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Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG

123 points by kranke155 4y ago

I work in video / filmmaking / ads in London. Most of the work in this space is short form video for YouTube / Instagram and TV. Now I am seeing the video generating AI (imagen video from Google on the front page) and I’m 100% sure a good percentage of the work will vanish. There’s loads of work that ad agencies will just hire an AI prompt guy to generate for ads. Big companies will still make ads, of course, but smaller gigs that keep the whole industry afloat? What about even 10 million $ shots with CG characters that will now become commonplace? I’ve retrained before. I started off as an editor, then did VR video, now moved into CG. I’m pretty good at my job - I’ve worked on stuff for Dell and Apple, including stuff you’ve probably seen. It’s funny to think I might have to retrain yet again. I didn’t expect image generation AI to be the next big leap. I was already moving into more storytelling content (ie documentaries) because that’s more defensible against AI. But I expected 3-4 years before video generation would just come out. Now it seems like it’s happening so quickly I’m not sure they won’t have good stuff out in 6 months to a year. So - HN - what do I do now? And what about the other fellas in my industry who will be out of a job? In my estimate, we are talking about tens of thousands. To counter the obvious: I have learnt web dev at one point I thought I’d make the jump, even started learning React but I found the work to be mind numbing. I just love making images. But I feel like Pierre Auguste Renoir’s who was a plate painter in France and did a good living out of it - until the process was industrialised and he struggled (maybe for the rest of his life? I don’t quite recall). To counter the second suggestion: AI prompt design is not image making as far as it would interest me. I also don’t think there will be a huge learning curve. Becoming a filmmaker on my standard requires about 10 years experience or an excellent school (of which there are maybe 10-20 in the world). I would imagine AÍ promoting will be done by the lowest paid interns available. What do I do HN?

