7 ms·

For every tool, a better output will always be created by people who specialize in a craft. Just as photoshop revolutionized photography, to this day you can te

by Fordec 4y ago

For every tool, a better output will always be created by people who specialize in a craft. Just as photoshop revolutionized photography, to this day you can tell the difference easily between and bad 'shops. In video games upon release everyone is bad and its an even playing field. But as people practice and gain experience they improve their usage, refine their approaches. You eventually see metas develop and best practices. This will all be exactly the same. Just give it some time and watch professionals create professional outputs compared to paying for some base level work on Fiverr or whatever.

petra 4y ago
Have we seen similar behavior in the usage of older GPT-3 based tools, for example in copywriting or using Copilot? How's the story there?
- BigJono 4y ago
  There's one huge difference between Copilot and stuff like this. Art that's 98% correct is awesome. Code that's 98% correct is completely useless. I think Copilot is going to live off hype for a while then tank and be looked back on as a failed experiment. Whereas I think that this kind of AI will eventually get to a point where it's extremely useful and could change up certain industries (game assets, marketing materials etc).
  - eloff 4y ago
    As a new user of copilot for the last three months, I can't disagree more. I was initially skeptical, and I have noticed it often produces code that looks good but is wrong. However, it still saves me enough time each day to pay for the monthly subscription - in one day. That's a 30x ROI. I imagine it only gets better from here. I wont go back to programming without it.
    - galdosdi 4y ago
      Can I ask what kind of programming you do for it to be so helpful? I mostly do maintenance of legacy codebases (also known as codebases, lol) where a lot of the work is figuring out where the changes need to be made and actually making the changes is frequently just a few lines here and there. When I do have to figure out how to use some API, it's often not an open source one, so Copilot would not have it in its corpus. I think these kinds of conditions are really common since software tends to last for maintenance longer than it is in initial greenfield development. So I'm confused what kind of work benefits from Copilot. Just pumping out greenfield development of new websites/webapps that don't use much legacy or closed source code or services, just using existing popular open source libraries in commonplace ways? The other thing I wonder about is code quality. When I look up API docs and stackoverflow examples, I get to read them all, maybe test some examples out in a CLI/REPL, and then decide carefully exactly what to do myself, what special cases to worry about or not, what errors to handle, etc. Maybe what I end up writing is even the same as Copilot would have written. But in the process, I learn about finer details of the library and make detailed decisions about how to deal with rare edge cases. Might even end up writing a comment calling out a common pitfall I realized might exist. My question is -- in order to save so much time with Copilot, are you still able to do all this extra thinking and deciding and learning (in cases that warrant it)? Or would doing that just end up consuming most of the time Copilot "saved"? In other words do you end up producing code much more rapidly, but at the expense of code that looks more like a junior than a senior wrote it, because it is most concerned with working at all, and does not have time to worry about finer details? At the expense of not being as deeply familiar with the foibles of the API you're working on? Honest questions as I haven't tried Copilot, and these are the thoughts that make me imagine it won't be of value. A lot of what I know I learned from doing the parts of the work that Copilot would be automating. Sure, Copilot would save me time when initially writing it. But would I then have less deep knowledge available when there's a fire in production because I never explored the fine details of my dependencies as much?
      - ryandrake 4y ago
        I haven't tried copilot either, but one of the things I'd be curious about is how well it can conform to a company's coding style guidelines and/or match its coding style with the existing legacy code that's being modified. One of the major annoyances of working as a team with legacy code is when someone forgets to, or deliberately avoids, conforming their code to the style and techniques of the surrounding code. Nothing grinds my gears like working in a 500 line C++ file, where_every_function_uses_underbars, has consistent 4 space indentions, avoids exceptions, and passes by reference, but right in the middle is that functionThatMiltonWrote that uses camel-case, has 8 space indentions, throws exceptions, and passes-by-pointer.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    >Code that's 98% correct is completely useless. Whoa! Really? Seems like modern software releases would be excited to achieve 98% with the incredible amount of bug fixes/patches released very quickly after the massive beta test known as release day.
    - belter 4y ago
      You are looking at code like a production line. It's a semantic construction. Code 0.1% wrong, sends you to the Sun instead of the Moon, debits your account instead of crediting...
      - prolyxis 4y ago
        What's your metric for the "percentage the code is wrong"? Is it how many lines of code were wrong, or how many test cases the code fails? Presumably if AI-generated code passes every test case, but would fail on edge cases that some human programmer(s) did not anticipate in their suite of tests, the humans potentially might have made similar coding mistakes as the AI if they had had to personally write the code.
        belter 4y ago
        For AI to generate code for a test case we would need AGI.
    - burlesona 4y ago
      Code has to be 100% correct or else it’s considered a bug (assuming it’s syntactically valid). Code that is 98% correct is actually much worse than no code at all. That’s the kind of code that will introduce subtle, systemic faults, and years later result in catastrophic failure when the company realizes they’ve been calculating millions of payments without sales tax, or a clever hacker discovers they can get escalated permissions by passing a well-crafted request etc.
      - ElijahLynn 4y ago
        If the 98% correct code works, and provides value then it is better than no code at all, yah?
