills. I am sure that there is a lot left to humans to fix and make usable of these AI generated images. You don't really make art in such companies - you just make what you are told to do - manufacture a product. You can spend your free time making real art for your own satisfaction and still enjoy it and share your results with accepting community.

-1

autoencoder

•

2y ago

3D games still need actual 3D models (rather than pictures). But I suppose many 3D artists are in your position, so the pay will drop accordingly.

I am content with the fact that, if it were a human that learned to create art by looking at art, we would be OK with them - so, model-generated art is OK in my view.

One way to look at it is, you are free to do something more abstract (asking a computer to create art, or something completely different) rather than concrete (handcrafting pixels and polygons). The point of technology is to let us create more with less. I think you should embrace this.

-1

theunraveler1985

•

2y ago

I’m about to be downvoted into oblivion for this but such is life. You have to get on with the times and be adaptable and fit yourself to the surroundings. The current zeitgeist demands that you become more proficient with AI prompts and if you wish to succeed then that is what you have to do.

Try not to dwell on the rights or wrongs of the technology for that is outside of your control.

-1

u/nashashmi avatar

nashashmi

•

2y ago

I don't think MJ took your job. It just made the job more challenging to produce higher rated work. And it is very different work than what you were used to. Take a look at a traditionally created piece and try to recreate that in MJ. If it takes much less time, congrats because now you are able to produce several versions of the same. Yes, your work became more, not less. It might have even become more mundane if you enjoyed the previous stuff.

Before CAD took over engineering, we used to draft. It was incredibly satisfying. And a room full of drafters was quite common. But now the job is merged with a whole bunch of other works. And the job is not similarly cool but it's something. We learned to savor it.

-1

jfalcon206

•

2y ago

I find that if your at the point where your originality becomes common place or "the norm" as often it's the inventors and the dreamers that end up being copied by everyone else. As the trendsetter, if I'm being replicated - it's flattery for about 5 minutes - then it's time to level up my game. Invent the next or start into a new direction. The moment I get complacent and try to rest on my laurels, I end up being in the limelight for that 10-15 or whatever and I spend years after catching myself occassionally trying to be self-important and thump my chest to a bunch of people who either heard my story or just found about that scene 5 minutes ago. Like I say to people: Stay Hungry. It gives you the angst to step the game up. If 3D is all you wanted to do, why not evolve it? Architectural CAD still isn't quite what it could be - let along now that Meta has pivoted on VR, you could look into that space - as second life still exists and build for that.

I am a SRE/SE person by trade. I talked to a particular VFX about a month or so ago and I was trying to sell myself but at the same time I'm discussing, "Oh sure, you have render farms and the queue, but how are you integrating what's coming into the pipeline?" MJ/Dall-E is still fairly two dimensional, but there is still so much that isn't hooked in - taking what they ask, conversion into 3d or a 2d scene, animating the scene, creating atmosphere, etc... at the end of the day the best experience with the cleanest execution of the director's vision is what wins the day. What the audience appreciates is the visible nuance.

Not to mention there is a whole 3d Physical Object space you could produce for and make those tangible objects - not just prints but items complete with flaws to make them one of a kind.

The winners in the game industry are the ones with the best story and the best spin along with the best amount of nuance. If you were to ask random people, I bet if you were to rattle off games from the last 30 years, Hexen or Thedexer are going to be lower than Zork or Myst. So again, why are you doing just games if your passion is to make 3D art? Try architecture and civil drafting/design... while the designs have to fit into engineering spec, structural ridgity can be rearranged if the architecture or art of a piece needs to be accomodated. Then if it turns into a real life experience, you have someplace to return to when the bills are paid and want to reminence.

-1

Ketchupsandvich

•

2y ago

This has been on the horizon for years, first most prominently text to image GANs, then made a certainty since July with the beta of dall:e then stable diffusion.

If a digital artist lets themself be made irrelevant there is no one other to blame then themselves.

Besides, making rushed content for mobile games? That’s hardly art, and sounds like the ideal application of this tech

-1

aobool

•

2y ago

This is great for the other guy though. He's able to use AI to create good work

-1

Mortidio

•

2y ago

Well, you can think of it a bit differently:

I am not an artist anymore, nor a 3D artist. Rn all I do is prompting, photoshopping and implementing good looking pictures.

Congrats on your promotion to Art Director!

Having been in both roles, IMO creating and iterating on prompts is kinda similar to art director work. Main difference is maybe the speed of iterations, thus increasing grittiness and reducing the prestige and glory of the position.

Ideally the final result should get best of the both worlds - human input and AI.

Currently I am creating a game as hobby project and to learn unity. So far AI input has been quite useful:

Concept artist work, both characters and scenery. I have not so far modelled any character or scene straight from the AI art, but used the images as inspiration for most of the models.

Textures. Thats 50-50 straight to use, and some modifications and mixing.

Texts. Previously even in AAA titles the dialogue options were repetitive, as nobody had time to reword single dialogue option 100x.... with chatGTP it can be done pretty easily, with an option to output the variations already formatted into json or xml or whatever you need..

-1

Pretend_Potential

•

2y ago

Dude - if Salvador Dali were still alive, he'd be doing nothing but midjourney (or other AIs) and not worry about whether he was still an artist or not. he'd be creating the fantastic surreal images he was passionate about and not defining himself by the tools he was using.

You're still an artist, you're just going to have to reivse what tools you feel are acceptable or not in your own self image.

-1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

Salty because his coworker is better with words than he is lol

-1

[deleted]

•

2y ago

It's called progress and we all need to deal with it... There is no way this will not stay as a implementation and while many of us will just lose our quality as we become obsolete, life doesn't care about it. It is the same when the industrial revolution killed so many jobs... adapt or stay lost! Sad but true.