tayo42 4y ago
Doesn't this art need to be trained on original human art? Eventually the styles being copied by ai will get stale. AFAIK these ai image generators aren't actually creating new styles
CelticBard 4y ago
Being proactive is always a good thing. Use the AI as a tool in your process.
givemeethekeys 4y ago
Learn the new AI tools and market yourself as an AI video production consultant.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  If you can't beat em, you might as well join them.
- kranke155 4y ago
  Not a job I’m interested in tbh.
  - rory 4y ago
    Are you genuinely asking for advice on what to do? It seems like your options are embrace the new tech, find a niche where you can outcompete it, or find a new way to support yourself that you like better. HN can't tell you which of those to choose. Personally I think there's a good chance you're overestimating the the extent to which your day-to-day job will actually change by incorporating AI. Machine learning was supposed to take over data science years ago, but data scientists are in more demand than ever, and their work often doesn't involve too much actual machine learning.
    - kranke155 4y ago
      I am just answering what seems to be a common suggestion, which is become an AÍ prompt person. I have two objections to this idea 1. I don’t think this is a well paid job with a moat of a skillset Thats built over years of experience - I assume there will be a race for good UX/UI in AÍ generation of images. The other thing is it doesn’t interest me simply because I don’t see it as a craft of imagemaking. Making a good image means knowing about composition, lighting, detail, texture. AÍ imagemaking doesn’t compare really to spending 10 hours agonising over lighting a shot which is what I love. Also I asked the question a bit as a challenge yes I do have my own ideas on what I’ll do.
      - 4y ago
robertlagrant 4y ago
Some excerpts from your website in the future: "We use AI to optimise our early-stage iterations" "AI is great for generating initial concepts. Here are some of ourfavourites, and some that didn't turn out so well!" "Did you know AI can reduce our turnaround for clients by up to 50%?" In other words: it'll help. It won't replace you.
- rossdavidh 4y ago
  ...which, by the way, is how most automation turns out. I've worked in semiconductor manufacturing and software, and in both cases the automation that was at one point predicted to eliminate jobs, just made the people more productive, which made them more valuable, and instead of fewer jobs there were more, because more could be done by each person (so the range of applications that were economical to do was increased). So "it'll help, it won't replace you" is not pie-in-the-sky thinking, it's the most likely result, because it's what normally happens when automation improves.
  - yehAnd 4y ago
    It made them appear more productive. The machines just did the once basic work. Numerous studies have been conducted to quantify which technology made workers more productive. They all ended up with models too complex and variable to be practical. Society just needs to accept a whole of our social truism is politically correct LARP to the drum beat of a financiers profit memes. What are a bunch of rich elders going to do if billions quit dancing like jesters for coin? Fight us from their far off estates? 800k sworn LEO in the US working for a paycheck, not fealty to a billionaire. The public has all the advantage but isn’t allowed to know it. Communal health is the future of work whether outsider financiers accept or not. We’ll just flood the inter tubes with AI media and crash the value of their copyright constraint system if they don’t like it. I have zero obligation to do-nothing daddy deep pockets who can point to a contract I wasn’t a party to. I don’t believe such people are worth coddling with my agency.
    - nindalf 4y ago
      Did you generate this comment with GPT-3?
simonw 4y ago
I suggest becoming an expert user of generative AI systems. You can start by exploring Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, then move on to video systems once those start becoming available. Effective prompt design is a very deep subject, and one that is changing all the time. My optimistic version of all of this is that people like yourself will be able to continue doing the work you are doing today... but better, and faster. You'll be able to produce higher quality work because the generative AIs will be able to speed up a whole bunch of the more time-consuming tasks for you, allowing you to spend more time on the creative and editorial side of things. I believe people with genuine skill, talent and taste will produce better work with the assistance of generative AI than people that do not have that existing background. I might be wrong! I hope I'm right.
NotHereNotThere 4y ago
While I think humanity is bad at predicting what the future will look like (where's my damn flying car..), _my_ prediction is that AI video generation will not be a major disrupter to ad agencies / film makers. It's a nice experiment, but I really doubt the level of artistic direction required to meet specific customer requirements will ever be replaced by "AI"
- ALittleLight 4y ago
  I think it probably will within a decade. Just to use still images, the tools that have come out with stable diffusion already allow a lot in terms of generating variations, inpainting, fixing faces, etc. Give these tools time to mature, models keep getting better and bigger, and hardware keeps getting better - you are absolutely going to replace still images "soon" and if you can do still images, video won't be far behind. The guy who needs an image will write a prompt and paste it in to some tool. The prompt goes to a language model that's been fine tuned on those websites that share prompts and image-gen creations. The language model spits out nine variations of the original prompt that it thinks will improve the output. The nine generations plus the original prompt produce ten variations from the next gen, or next next gen, diffusers. The original guy put in his prompt and gets back a grid of 100 examples. Does he like any? Maybe mark a few, refine the prompt, mark a few more, get variations of the ones he's marked. Expand one or two, edit something out, add something in, generate another thousand variations, and he's got something really good. If this process gets fast I think you'll see a few minutes from a non-expert can produce better illustrations than professional artists. I don't think this means that everyone will be a professional-artist-equivalent - just like anyone could deliver a pizza but not everyone is a pizza delivery driver. What it will mean is that getting professional artist output will become something that anyone could reasonably pick up and do if they do a small amount of learning to get the hang of the tools. Plus, just like you might deliver a pizza to your friends or family, if you needed to you could produce high quality art.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - cercatrova 4y ago
ttoinou 4y ago
If you were able to retrain in the same industry on different jobs 3 times, learnt web development, you are reading HN / are tech literate and are aware of the coming changes in the industry such as Deep Learning : don't worry. You're on top of the rest of workers in this industry. You will eventually find your new niche skills, and even if you don't, being on top of your current field you have a few years runaway ;)
kyleyeats 4y ago
People like you will do 10x the amount of work in the future. So we don't need about 90% of you. For this I think you should try to be one of the 10% that's left. You're on HN and you're really early in this AI image generation game.
- simonw 4y ago
  I wonder about that. Sometimes when technology makes people 10x more productive society responds by increasing the demand for what they can do by a factor of ten. One example: I'm running an early-stage startup. If an explainer video for my product will cost me $20,000 I'm probably not going to commission one. If it costs $2,000 then maybe I will.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    This is a huge part of it, and if you can ride that wave, you can be the person charging $10k for what everyone else is scrambling around trying to charge $2k.
    - kyleyeats 4y ago
      Yeah it's really like the 90% are in a race to the bottom and the 10% are in a new field.
      - kranke155 4y ago
        Yeah like I said the thing is becoming an AÍ prompt person doesn’t interest me in the least. I trained to be a craftsman that’s what interests me.
        simonw 4y ago
        I don't think the two are mutually exclusive. I've seen plenty of talented, experienced artists on various AI subreddits who are incorporating prompt-driven images as a small part of their overall work. A relevant example: Newgrounds banned AI art: https://waxy.org/2022/09/online-art-communities-begin-banning-ai-generated-images/ https://waxy.org/2022/09/online-art-communities-begin-bannin... - but they included this exception: > There are cases where some use of AI is ok, for example if you are primarily showcasing your character art but use an AI-generated background.
madsbuch 4y ago
Add these technologies to your toolbox. It is not easy to do "prompt engineering". Keep in mind that most generated material looks awful -- there is a huge selection bias going on. The outputted stuff needs to made production ready also, distribution, etc. If anything, the emergence of these technologies should greatly expand. You will have a new customer base that was not available before, and you will be able to deliver new products.
- adamredwoods 4y ago
  Agreed, we're still decades away from solid results. I compare this to automated driving: Truck drivers and cab drivers are still in business. Another example is the uncanny valley of CGI people: at what point was it acceptable to audiences, and at what point was it excellent?
  - OJFord 4y ago
    > I compare this to automated driving: Truck drivers and cab drivers are still in business. It's pretty early to declare that a victory for human drivers isn't it? I'd be worried, if I were them.
  - bulbosaur123 4y ago
    > Agreed, we're still decades away from solid results You spelled "two years" wrong.
- TillE 4y ago
  > Keep in mind that most generated material looks awful -- there is a huge selection bias going on. Yeah. Look at machine translation - it's gotten pretty good, in some limited cases it's perfect, but it's also frequently just clueless, and for anything serious you absolutely need a real human translator. I think these AI tools will improve, but I'm extremely skeptical that it's going to improve by like an order of magnitude any time soon. It will still require extensive tuning, heavy selection, and accepting that you probably can almost never get it to make exactly what you want.
  - 4y ago
dougmwne 4y ago
Perhaps in the short term you do nothing. It will be many years before this moves from “toy” to “tool”. The industry is made up of humans and humans adapt at human speed. You don’t have to outrun the AI bears, you just have to outrun your colleagues. Perhaps this will just make your job easier and not impact your ability to make money. Maybe you will make even more money. And if at some point the industry dries up completely, you will move on and do the best you can. We all will.
- freetime2 4y ago
  I agree. The Imagen videos are incredibly impressive, but they are also cherry-picked examples and there are noticeable quality issues. Similar to what we have seen with self-driving cars, I expect it will take years to go from an impressive tech demo to the kind of tool that can reliably deliver the kind of quality, versatility, and specificity needed for professional applications. So at the very least the parent probably has time to do a bit of soul searching to decide and prepare for their next undertaking.
mixmastamyk 4y ago
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. However, I don't think it'll replace much or even a lot of work, especially where a minimum level of quality is desired.
cercatrova 4y ago
Create an agency of one (yourself) and use the AI tools. Profit from the margins between the cost of the AI (likely near zero as time goes on) and what you charge customers. This is not without precedent. DesignJoy is run by a single designer who makes over $1.5 million a year by himself, doing contracts for 20+ clients at a time [0]. [0] https://www.indiehackers.com/post/broke-the-1-5m-arr-mark-as-an-agency-of-one-e26ae36fe7 https://www.indiehackers.com/post/broke-the-1-5m-arr-mark-as...
badpun 4y ago
I'm not so sure it will be that easy to exactly control the output of the AI algos. This is not that important when doing art for art's sake but, for commercial purposes, if you can't make that can of coke slightly bigger or more redder, or have the teenage in the picture hold it slighlty differently (all as per client's feedback), the tool might be a failure.
- rory 4y ago
  I think it's more likely that people are simply thinking of the AI algo as doing too much, rather than this kind of tool becoming a general failure. There will likely be many, many steps before, during, and after AI image / video generation that will need a highly skilled human in the loop to produce a great result.
asadlionpk 4y ago
I would say add these AI tools to your toolbox and use them to get things done quicker.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Right—the ones who survive in the industry will be the ones who use these tools to increase their output 5x or more (while someone who's only good at the prompt-crafting part and isn't an expert at image manipulation might only hit 1x-2x the pro's prior output)