  - rhodorhoades 4y ago
    It seems like you haven’t used CoPilot. Yeah, some of the harder bits I may have to code myself but the amount of boilerplate it reduces is incredibly liberating.
- orthoxerox 4y ago
  There are genre fiction authors using GPT-3 based tools to generate prose for their 27th "merfolk romance" or "firefighting LitRPG".
dsign 4y ago
I agree, this would be an incredible tool. I can see how some of the outputs may help me improve a piece I'm working on, even if I would never use the model's output for my final product.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  It looks like a decent way to produce concept sketches. Currently, working with creatives (including programmers) is a very iterative process for non-creatives. "I want this." "No, I meant this." "Can we try making that line longer?" "Eh, I'm not feeling it. Why don't we try brighter colors?" "Ugh. That looks obnoxious. Can we tone down the red?" etc. If the non-creative can use this system to reduce that iteration, it will make life easier for them (maybe not for the creative, if they are banking on the hours doing the iterations).
  - odessacubbage 4y ago
    honestly i feel the opposite. one of the worst situations to run into as a designer is a client who is simply too married to a bad design. i would much rather work with something you scribbled on the back of a napkin than than some highly rendered ai vomit that is just fundamentally shit.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
      That’s a good point. Well, the bottle is open, and the genie is flying around, so we’ll have to see what happens…
    - a_t48 4y ago
      > character concept art on a napkin https://labs.openai.com/e/bzJBnS0dkgvNeZ681ZTA49nK https://labs.openai.com/e/bzJBnS0dkgvNeZ681ZTA49nK Sadly, "highly rendered ai vomit" is filtered.
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    Does SD have the ability to take this kind of micromanagement input though? From what I've seen, it works off of a general descriptive prompt. Will adding a very specific "but put the duck 5 pixels to the left" or a very vague "give it more pop" to the prompt actually have the intended effect?
amelius 4y ago
Yes, but art school just turned into a one-semester course.
- sigmoid10 4y ago
  Not yet, but I can definitely imagine a future where these tools get more capable and refined, to the point where all the shortcomings listed above will be overcome. Knowledge about cameras and scene composition are already encoded in the networks to some degree, it just needs to become more accessible. There's probably also a better way to seed new images than by starting with random noise, so we could get similar variations easier. We have already made the big step towards creativity and real world understanding of objects and their lighting, the remaining issues are more technical and unless we are incredibly unlucky and run into a true show-stopper, we'll probably all have access to a high quality digital artist that can reduce production times dramatically.
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    You need to give some information about the scene to the network. Camera settings is just a short hand to describe the field of view and depth of focus (at the very least). If you make that implicit you'd still need to give the network the steradians, focal length, circle of confusion, etc. etc. etc. that you want your image to use. You'd need to understand everything in Hecht's Optics to tweak all the parameters of an AI generated image.
    - sigmoid10 4y ago
      That's an implementation problem, not a technical or conceptual one. Diffusion models have shown that they can learn practically all of these things if you make them sufficiently big.
- WJW 4y ago
  Of course not, it just gained a new "advanced stable diffusion usage" track. Photography didn't displace painting from art school, and even outside art there are plenty of examples to be found. CNC machines are awesome, but every machining class in existence still teaches manual lathing and milling.
geofft 4y ago
Yes, but the consequence for society is that professionalization is coming to every single field, and the blue-collar jobs are evaporating, and we had better figure out how to get all those people either white-collar jobs or some other form of income if we want to avoid significant social instability. It used to be that you could find work as a political cartoonist and draw a picture of some satirizable politician each day - maybe Dr. Oz with a funny-looking vegetable platter, or Biden falling off a bike labeled "build back better," or something - and that would be a career. Now it seems you can just type "Dr. Oz holding a vegetable platter, political cartoon" into one of these AIs and the bulk of the work is automated. Sure, you could spend the rest of the day refining it, but nobody's really looking for perfection or transcendent skill in their political cartoons. You can still find work making political videos of Dr. Oz and vegetables (e.g. https://twitter.com/JohnFetterman/status/1564432981841907713 https://twitter.com/JohnFetterman/status/1564432981841907713). Today's image generation AIs cannot do videos like that. Tomorrow's will, before we know it, and again nobody's looking for more than a baseline level of quality there either. And even the local newspaper that might have been employing a political cartoonist is being swallowed by high-capital-ownership companies that can replace a lot of the writing with AIs. The expectations of quality are a bit higher - though the AIs have mostly gotten the hang of sports writing - but again people don't expect The Smalltown Gazette to have the standards of The New Yorker. Sure, the highest-quality drawings, feature films, and longform journalism will get a lot better. And that's great! But most people don't work on such things. What are they going to do? If nothing else, how will they remain an audience with money to spend on the highest-quality works? (I am not advocating for stopping this process, to be clear. Smashing the AIs isn't a coherent proposal, and smashing the physical machines of automation didn't actually work when the Luddites tried. I'm advocating for admitting that this process is happening and drying up employment, admitting that keeping as much of humanity as possible under a good standard of living is important for humanity, and figuring out what to do about it.)
- joshuahedlund 4y ago
  > blue-collar jobs are evaporating I've been hearing this for awhile, yet ironically right now we have the biggest shortage of blue-collar workers we've had in a long time.