-1

lxe

•

2y ago

AI isn't taking your job. You have to establish a mindset of adapting and becoming the best at whatever technology is catching up to your old workflows.

As a programmer, I have to keep up with new paradigms almost continuously. The joy of my career isn't from honing one skill and getting diminishing returns from getting a little bit better at it over time, but rather from learning new and exciting things, and harnessing their power as much as I can, while establishing a baseline set of skills that I can adapt to whatever technological thing comes up next.

It's same with AI art. You can pigeonhole yourself into MJ 5 and be sad for it, or you can explore more than just the tip of the iceberg of what you can do with all the other new tools AI research is pioneering.

You're not "worse" than AI. You just need to catch that wave and surf it instead of letting it tumble you about.

-2

thisisvenky

•

2y ago

I think the major reason here for your dislike is that you feel the competition with your colleague and seems like you don't like him because you've felt your work is better than his.

Now that midjourney has arrived, he jumped the ship to adapt to AI prompting, while you have trouble adjusting.

You have two choices now.

Adapt: Use prompting and create better designs, finish the task soon because you are good in Photoshop and stuffs, and use the free time to working on your 3d design.

Leave: If you don't want to continue there, better leave and build a better portfolio to up your gane somewhere lelse.

-2

u/boleban8 avatar

boleban8

•

2y ago

We are on the eve of great change, so don't lose hope. We cannot resist this great change, we can only embrace it.

-2

u/Itchy_fingaz_ avatar

Itchy_fingaz_

•

2y ago

Adapt or die my friend.

You sound like the carpenter who was angry when electric screwdrivers came around.

-2

[deleted]

•

2y ago

What carpenter was angry when “electric screwdrivers” or “drills” came around? What about table saws? I’m sure they loathe table saws. Dumb argument.

6

u/Lord_Eresmus avatar

Lord_Eresmus

•

2y ago

Just learn a trade bro

-2

perception-eng

•

2y ago

Hi! I’m one of the founders of MirageML and we’re working on bringing control back for 3D artists with AI! We’re developing a 3D Canvas from the ground up integrated with ai that stays true to the artist’s vision!

Definitely reach out!

https://mirageml.com

-2

u/T3Dragoon avatar

T3Dragoon

•

2y ago

This advantage is gone, and so is my hope for using my own creative energy to create.

You had my sympathy up to that point. Now your just angry a new tool came about and someone is now at least as good as you or better at getting work out that the bosses like. Pathetic**.**

-2

Financial_Drinker

•

2y ago

Deserved.

-2

SpectralDomain256

•

2y ago

Congrats. Now you feel what 99% of people feel about their jobs.

-3

u/GreggorySmegma avatar

GreggorySmegma

•

2y ago

rip bozo pakwatch Coders next And yall said truckers were gonna lose their job lmfao

-3

u/mossgoblin avatar

mossgoblin

•

2y ago

Obvious karmabait is obvious

-3

u/Somewhatacceptable24 avatar

Somewhatacceptable24

•

2y ago

Mathematicians survived the calculator: their lives were made better and their work easier. Yet they still are necessary: calculators are not the be-all-end-all. The same goes for modern Ai, simply on a larger scale.

-3

TobioOkuma1

•

2y ago

Dumbass take. Calculators allow you to do certain equations quickly, but advanced mathematical theory can't be thought out by a calculator.

1

u/zedfirenze avatar

zedfirenze

•

2y ago

I don’t really see anybody speaking on this, but honestly this isn’t a bad thing at all. If you look at it the right way, all you’ve gained is an opportunity. Your problem isn’t AI, its the company you’re working for. They’ve sold out, and settled for less, so now its time for you to leave. Whether that’s finding a new job, or maybe pursuing something on your own, theirs a new challenge/opportunity ahead of you which will help you advance in ways which you always wanted to before. So look ahead for it.

-4

randytayler

•

2y ago

Partially agree, but I don't think leaving the job is sensible. If the environment is healthy, with good people, and it's paying well, then I think the answer is to level up in AI art (for the sake of future stability), expand your skillset (whatever that means for you), and also pursue side interests for fun.

-1

u/zedfirenze avatar

zedfirenze

•

2y ago

He just said he lost his passion. Working with no passion for a check is not sensible. That’s selling out, and settling. Not saying it’ll be easy for him to take this next step but it’s clearly the only option. Bc no matter how “good” the environment or pay is at the job he’s at currently, he’s suffering.

He’s being tested right now, and his decision will be the basis of the quality and direction of his life going forward.

Edit: Just including what I put in a later comment. Of course sometimes you have to work a job that isn’t your passion or do things you don’t like bc that’s just life. However, that clearly isn’t this. He’s already in art and his company has started using something that takes away the meaning or value behind creating art in the first place to increase profits. That lack’s sensibility. And the guy already said he lost EVERYTHING he loves about his job. Its clearly time to find something new. Being scared to leave where you are for comfort is just something I’ll never agree with. Especially if they’ve already stooped to levels like this. Food for thought.

1

randytayler

•

2y ago

Working a job that isn't your passion is "selling out"?

It's work. 99.99% of the world has to work at something that isn't their passion. We save our passion for our time off. And that's fine!

When I was in my early 20s I would've agreed with you, for the record. I even told my musician brother that he was selling out by taking a corporate job that had nothing to do with music. It was an incredibly hurtful thing to say, and I regret it to this day.

I think claiming that today's decision will be the basis for the quality and direction of his life is wild hyperbole.

0

Continue this thread

stixx_nixon

•

2y ago

I’m sure vcr repair technicians felt the same way.

adapt.

-4

[deleted]

•

2y ago

Cry more or learn to adapt.

-4

u/UAVXP avatar

UAVXP

•

2y ago

Oh noes, boo-hoo shut up.