kube-system 4y ago
Find the weaknesses of AI generated imagery and do the things that it can't.
- Wolfbeta 4y ago
  Become a human Generative Adversarial Network. Reductio ad absurdium.
egypturnash 4y ago
I am a 2d artist and I have similar feelings. Are you as full of loathing for all the HN people saying “just integrate the AI into your practice” as I am? I like drawing stuff and I love that this pays my bills and I really have zero interest in becoming a “prompt engineer” instead. I think a strategy of creating an image of AI art as cheap and tacky is useful. For how long, I don’t know. If we’re lucky then it’ll turn out that getting these things out of the domain of creepy claw hands is a lot harder than anyone thinks it will be, and there will be a lot of obvious tells for a long time. It may also be useful to try and get your professional associations to bring some suits against these things for playing fast and loose with “fair use”. The legality of these things is debatable, and so’s where “fair use” should fall - personally I feel like nobody posting work on the internet anticipated their stuff being scraped and fed into a giant neural net designed to take their job. Make this shit a lot pricier by demanding that it be built on art explicitly licensed for machine training. Figuring out where the intersection of “art you like to make” and “art the AI sucks at” lies is worthwhile. If your passion is realistic painterly work then you’re fucked, what do you enjoy doing that isn’t that?
- lbarrow 4y ago
  What's the difference between a human artist walking around in the world, seeing images and videos (many of which are under copyright) and then using those images as inspiration, versus an AI being fed millions of images and videos as part of a large training set? I am not a lawyer but I don't really see the "it's not fair use" argument.
  - Wistar 4y ago
    There's a whole lot of unapologetic artistic theft of others’ work that has contributed to the creation of new art.
    - etrautmann 4y ago
      why do we even call it theft or pretend that any artist arrived at ideas without inspiration?
bobsmooth 4y ago
Become a plumber. It'll be a while till robots can replace you in the trades.
- KMnO4 4y ago
  You’re telling a highly creative person to pursue an unstimulating job that they’re not passionate about.
  - ALittleLight 4y ago
    This kind of comes across like you're implying there are different classes of people and our kind are too good to be plumbers. If you're worried about AI taking your job, then taking a job that AI can't do seems like a pretty reasonable response.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      The upper-middle class have a god-given right to make a very good living expressing their creativity and opinions.
  - hackeraccount 4y ago
    When I do plumbing it's both creative and very stimulating; at least to the senses.
  - bobsmooth 4y ago
    There are millions of people working unstimulating jobs they're not passionate about. Why is the OP special?
  - 10u152 4y ago
    Perhaps, but jobs are what you make of them. I know a guy that does floor polishing and epoxy floors. Not a very creative job but plenty of work. Him and his crew spend a lot of time together. They have deep discussions about philosophy, art and ethics while spreading smelly goop around concrete floors. I bet they go home pretty intellectually satisfied from doing epoxy floors.
brudgers 4y ago
Get out of the race to $0. Develop business relationships. Good clients are mostly insensitive to price. That’s what makes them good clients. Good luck
- kranke155 4y ago
  Hmm not sure I follow. I have great clients and they do ask for high end work - but often what keeps me afloat is the trashy low quality stuff. A few times a year I do the high quality high end stuff. You’re right that really high end work will continue, most likely unchanged, for at least a decade (maybe). But I’m not so sure really - things are moving so fast.
  - brudgers 4y ago
    Sorry for not being clear. My point is on the quality of clients, not the quality of the work product. In the future, clients who prioritize cheap will go on fivrr and get 500 AI alternatives to choose from if they can. Or down the block to a lower priced competitor later this afternoon if they can. Good clients want you to stay in business because they want to work with you again.
    - kranke155 4y ago
      This is possible. I like that idea.
freedude 4y ago
It probably depends upon you. Is AI a tool or a trap? Can it make some of your jobs iterate more quickly and weed out the cruft or heavy lifting? Or is it only something that gets in your way of production? It is up to you.
tenebrisalietum 4y ago
Human language is inexact and context sensitive. This means the precise meaning of words in communications is unique to the time, place, and members of the communication. Because of this, there will never be a 100% reliable "text prompt to AI image" generator. Someone will have to get to know the AI and figure out how to make it do what is wanted, or modify it to get what is wanted. Kinda the same way Google and other information repositories have not made researcher's jobs obsolete.
notjustanymike 4y ago
Auto-generated content has a tendency to raise only the baseline in industries. For web development first it was Dreamweaver, then WordPress templates, then SquareSpace and Wix. Bootstrap came along, then Material and a thousand other prepackaged design languages. While these advancements reduced the income from building mom & pop restaurant websites, the demand for high-end curated sites never really changed. Just focus your efforts on continuing to produce quality work, those clients never dry up.
- markdown 4y ago
  > those clients never dry up As someone who used to work in web dev, they most certainly do and did. And you have an ever growing pool (worldwide) of workers who are jostling over that dwindling supply of gigs.
  - can16358p 4y ago
    Yup, I second that. Many places that I've worked with are now considering using a zero code website creator instead of actually coding, and for many scenarios it just works perfectly, cheap, and flawlessly. Of course it's not for everything especially if there's customization and server technologies involved, but it's very big to create disruption.
  - earthboundkid 4y ago
    I would be surprised to learn that the absolute number of web devs today has gone down since SquareSpace came out. Yes, the $500 website is dead, but there’s still tons of work for tons of people.
  - arcturus17 4y ago
    Meh. There’s plenty of work to go around. At the low end, companies are rebuilding their websites all the time, whether it’s on Webflow or whatever. At the higher end, there is plenty of integration work, enterprise apps, etc to be built. Competition is fierce but there is opportunity if you specialize properly and build the right relationships.
  - 4y ago
hackeraccount 4y ago
I understand you're not interested in learning a new tool set. That totally sucks especially when it at least appears orthogonal to what you currently know (not to be a dick but I would underline appears). As a related thought, if not an upside, did you read that story about the guy who outsourced his job to China? He worked for some telecom and just hired out whatever they wanted him to do to randos overseas and basically ended up doing nothing other then going to meetings that set up scope. I believe he was fired but - end result aside - it's not hard to see how this might fit into your situation.
ativzzz 4y ago
The only constant in life is change. There is no guarantee of stability or order in life, despite the human desire to carve it out where it doesn't exist. You can either embrace that change, or fight against it. Embracing the change means learning the new tools and adapting your job around them. Fighting against it means lobbying the government to create protectionist laws for your industry to prevent new technology from disrupting you. The former is easier if you are more flexible and open minded. The latter is easier if you have a lot of money and are well connected. Neither is inherently easy, which is why most of us just complain instead.
- kranke155 4y ago
  This is the least BS comment I’ve seen here. Thanks you’re right, change is inevitable. I just dropped this here as a challenge if you will, but the overall feeling seems to be “you will actually make more money” or just “become an AÍ prompt person”. The first I don’t think is true and the second doesn’t interest me honestly. I trained in my craft so I could become a craftsman, if you will I’ve always wanted to become a monk who would make copies of books, not a printing press operator.
  - iExploder 4y ago
    it used to be that only taxes and death would come for us all, now AI is in on it as well, maybe you could consider joining the machine on a project that feeds the AI with unique new art, I imagine the models will need to be updated or re-learned with "license friendly" art at some point, might be a nice way to go out with the bang..
  - ativzzz 4y ago
    I don't think craftmanship will ever go away. Better tools allow us to make more stuff and bigger stuff and more complex stuff - AI will be just another tool that creatives can use.
dexwiz 4y ago
I am not an ad person, but to me they always contain a specific subject (thing, place, etc). If you are making an ad for widget XJ900, you don't want it to actually show the XK800. What's harder, trying to prompt the AI into generating content on your specific subject, or just modeling/filming the subject with current methods? Which is harder to incorporate client feedback? So far, slight tweaks in prompts can produce radically difficult results. Paint back can help, but we'll see. I have yet to see a stable diffusion output that is high quality work. They often lack any compositional sense, and all the lines are weirdly wavy. It's like someone trying to do realism but with the motor skills and spatial awareness of a toddler. The picture that won the state fair awards looked really terrible on further inspection. Basic composition elements like the horizon line or the giant circle in the middle were all skewed, and not in an attractive way. Any elements beyond the central figures are just noise. I see that story as more about bad judging than anything else. Stable diffusion has its own version of uncanny valley, and it may be a long time before we can cross it. The people who decree stable diffusion as the death of human art don't often to have a firm grasp on artistic or design fundamentals.
- toast0 4y ago
  > I am not an ad person, but to me they always contain a specific subject (thing, place, etc). If you are making an ad for widget XJ900, you don't want it to actually show the XK800. Depends on the widget. There are lots of categories of widgets where you just want to show happy people. Or if you're advertising a brand rather than a specific product, you may want to show happy people with a logo, but the products don't need to exist.
- shostack 4y ago
  Inpainting and outpainting are two techniques that come into play here.
spyder 4y ago
AI for long time will be just another tool to improve your production. It will probably reduce the more repetitive boring part of the work. Quickly generating content will let you try out a lot of ideas faster and seeing the different results will inspire you more. Some of the simpler work will probably go away but most likely it will be replaced by other work that currently is considered more complex but becomes easier and cheaper with AI so more customer can afford it. AI+human will produce better results than just AI for a long time but you have to learn how to use it. One of the interesting possibility will be to train your own AI on your private creative work/dataset so others could not have it if they don't have access to your private dataset, and it would produce your style better than some general AI. There will be services that will do it for you as for example Emad from StabilityAI already mentioned they will provide something like that. But yeah, if AI keeps improving the end game is a little scary.
illwrks 4y ago
For any large company (with a brand team) these tools will only ever be a starting point to get a general direction. It might remove some initial back and forth working through some basic things that a junior might do. The output might then be used as a prompt for the creative agencies they work with. The brand is the sacred and I doubt anyone would take the risk with anything that isn't 100% controlled (photoshoot, CGI etc) For the smaller companies, the mom and pop ones mentioned elsewhere in the thread, this will probably kill any creative work from them. Also, consider going in-house into a large corporate. They usually have marketing and comms teams, if not external facing then internal. Then when these tools mature you could leverage them to knock out internal work at tighter deadlines.
earthboundkid 4y ago
Current AI puts out weird output that is not suitable for publication. There will be working fixing it for the foreseeable future.
whoisjuan 4y ago
Learn how to write. It's as simple as that. These models will require well-crafted prompts to produce the desired outputs. Your way to get ahead of this is to learn how the models transform a prompt into a video or image. You will quickly realize there's way more nuance and need for precise terminology than the shelf examples you're seeing. These models are only as good as the prompts they receive. Someone needs to write those precise prompts. You are way ahead of everyone else because you already understand the concepts, terminology, and process of video production and CG.