by Fordec 4y ago

petra 4y ago

Have we seen similar behavior in the usage of older GPT-3 based tools, for example in copywriting or using Copilot? How's the story there?

BigJono 4y ago
There's one huge difference between Copilot and stuff like this. Art that's 98% correct is awesome. Code that's 98% correct is completely useless. I think Copilot is going to live off hype for a while then tank and be looked back on as a failed experiment. Whereas I think that this kind of AI will eventually get to a point where it's extremely useful and could change up certain industries (game assets, marketing materials etc).
- eloff 4y ago
  As a new user of copilot for the last three months, I can't disagree more. I was initially skeptical, and I have noticed it often produces code that looks good but is wrong. However, it still saves me enough time each day to pay for the monthly subscription - in one day. That's a 30x ROI. I imagine it only gets better from here. I wont go back to programming without it.
  - galdosdi 4y ago
    Can I ask what kind of programming you do for it to be so helpful? I mostly do maintenance of legacy codebases (also known as codebases, lol) where a lot of the work is figuring out where the changes need to be made and actually making the changes is frequently just a few lines here and there. When I do have to figure out how to use some API, it's often not an open source one, so Copilot would not have it in its corpus. I think these kinds of conditions are really common since software tends to last for maintenance longer than it is in initial greenfield development. So I'm confused what kind of work benefits from Copilot. Just pumping out greenfield development of new websites/webapps that don't use much legacy or closed source code or services, just using existing popular open source libraries in commonplace ways? The other thing I wonder about is code quality. When I look up API docs and stackoverflow examples, I get to read them all, maybe test some examples out in a CLI/REPL, and then decide carefully exactly what to do myself, what special cases to worry about or not, what errors to handle, etc. Maybe what I end up writing is even the same as Copilot would have written. But in the process, I learn about finer details of the library and make detailed decisions about how to deal with rare edge cases. Might even end up writing a comment calling out a common pitfall I realized might exist. My question is -- in order to save so much time with Copilot, are you still able to do all this extra thinking and deciding and learning (in cases that warrant it)? Or would doing that just end up consuming most of the time Copilot "saved"? In other words do you end up producing code much more rapidly, but at the expense of code that looks more like a junior than a senior wrote it, because it is most concerned with working at all, and does not have time to worry about finer details? At the expense of not being as deeply familiar with the foibles of the API you're working on? Honest questions as I haven't tried Copilot, and these are the thoughts that make me imagine it won't be of value. A lot of what I know I learned from doing the parts of the work that Copilot would be automating. Sure, Copilot would save me time when initially writing it. But would I then have less deep knowledge available when there's a fire in production because I never explored the fine details of my dependencies as much?
    - ryandrake 4y ago
      I haven't tried copilot either, but one of the things I'd be curious about is how well it can conform to a company's coding style guidelines and/or match its coding style with the existing legacy code that's being modified. One of the major annoyances of working as a team with legacy code is when someone forgets to, or deliberately avoids, conforming their code to the style and techniques of the surrounding code. Nothing grinds my gears like working in a 500 line C++ file, where_every_function_uses_underbars, has consistent 4 space indentions, avoids exceptions, and passes by reference, but right in the middle is that functionThatMiltonWrote that uses camel-case, has 8 space indentions, throws exceptions, and passes-by-pointer.