- Uehreka 4y ago
  Yeah, but what happens when GPT-3 starts writing better prompts than humans? People are talking like that’s not going to happen, just like a few years ago people wouldn’t have foreseen how far AI Art would come. I feel like putting bounds on where AI will go next is a bit of a fool’s errand.
  - whoisjuan 4y ago
    You still need to prompt GPT-3 with something. Stacking two systems won't improve the outputs if your original input lacks precision. Garbage in, garbage out. Granted, GPT-3 requires way less precision to generate something useful, but you still need to pass the proper context. I think you're right, though. It's hard to speculate how these things would turn out, but I think it's reasonable to assume that we will still need some relatively sophisticated human input to produce the best results out of these systems.
nitwit005 4y ago
It seems fairly hard to predict to me. There have been huge improvements in computer art generally, but that seems to have come with rising demand and quality expectations. If prices for this sort of art does fall, demand will also increase. It's hard to guess how big that increase will be.
cwkoss 4y ago
Working on ads is a profession with significant moral hazard: thought manipulation is inherently antisocial. Being disrupted out of the industry could end up being a blessing for your mental wellbeing.
smm11 4y ago
Everybody in the world is carrying a camera with them full-time. I'm still dodging pro photographers shooting weddings, graduates, and teens every time I ride through the park.
yrgulation 4y ago
If anything the number of jobs will increase. Simply because technologies such as what you describe are enablers. Suddenly everyone and their cat will want good looking ai generated videos. But someone will need to make that little tweak that makes them look good. For instance, i wouldnt be able to produce nice content regardless of how many ais you throw at me simply because i dont have an eye for it. But suddenly john in marketing is able to create a few amateurish sketch videos, crappy and naive, but they will lead to ideas for proper videos that he can collaborate with someone like you to turn into professional content. Similarly you will be able to iterate ideas faster and thus keep clients happy. Its the same with web development. The more libraries the more tools and the more automation the more jobs out there. John in marketing or Sandra the ceo are now able to experiment with mockups, show them to stakeholders and gain their attention much quicker. As a result there are more funding and more product development leading to more tech jobs. Therefore, enabler tech like this will lead to growth.
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zeofig 4y ago
A lot of people are telling you to Deal With It. I would argue that people are way too hyped about these AI developments. It looks cool and it can generate something interesting, but can it really generate what you need? Can it make something good enough to work like an ad (or whatever) made by people who know what they're doing? Maybe sometimes, but usually the answer is No. Will it do that soon? Nobody knows for sure, but I think a lot of techies are too optimistic. What the AI does is an interpolation of existing image data. It doesn't know how to draw what you really want, and it can't reliably produce output that's usable (let alone "good") for highly specific purposes. And any real application of CG/videography is highly specific. It's easy to imagine all of that is the next step, but I think that's a lot harder than what the AI does at the moment.
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blurbleblurble 4y ago
Same feeling as a software developer. Programming as we know it will be completely transformed before the end of the decade.
syntheweave 4y ago
In a broad sense, we can think of the economy in terms of resource inputs to society and the dependencies that result in goods and services. This is the kind of thing you can plot out, industry by industry, with Wardley mapping. Now, clearly, resource extraction jobs aren't going away. The methods change as we go from "ape poking at insects with stick" to "hydraulic fracking", but someone has to have some oversight of the process. But everything leading to a resulting experience fulfilling some human need is subject to change with AI in the picture, because we can imagine machines in the loop doing all the processing, moving, coordinating, and final delivery. Experiences that used to be jobs don't have to be anymore. And therefore the whole social contract of industrial economies is subject to a gradual shift towards indifference: if I have some land, some machines, some access to raw materials, I don't need a job, or to sell things, or to run an organization. But, counterbalancing that, there still have to be voices coordinating and controlling access to those things, because there are too many ethical dangers involved in making it completely permissionless. What financial systems(hence money, wages, etc.) do in controlling access is a way of assigning credit, so that you gain general permissions to stuff. If you do things that persistently assign credit to yourself, without also turning it into a reassignment of credit that makes enemies(power-monging etc.), you survive in any economy. The role of anything artistic in that is, broadly speaking, going to be one of storytelling and aesthetic presentation of information. And I think the key insight to take from the tools we're getting is that direct prompt engineering is going to be taken for granted; but prompt engineering as a layer on top of or beneath a more specialized skillset will still produce distinguished results. That is, if you can glue a little bit of API code together, you can create a job where 90% of your creative time is still spent in a more hands-on mode, but then you send it through the machine as the last step. The trick is in not getting too dependent on someone's platform control play in the process.
nbzso 4y ago
My practical advice: Plan for your future from a blank state of mind. Reduce all unnecessary expenses, invest into more self-sufficient survival. The race between semi-pros and professionals is marketing driven, same applies in AI situation, AI will not be as good as the best in the business, but clients/corporations will use the AI argument to lower the reward for professional labor. This is normal. This is the Surveillance Capitalism. And is the direct result of the lack of ethics behind the tech overlords. They simply don't care. And now their social position of demigods and keepers of "the knowledge" will give them the ultimate power over peoples imagination and thoughts. So be it. I cannot stop this. And the "adaptation" argument is utter nonsense. But I can move into the woods and live a simple and happy life. I can create my own paper and paints from surrounding materials, and I will paint for myself and my friends. The majority of the next generations will have no problem to be controlled by AI. Corporations will package this as a "progress" and people will swallow it willingly. So what? It is a choice, a minority will refuse to live in AI induced comma and will search for human touch, human emotions, human produced reality.
quinnjh 4y ago
Be valuable :)
orbital-decay 4y ago
No offence, but all this moral panic induced by a spectacular AI demo looks really myopic. It puzzles me how many creative professionals are unable to see their edge somehow. The main value of your work is always conceptualization, even if you see yourself as a pixel pusher (if that's the case, it's most likely wrong), and it's not easy to master. Maybe you're just not aware of the current state of these tools, and their potential in near future? It's really easy to fall under impression that it advances at light speeds but once you take a deep dive to be aware of the limitations, you'll be much less impressed. You won't be out of your job. You will have a powerful tool to create with, though. Visual content generation based on text will always lose to compositing, just because of its inefficient nature. "Prompt engineering" is a nonsense gimmick. AI-powered tools won't "replace" you, ever. They will make possible things that are impractical right now due to the sheer amount of manual work involved. (30's animation style comeback, anyone?). You'll always be able to create something with 10x value, compared to a non-pro. Just keep your nose to the wind, as changes won't be immediate. Embrace it and learn how to use it, to be ahead of everyone. Or at least be aware of your surroundings.
- kranke155 4y ago
  Because you’re not a creative professional you’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg. Here’s the truth about creative work - most of is trash. You make a lot trash. Unimaginative, boring trash. You use that to pay your bills. The creative stuff that people love and share on Instagram is 10% of the work. The stuff you don’t share nor do you talk about is 90% of your income. The problem in this forum is people dont have experience with creative work nor do they understand the economics of the industry. Not their fault they don’t have to. But here’s the reality - the stuff you love so much and consider creative work is the 5% that those artists made the right decisions and were allowed to make them and everything went fine. A lot of the work is drudge work. Like an illustrator starting out will make cheap card illustrations or whatever. And then in his 5% of time he will make the amazing personal stuff he posts on artstation. You love and share the stuff on artstation - but his income is mostly coming from shitty card illustrations that will never be on his portfolio. Due to HN being clearly unaware of the economics this is being repeated here a lot - just do super high super creative stuff and you’ll be fine. The problem is there isn’t enough of that work to begin with! If you’re working for a good company you know you can place the final work on your portfolio because the creative brief will be good and executed well - Nike, Apple, Squarespace - some people (including myself) will actually reduce our day rate because we know it’s great fun to work on it plus it will be a value add on your portfolio. That’s how competitive it is to GET high end high credit work. The idea that we can all migrate to that is a wild fantasy.
kache_ 4y ago
Unfortunately, it seems that technology is showing no signs of slowing down. If it's any solace, you're only the first set of victims, and the rest of us will soon follow.
t0bia_s 4y ago
AI wouldn't steal your job. I guess your clients require specific taks, nothing that can be precisely done by AI. Sure, it can help to speed up creative process, but if AI generated images/video is enough for your clients, than nothing new and innovative is made.
- anothernewdude 4y ago
  > than nothing new and innovative is made. But will people notice?
  - t0bia_s 4y ago
    Those, who pay for innovations, specific tastk and actual art... Of course.
krapp 4y ago
If you can lift at least 35 pounds and pass a drug test, Amazon is always hiring. I also hear trucking and paralegal are booming fields.
galdosdi 4y ago
> There’s loads of work that ad agencies will just hire an AI prompt guy to generate for ads. I am really skeptical of the idea that soon, working with image AI will involve purely prompt writing. I bet it will involve some prompt writing but still plenty of original art creation, and even more photoshop combining, as now. Think about how much more time a modern employed artist spends fucking around with photoshop tools, as opposed to literally having their pen on their wacom tablet. It's just a continuing trend in that direction -- or at least that's my educated guess which could be wrong.
Aqueous 4y ago
I think you maybe getting ahead of yourself. It’s one thing for AI to produce art that roughly aligns with a prompt, which is as you well know right now what it is capable of. It’s another to fulfill the exact vision of what a person wants. That requires a much higher level and more detailed and more intuitive understanding of what the expectations are and what the vision of the director is. AI is not capable of that level of understanding yet, as far as I know. I suspect it might turn out like the issues we are encountering with self-driving. Autonomous vehicles may be able to deal with 99% of all driving situations right now but that last 1% is the killer. That last 1% is the reason self-driving isn’t good enough. Furthermore, while the first 99% may have taken only 20% of the total time to adoption to solve, I suspect that last 1% may take the remaining 80% before self-driving gains widespread adoption. Just as it could be many years before we can fully rely on self-driving technology to cart us around, it could be many years before AI really starts to supplant human artists, before prompt engineering becomes enough of a precise art to no longer need people who can exactly translate a vision into a visual work. Of course, feel free to print out this comment, hang it on the wall and throw darts at it in a much fewer number of years when my prediction turns out to be totally wrong. It's really just based on an intuition.
- kranke155 4y ago
  This is true but the problem is I’m in my early 30s. I have to start planning now for what’s my next profession, and I hope I pick one that won’t get disrupted…
ffwacom 4y ago
AI as it stands is a massive legal liability for companies as it interpolates between plagiarised images. The image gen projects are extremely unethical and immoral IMO as they rely on scraped data created by artists to ‘train’.

123 points by kranke155 4y ago

tayo42 4y ago

Doesn't this art need to be trained on original human art? Eventually the styles being copied by ai will get stale. AFAIK these ai image generators aren't actually creating new styles

CelticBard 4y ago

Being proactive is always a good thing. Use the AI as a tool in your process.

givemeethekeys 4y ago

Learn the new AI tools and market yourself as an AI video production consultant.

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
If you can't beat em, you might as well join them.
kranke155 4y ago
Not a job I’m interested in tbh.
- rory 4y ago
  Are you genuinely asking for advice on what to do? It seems like your options are embrace the new tech, find a niche where you can outcompete it, or find a new way to support yourself that you like better. HN can't tell you which of those to choose. Personally I think there's a good chance you're overestimating the the extent to which your day-to-day job will actually change by incorporating AI. Machine learning was supposed to take over data science years ago, but data scientists are in more demand than ever, and their work often doesn't involve too much actual machine learning.
  - kranke155 4y ago
    I am just answering what seems to be a common suggestion, which is become an AÍ prompt person. I have two objections to this idea 1. I don’t think this is a well paid job with a moat of a skillset Thats built over years of experience - I assume there will be a race for good UX/UI in AÍ generation of images. The other thing is it doesn’t interest me simply because I don’t see it as a craft of imagemaking. Making a good image means knowing about composition, lighting, detail, texture. AÍ imagemaking doesn’t compare really to spending 10 hours agonising over lighting a shot which is what I love. Also I asked the question a bit as a challenge yes I do have my own ideas on what I’ll do.
    - 4y ago

robertlagrant 4y ago

Some excerpts from your website in the future: "We use AI to optimise our early-stage iterations" "AI is great for generating initial concepts. Here are some of ourfavourites, and some that didn't turn out so well!" "Did you know AI can reduce our turnaround for clients by up to 50%?" In other words: it'll help. It won't replace you.

rossdavidh 4y ago
...which, by the way, is how most automation turns out. I've worked in semiconductor manufacturing and software, and in both cases the automation that was at one point predicted to eliminate jobs, just made the people more productive, which made them more valuable, and instead of fewer jobs there were more, because more could be done by each person (so the range of applications that were economical to do was increased). So "it'll help, it won't replace you" is not pie-in-the-sky thinking, it's the most likely result, because it's what normally happens when automation improves.
- yehAnd 4y ago
  It made them appear more productive. The machines just did the once basic work. Numerous studies have been conducted to quantify which technology made workers more productive. They all ended up with models too complex and variable to be practical. Society just needs to accept a whole of our social truism is politically correct LARP to the drum beat of a financiers profit memes. What are a bunch of rich elders going to do if billions quit dancing like jesters for coin? Fight us from their far off estates? 800k sworn LEO in the US working for a paycheck, not fealty to a billionaire. The public has all the advantage but isn’t allowed to know it. Communal health is the future of work whether outsider financiers accept or not. We’ll just flood the inter tubes with AI media and crash the value of their copyright constraint system if they don’t like it. I have zero obligation to do-nothing daddy deep pockets who can point to a contract I wasn’t a party to. I don’t believe such people are worth coddling with my agency.
  - nindalf 4y ago
    Did you generate this comment with GPT-3?

simonw 4y ago

I suggest becoming an expert user of generative AI systems. You can start by exploring Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, then move on to video systems once those start becoming available. Effective prompt design is a very deep subject, and one that is changing all the time. My optimistic version of all of this is that people like yourself will be able to continue doing the work you are doing today... but better, and faster. You'll be able to produce higher quality work because the generative AIs will be able to speed up a whole bunch of the more time-consuming tasks for you, allowing you to spend more time on the creative and editorial side of things. I believe people with genuine skill, talent and taste will produce better work with the assistance of generative AI than people that do not have that existing background. I might be wrong! I hope I'm right.

NotHereNotThere 4y ago

While I think humanity is bad at predicting what the future will look like (where's my damn flying car..), _my_ prediction is that AI video generation will not be a major disrupter to ad agencies / film makers. It's a nice experiment, but I really doubt the level of artistic direction required to meet specific customer requirements will ever be replaced by "AI"

ALittleLight 4y ago
I think it probably will within a decade. Just to use still images, the tools that have come out with stable diffusion already allow a lot in terms of generating variations, inpainting, fixing faces, etc. Give these tools time to mature, models keep getting better and bigger, and hardware keeps getting better - you are absolutely going to replace still images "soon" and if you can do still images, video won't be far behind. The guy who needs an image will write a prompt and paste it in to some tool. The prompt goes to a language model that's been fine tuned on those websites that share prompts and image-gen creations. The language model spits out nine variations of the original prompt that it thinks will improve the output. The nine generations plus the original prompt produce ten variations from the next gen, or next next gen, diffusers. The original guy put in his prompt and gets back a grid of 100 examples. Does he like any? Maybe mark a few, refine the prompt, mark a few more, get variations of the ones he's marked. Expand one or two, edit something out, add something in, generate another thousand variations, and he's got something really good. If this process gets fast I think you'll see a few minutes from a non-expert can produce better illustrations than professional artists. I don't think this means that everyone will be a professional-artist-equivalent - just like anyone could deliver a pizza but not everyone is a pizza delivery driver. What it will mean is that getting professional artist output will become something that anyone could reasonably pick up and do if they do a small amount of learning to get the hang of the tools. Plus, just like you might deliver a pizza to your friends or family, if you needed to you could produce high quality art.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- cercatrova 4y ago

ttoinou 4y ago

If you were able to retrain in the same industry on different jobs 3 times, learnt web development, you are reading HN / are tech literate and are aware of the coming changes in the industry such as Deep Learning : don't worry. You're on top of the rest of workers in this industry. You will eventually find your new niche skills, and even if you don't, being on top of your current field you have a few years runaway ;)

kyleyeats 4y ago

People like you will do 10x the amount of work in the future. So we don't need about 90% of you. For this I think you should try to be one of the 10% that's left. You're on HN and you're really early in this AI image generation game.