- dylan604 4y ago
  >Code that's 98% correct is completely useless. Whoa! Really? Seems like modern software releases would be excited to achieve 98% with the incredible amount of bug fixes/patches released very quickly after the massive beta test known as release day.
  - belter 4y ago
    You are looking at code like a production line. It's a semantic construction. Code 0.1% wrong, sends you to the Sun instead of the Moon, debits your account instead of crediting...
    - prolyxis 4y ago
      What's your metric for the "percentage the code is wrong"? Is it how many lines of code were wrong, or how many test cases the code fails? Presumably if AI-generated code passes every test case, but would fail on edge cases that some human programmer(s) did not anticipate in their suite of tests, the humans potentially might have made similar coding mistakes as the AI if they had had to personally write the code.
      - belter 4y ago
        For AI to generate code for a test case we would need AGI.
  - burlesona 4y ago
    Code has to be 100% correct or else it’s considered a bug (assuming it’s syntactically valid). Code that is 98% correct is actually much worse than no code at all. That’s the kind of code that will introduce subtle, systemic faults, and years later result in catastrophic failure when the company realizes they’ve been calculating millions of payments without sales tax, or a clever hacker discovers they can get escalated permissions by passing a well-crafted request etc.
    - ElijahLynn 4y ago
      If the 98% correct code works, and provides value then it is better than no code at all, yah?
- rhodorhoades 4y ago
  It seems like you haven’t used CoPilot. Yeah, some of the harder bits I may have to code myself but the amount of boilerplate it reduces is incredibly liberating.
orthoxerox 4y ago
There are genre fiction authors using GPT-3 based tools to generate prose for their 27th "merfolk romance" or "firefighting LitRPG".

dsign 4y ago

I agree, this would be an incredible tool. I can see how some of the outputs may help me improve a piece I'm working on, even if I would never use the model's output for my final product.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
It looks like a decent way to produce concept sketches. Currently, working with creatives (including programmers) is a very iterative process for non-creatives. "I want this." "No, I meant this." "Can we try making that line longer?" "Eh, I'm not feeling it. Why don't we try brighter colors?" "Ugh. That looks obnoxious. Can we tone down the red?" etc. If the non-creative can use this system to reduce that iteration, it will make life easier for them (maybe not for the creative, if they are banking on the hours doing the iterations).
- odessacubbage 4y ago
  honestly i feel the opposite. one of the worst situations to run into as a designer is a client who is simply too married to a bad design. i would much rather work with something you scribbled on the back of a napkin than than some highly rendered ai vomit that is just fundamentally shit.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    That’s a good point. Well, the bottle is open, and the genie is flying around, so we’ll have to see what happens…
  - a_t48 4y ago
    > character concept art on a napkin https://labs.openai.com/e/bzJBnS0dkgvNeZ681ZTA49nK https://labs.openai.com/e/bzJBnS0dkgvNeZ681ZTA49nK Sadly, "highly rendered ai vomit" is filtered.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  Does SD have the ability to take this kind of micromanagement input though? From what I've seen, it works off of a general descriptive prompt. Will adding a very specific "but put the duck 5 pixels to the left" or a very vague "give it more pop" to the prompt actually have the intended effect?