simonw 4y ago
I wonder about that. Sometimes when technology makes people 10x more productive society responds by increasing the demand for what they can do by a factor of ten. One example: I'm running an early-stage startup. If an explainer video for my product will cost me $20,000 I'm probably not going to commission one. If it costs $2,000 then maybe I will.
- bombcar 4y ago
  This is a huge part of it, and if you can ride that wave, you can be the person charging $10k for what everyone else is scrambling around trying to charge $2k.
  - kyleyeats 4y ago
    Yeah it's really like the 90% are in a race to the bottom and the 10% are in a new field.
    - kranke155 4y ago
      Yeah like I said the thing is becoming an AÍ prompt person doesn’t interest me in the least. I trained to be a craftsman that’s what interests me.
      - simonw 4y ago
        I don't think the two are mutually exclusive. I've seen plenty of talented, experienced artists on various AI subreddits who are incorporating prompt-driven images as a small part of their overall work. A relevant example: Newgrounds banned AI art: https://waxy.org/2022/09/online-art-communities-begin-banning-ai-generated-images/ https://waxy.org/2022/09/online-art-communities-begin-bannin... - but they included this exception: > There are cases where some use of AI is ok, for example if you are primarily showcasing your character art but use an AI-generated background.

madsbuch 4y ago

Add these technologies to your toolbox. It is not easy to do "prompt engineering". Keep in mind that most generated material looks awful -- there is a huge selection bias going on. The outputted stuff needs to made production ready also, distribution, etc. If anything, the emergence of these technologies should greatly expand. You will have a new customer base that was not available before, and you will be able to deliver new products.

adamredwoods 4y ago
Agreed, we're still decades away from solid results. I compare this to automated driving: Truck drivers and cab drivers are still in business. Another example is the uncanny valley of CGI people: at what point was it acceptable to audiences, and at what point was it excellent?
- OJFord 4y ago
  > I compare this to automated driving: Truck drivers and cab drivers are still in business. It's pretty early to declare that a victory for human drivers isn't it? I'd be worried, if I were them.
- bulbosaur123 4y ago
  > Agreed, we're still decades away from solid results You spelled "two years" wrong.
TillE 4y ago
> Keep in mind that most generated material looks awful -- there is a huge selection bias going on. Yeah. Look at machine translation - it's gotten pretty good, in some limited cases it's perfect, but it's also frequently just clueless, and for anything serious you absolutely need a real human translator. I think these AI tools will improve, but I'm extremely skeptical that it's going to improve by like an order of magnitude any time soon. It will still require extensive tuning, heavy selection, and accepting that you probably can almost never get it to make exactly what you want.
- 4y ago

dougmwne 4y ago

Perhaps in the short term you do nothing. It will be many years before this moves from “toy” to “tool”. The industry is made up of humans and humans adapt at human speed. You don’t have to outrun the AI bears, you just have to outrun your colleagues. Perhaps this will just make your job easier and not impact your ability to make money. Maybe you will make even more money. And if at some point the industry dries up completely, you will move on and do the best you can. We all will.

freetime2 4y ago
I agree. The Imagen videos are incredibly impressive, but they are also cherry-picked examples and there are noticeable quality issues. Similar to what we have seen with self-driving cars, I expect it will take years to go from an impressive tech demo to the kind of tool that can reliably deliver the kind of quality, versatility, and specificity needed for professional applications. So at the very least the parent probably has time to do a bit of soul searching to decide and prepare for their next undertaking.

mixmastamyk 4y ago

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. However, I don't think it'll replace much or even a lot of work, especially where a minimum level of quality is desired.

cercatrova 4y ago

Create an agency of one (yourself) and use the AI tools. Profit from the margins between the cost of the AI (likely near zero as time goes on) and what you charge customers. This is not without precedent. DesignJoy is run by a single designer who makes over $1.5 million a year by himself, doing contracts for 20+ clients at a time [0]. [0] https://www.indiehackers.com/post/broke-the-1-5m-arr-mark-as-an-agency-of-one-e26ae36fe7 https://www.indiehackers.com/post/broke-the-1-5m-arr-mark-as...

badpun 4y ago

I'm not so sure it will be that easy to exactly control the output of the AI algos. This is not that important when doing art for art's sake but, for commercial purposes, if you can't make that can of coke slightly bigger or more redder, or have the teenage in the picture hold it slighlty differently (all as per client's feedback), the tool might be a failure.

rory 4y ago
I think it's more likely that people are simply thinking of the AI algo as doing too much, rather than this kind of tool becoming a general failure. There will likely be many, many steps before, during, and after AI image / video generation that will need a highly skilled human in the loop to produce a great result.

asadlionpk 4y ago

I would say add these AI tools to your toolbox and use them to get things done quicker.

yamtaddle 4y ago
Right—the ones who survive in the industry will be the ones who use these tools to increase their output 5x or more (while someone who's only good at the prompt-crafting part and isn't an expert at image manipulation might only hit 1x-2x the pro's prior output)

kube-system 4y ago

Find the weaknesses of AI generated imagery and do the things that it can't.

Wolfbeta 4y ago
Become a human Generative Adversarial Network. Reductio ad absurdium.

egypturnash 4y ago

I am a 2d artist and I have similar feelings. Are you as full of loathing for all the HN people saying “just integrate the AI into your practice” as I am? I like drawing stuff and I love that this pays my bills and I really have zero interest in becoming a “prompt engineer” instead. I think a strategy of creating an image of AI art as cheap and tacky is useful. For how long, I don’t know. If we’re lucky then it’ll turn out that getting these things out of the domain of creepy claw hands is a lot harder than anyone thinks it will be, and there will be a lot of obvious tells for a long time. It may also be useful to try and get your professional associations to bring some suits against these things for playing fast and loose with “fair use”. The legality of these things is debatable, and so’s where “fair use” should fall - personally I feel like nobody posting work on the internet anticipated their stuff being scraped and fed into a giant neural net designed to take their job. Make this shit a lot pricier by demanding that it be built on art explicitly licensed for machine training. Figuring out where the intersection of “art you like to make” and “art the AI sucks at” lies is worthwhile. If your passion is realistic painterly work then you’re fucked, what do you enjoy doing that isn’t that?

lbarrow 4y ago
What's the difference between a human artist walking around in the world, seeing images and videos (many of which are under copyright) and then using those images as inspiration, versus an AI being fed millions of images and videos as part of a large training set? I am not a lawyer but I don't really see the "it's not fair use" argument.
- Wistar 4y ago
  There's a whole lot of unapologetic artistic theft of others’ work that has contributed to the creation of new art.
  - etrautmann 4y ago
    why do we even call it theft or pretend that any artist arrived at ideas without inspiration?

bobsmooth 4y ago

Become a plumber. It'll be a while till robots can replace you in the trades.

KMnO4 4y ago
You’re telling a highly creative person to pursue an unstimulating job that they’re not passionate about.
- ALittleLight 4y ago
  This kind of comes across like you're implying there are different classes of people and our kind are too good to be plumbers. If you're worried about AI taking your job, then taking a job that AI can't do seems like a pretty reasonable response.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    The upper-middle class have a god-given right to make a very good living expressing their creativity and opinions.
- hackeraccount 4y ago
  When I do plumbing it's both creative and very stimulating; at least to the senses.
- bobsmooth 4y ago
  There are millions of people working unstimulating jobs they're not passionate about. Why is the OP special?
- 10u152 4y ago
  Perhaps, but jobs are what you make of them. I know a guy that does floor polishing and epoxy floors. Not a very creative job but plenty of work. Him and his crew spend a lot of time together. They have deep discussions about philosophy, art and ethics while spreading smelly goop around concrete floors. I bet they go home pretty intellectually satisfied from doing epoxy floors.

brudgers 4y ago

Get out of the race to $0. Develop business relationships. Good clients are mostly insensitive to price. That’s what makes them good clients. Good luck

kranke155 4y ago
Hmm not sure I follow. I have great clients and they do ask for high end work - but often what keeps me afloat is the trashy low quality stuff. A few times a year I do the high quality high end stuff. You’re right that really high end work will continue, most likely unchanged, for at least a decade (maybe). But I’m not so sure really - things are moving so fast.
- brudgers 4y ago
  Sorry for not being clear. My point is on the quality of clients, not the quality of the work product. In the future, clients who prioritize cheap will go on fivrr and get 500 AI alternatives to choose from if they can. Or down the block to a lower priced competitor later this afternoon if they can. Good clients want you to stay in business because they want to work with you again.
  - kranke155 4y ago
    This is possible. I like that idea.

freedude 4y ago

It probably depends upon you. Is AI a tool or a trap? Can it make some of your jobs iterate more quickly and weed out the cruft or heavy lifting? Or is it only something that gets in your way of production? It is up to you.

tenebrisalietum 4y ago

Human language is inexact and context sensitive. This means the precise meaning of words in communications is unique to the time, place, and members of the communication. Because of this, there will never be a 100% reliable "text prompt to AI image" generator. Someone will have to get to know the AI and figure out how to make it do what is wanted, or modify it to get what is wanted. Kinda the same way Google and other information repositories have not made researcher's jobs obsolete.

notjustanymike 4y ago

Auto-generated content has a tendency to raise only the baseline in industries. For web development first it was Dreamweaver, then WordPress templates, then SquareSpace and Wix. Bootstrap came along, then Material and a thousand other prepackaged design languages. While these advancements reduced the income from building mom & pop restaurant websites, the demand for high-end curated sites never really changed. Just focus your efforts on continuing to produce quality work, those clients never dry up.

markdown 4y ago
> those clients never dry up As someone who used to work in web dev, they most certainly do and did. And you have an ever growing pool (worldwide) of workers who are jostling over that dwindling supply of gigs.
- can16358p 4y ago
  Yup, I second that. Many places that I've worked with are now considering using a zero code website creator instead of actually coding, and for many scenarios it just works perfectly, cheap, and flawlessly. Of course it's not for everything especially if there's customization and server technologies involved, but it's very big to create disruption.
- earthboundkid 4y ago
  I would be surprised to learn that the absolute number of web devs today has gone down since SquareSpace came out. Yes, the $500 website is dead, but there’s still tons of work for tons of people.
- arcturus17 4y ago
  Meh. There’s plenty of work to go around. At the low end, companies are rebuilding their websites all the time, whether it’s on Webflow or whatever. At the higher end, there is plenty of integration work, enterprise apps, etc to be built. Competition is fierce but there is opportunity if you specialize properly and build the right relationships.
- 4y ago

hackeraccount 4y ago

I understand you're not interested in learning a new tool set. That totally sucks especially when it at least appears orthogonal to what you currently know (not to be a dick but I would underline appears). As a related thought, if not an upside, did you read that story about the guy who outsourced his job to China? He worked for some telecom and just hired out whatever they wanted him to do to randos overseas and basically ended up doing nothing other then going to meetings that set up scope. I believe he was fired but - end result aside - it's not hard to see how this might fit into your situation.

ativzzz 4y ago

The only constant in life is change. There is no guarantee of stability or order in life, despite the human desire to carve it out where it doesn't exist. You can either embrace that change, or fight against it. Embracing the change means learning the new tools and adapting your job around them. Fighting against it means lobbying the government to create protectionist laws for your industry to prevent new technology from disrupting you. The former is easier if you are more flexible and open minded. The latter is easier if you have a lot of money and are well connected. Neither is inherently easy, which is why most of us just complain instead.

kranke155 4y ago
This is the least BS comment I’ve seen here. Thanks you’re right, change is inevitable. I just dropped this here as a challenge if you will, but the overall feeling seems to be “you will actually make more money” or just “become an AÍ prompt person”. The first I don’t think is true and the second doesn’t interest me honestly. I trained in my craft so I could become a craftsman, if you will I’ve always wanted to become a monk who would make copies of books, not a printing press operator.
- iExploder 4y ago
  it used to be that only taxes and death would come for us all, now AI is in on it as well, maybe you could consider joining the machine on a project that feeds the AI with unique new art, I imagine the models will need to be updated or re-learned with "license friendly" art at some point, might be a nice way to go out with the bang..
- ativzzz 4y ago
  I don't think craftmanship will ever go away. Better tools allow us to make more stuff and bigger stuff and more complex stuff - AI will be just another tool that creatives can use.

dexwiz 4y ago

I am not an ad person, but to me they always contain a specific subject (thing, place, etc). If you are making an ad for widget XJ900, you don't want it to actually show the XK800. What's harder, trying to prompt the AI into generating content on your specific subject, or just modeling/filming the subject with current methods? Which is harder to incorporate client feedback? So far, slight tweaks in prompts can produce radically difficult results. Paint back can help, but we'll see. I have yet to see a stable diffusion output that is high quality work. They often lack any compositional sense, and all the lines are weirdly wavy. It's like someone trying to do realism but with the motor skills and spatial awareness of a toddler. The picture that won the state fair awards looked really terrible on further inspection. Basic composition elements like the horizon line or the giant circle in the middle were all skewed, and not in an attractive way. Any elements beyond the central figures are just noise. I see that story as more about bad judging than anything else. Stable diffusion has its own version of uncanny valley, and it may be a long time before we can cross it. The people who decree stable diffusion as the death of human art don't often to have a firm grasp on artistic or design fundamentals.

toast0 4y ago
> I am not an ad person, but to me they always contain a specific subject (thing, place, etc). If you are making an ad for widget XJ900, you don't want it to actually show the XK800. Depends on the widget. There are lots of categories of widgets where you just want to show happy people. Or if you're advertising a brand rather than a specific product, you may want to show happy people with a logo, but the products don't need to exist.
shostack 4y ago
Inpainting and outpainting are two techniques that come into play here.

spyder 4y ago

AI for long time will be just another tool to improve your production. It will probably reduce the more repetitive boring part of the work. Quickly generating content will let you try out a lot of ideas faster and seeing the different results will inspire you more. Some of the simpler work will probably go away but most likely it will be replaced by other work that currently is considered more complex but becomes easier and cheaper with AI so more customer can afford it. AI+human will produce better results than just AI for a long time but you have to learn how to use it. One of the interesting possibility will be to train your own AI on your private creative work/dataset so others could not have it if they don't have access to your private dataset, and it would produce your style better than some general AI. There will be services that will do it for you as for example Emad from StabilityAI already mentioned they will provide something like that. But yeah, if AI keeps improving the end game is a little scary.

illwrks 4y ago

For any large company (with a brand team) these tools will only ever be a starting point to get a general direction. It might remove some initial back and forth working through some basic things that a junior might do. The output might then be used as a prompt for the creative agencies they work with. The brand is the sacred and I doubt anyone would take the risk with anything that isn't 100% controlled (photoshoot, CGI etc) For the smaller companies, the mom and pop ones mentioned elsewhere in the thread, this will probably kill any creative work from them. Also, consider going in-house into a large corporate. They usually have marketing and comms teams, if not external facing then internal. Then when these tools mature you could leverage them to knock out internal work at tighter deadlines.

earthboundkid 4y ago

Current AI puts out weird output that is not suitable for publication. There will be working fixing it for the foreseeable future.

whoisjuan 4y ago

Learn how to write. It's as simple as that. These models will require well-crafted prompts to produce the desired outputs. Your way to get ahead of this is to learn how the models transform a prompt into a video or image. You will quickly realize there's way more nuance and need for precise terminology than the shelf examples you're seeing. These models are only as good as the prompts they receive. Someone needs to write those precise prompts. You are way ahead of everyone else because you already understand the concepts, terminology, and process of video production and CG.