amelius 4y ago

Yes, but art school just turned into a one-semester course.

sigmoid10 4y ago
Not yet, but I can definitely imagine a future where these tools get more capable and refined, to the point where all the shortcomings listed above will be overcome. Knowledge about cameras and scene composition are already encoded in the networks to some degree, it just needs to become more accessible. There's probably also a better way to seed new images than by starting with random noise, so we could get similar variations easier. We have already made the big step towards creativity and real world understanding of objects and their lighting, the remaining issues are more technical and unless we are incredibly unlucky and run into a true show-stopper, we'll probably all have access to a high quality digital artist that can reduce production times dramatically.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  You need to give some information about the scene to the network. Camera settings is just a short hand to describe the field of view and depth of focus (at the very least). If you make that implicit you'd still need to give the network the steradians, focal length, circle of confusion, etc. etc. etc. that you want your image to use. You'd need to understand everything in Hecht's Optics to tweak all the parameters of an AI generated image.
  - sigmoid10 4y ago
    That's an implementation problem, not a technical or conceptual one. Diffusion models have shown that they can learn practically all of these things if you make them sufficiently big.
WJW 4y ago
Of course not, it just gained a new "advanced stable diffusion usage" track. Photography didn't displace painting from art school, and even outside art there are plenty of examples to be found. CNC machines are awesome, but every machining class in existence still teaches manual lathing and milling.

geofft 4y ago

Yes, but the consequence for society is that professionalization is coming to every single field, and the blue-collar jobs are evaporating, and we had better figure out how to get all those people either white-collar jobs or some other form of income if we want to avoid significant social instability. It used to be that you could find work as a political cartoonist and draw a picture of some satirizable politician each day - maybe Dr. Oz with a funny-looking vegetable platter, or Biden falling off a bike labeled "build back better," or something - and that would be a career. Now it seems you can just type "Dr. Oz holding a vegetable platter, political cartoon" into one of these AIs and the bulk of the work is automated. Sure, you could spend the rest of the day refining it, but nobody's really looking for perfection or transcendent skill in their political cartoons. You can still find work making political videos of Dr. Oz and vegetables (e.g. https://twitter.com/JohnFetterman/status/1564432981841907713 https://twitter.com/JohnFetterman/status/1564432981841907713). Today's image generation AIs cannot do videos like that. Tomorrow's will, before we know it, and again nobody's looking for more than a baseline level of quality there either. And even the local newspaper that might have been employing a political cartoonist is being swallowed by high-capital-ownership companies that can replace a lot of the writing with AIs. The expectations of quality are a bit higher - though the AIs have mostly gotten the hang of sports writing - but again people don't expect The Smalltown Gazette to have the standards of The New Yorker. Sure, the highest-quality drawings, feature films, and longform journalism will get a lot better. And that's great! But most people don't work on such things. What are they going to do? If nothing else, how will they remain an audience with money to spend on the highest-quality works? (I am not advocating for stopping this process, to be clear. Smashing the AIs isn't a coherent proposal, and smashing the physical machines of automation didn't actually work when the Luddites tried. I'm advocating for admitting that this process is happening and drying up employment, admitting that keeping as much of humanity as possible under a good standard of living is important for humanity, and figuring out what to do about it.)

joshuahedlund 4y ago
> blue-collar jobs are evaporating I've been hearing this for awhile, yet ironically right now we have the biggest shortage of blue-collar workers we've had in a long time.