Uehreka 4y ago
Yeah, but what happens when GPT-3 starts writing better prompts than humans? People are talking like that’s not going to happen, just like a few years ago people wouldn’t have foreseen how far AI Art would come. I feel like putting bounds on where AI will go next is a bit of a fool’s errand.
- whoisjuan 4y ago
  You still need to prompt GPT-3 with something. Stacking two systems won't improve the outputs if your original input lacks precision. Garbage in, garbage out. Granted, GPT-3 requires way less precision to generate something useful, but you still need to pass the proper context. I think you're right, though. It's hard to speculate how these things would turn out, but I think it's reasonable to assume that we will still need some relatively sophisticated human input to produce the best results out of these systems.

nitwit005 4y ago

It seems fairly hard to predict to me. There have been huge improvements in computer art generally, but that seems to have come with rising demand and quality expectations. If prices for this sort of art does fall, demand will also increase. It's hard to guess how big that increase will be.

cwkoss 4y ago

Working on ads is a profession with significant moral hazard: thought manipulation is inherently antisocial. Being disrupted out of the industry could end up being a blessing for your mental wellbeing.

smm11 4y ago

Everybody in the world is carrying a camera with them full-time. I'm still dodging pro photographers shooting weddings, graduates, and teens every time I ride through the park.

yrgulation 4y ago

If anything the number of jobs will increase. Simply because technologies such as what you describe are enablers. Suddenly everyone and their cat will want good looking ai generated videos. But someone will need to make that little tweak that makes them look good. For instance, i wouldnt be able to produce nice content regardless of how many ais you throw at me simply because i dont have an eye for it. But suddenly john in marketing is able to create a few amateurish sketch videos, crappy and naive, but they will lead to ideas for proper videos that he can collaborate with someone like you to turn into professional content. Similarly you will be able to iterate ideas faster and thus keep clients happy. Its the same with web development. The more libraries the more tools and the more automation the more jobs out there. John in marketing or Sandra the ceo are now able to experiment with mockups, show them to stakeholders and gain their attention much quicker. As a result there are more funding and more product development leading to more tech jobs. Therefore, enabler tech like this will lead to growth.

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zeofig 4y ago

A lot of people are telling you to Deal With It. I would argue that people are way too hyped about these AI developments. It looks cool and it can generate something interesting, but can it really generate what you need? Can it make something good enough to work like an ad (or whatever) made by people who know what they're doing? Maybe sometimes, but usually the answer is No. Will it do that soon? Nobody knows for sure, but I think a lot of techies are too optimistic. What the AI does is an interpolation of existing image data. It doesn't know how to draw what you really want, and it can't reliably produce output that's usable (let alone "good") for highly specific purposes. And any real application of CG/videography is highly specific. It's easy to imagine all of that is the next step, but I think that's a lot harder than what the AI does at the moment.

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blurbleblurble 4y ago

Same feeling as a software developer. Programming as we know it will be completely transformed before the end of the decade.

syntheweave 4y ago

In a broad sense, we can think of the economy in terms of resource inputs to society and the dependencies that result in goods and services. This is the kind of thing you can plot out, industry by industry, with Wardley mapping. Now, clearly, resource extraction jobs aren't going away. The methods change as we go from "ape poking at insects with stick" to "hydraulic fracking", but someone has to have some oversight of the process. But everything leading to a resulting experience fulfilling some human need is subject to change with AI in the picture, because we can imagine machines in the loop doing all the processing, moving, coordinating, and final delivery. Experiences that used to be jobs don't have to be anymore. And therefore the whole social contract of industrial economies is subject to a gradual shift towards indifference: if I have some land, some machines, some access to raw materials, I don't need a job, or to sell things, or to run an organization. But, counterbalancing that, there still have to be voices coordinating and controlling access to those things, because there are too many ethical dangers involved in making it completely permissionless. What financial systems(hence money, wages, etc.) do in controlling access is a way of assigning credit, so that you gain general permissions to stuff. If you do things that persistently assign credit to yourself, without also turning it into a reassignment of credit that makes enemies(power-monging etc.), you survive in any economy. The role of anything artistic in that is, broadly speaking, going to be one of storytelling and aesthetic presentation of information. And I think the key insight to take from the tools we're getting is that direct prompt engineering is going to be taken for granted; but prompt engineering as a layer on top of or beneath a more specialized skillset will still produce distinguished results. That is, if you can glue a little bit of API code together, you can create a job where 90% of your creative time is still spent in a more hands-on mode, but then you send it through the machine as the last step. The trick is in not getting too dependent on someone's platform control play in the process.

nbzso 4y ago

My practical advice: Plan for your future from a blank state of mind. Reduce all unnecessary expenses, invest into more self-sufficient survival. The race between semi-pros and professionals is marketing driven, same applies in AI situation, AI will not be as good as the best in the business, but clients/corporations will use the AI argument to lower the reward for professional labor. This is normal. This is the Surveillance Capitalism. And is the direct result of the lack of ethics behind the tech overlords. They simply don't care. And now their social position of demigods and keepers of "the knowledge" will give them the ultimate power over peoples imagination and thoughts. So be it. I cannot stop this. And the "adaptation" argument is utter nonsense. But I can move into the woods and live a simple and happy life. I can create my own paper and paints from surrounding materials, and I will paint for myself and my friends. The majority of the next generations will have no problem to be controlled by AI. Corporations will package this as a "progress" and people will swallow it willingly. So what? It is a choice, a minority will refuse to live in AI induced comma and will search for human touch, human emotions, human produced reality.

quinnjh 4y ago

Be valuable :)

orbital-decay 4y ago

No offence, but all this moral panic induced by a spectacular AI demo looks really myopic. It puzzles me how many creative professionals are unable to see their edge somehow. The main value of your work is always conceptualization, even if you see yourself as a pixel pusher (if that's the case, it's most likely wrong), and it's not easy to master. Maybe you're just not aware of the current state of these tools, and their potential in near future? It's really easy to fall under impression that it advances at light speeds but once you take a deep dive to be aware of the limitations, you'll be much less impressed. You won't be out of your job. You will have a powerful tool to create with, though. Visual content generation based on text will always lose to compositing, just because of its inefficient nature. "Prompt engineering" is a nonsense gimmick. AI-powered tools won't "replace" you, ever. They will make possible things that are impractical right now due to the sheer amount of manual work involved. (30's animation style comeback, anyone?). You'll always be able to create something with 10x value, compared to a non-pro. Just keep your nose to the wind, as changes won't be immediate. Embrace it and learn how to use it, to be ahead of everyone. Or at least be aware of your surroundings.

kranke155 4y ago
Because you’re not a creative professional you’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg. Here’s the truth about creative work - most of is trash. You make a lot trash. Unimaginative, boring trash. You use that to pay your bills. The creative stuff that people love and share on Instagram is 10% of the work. The stuff you don’t share nor do you talk about is 90% of your income. The problem in this forum is people dont have experience with creative work nor do they understand the economics of the industry. Not their fault they don’t have to. But here’s the reality - the stuff you love so much and consider creative work is the 5% that those artists made the right decisions and were allowed to make them and everything went fine. A lot of the work is drudge work. Like an illustrator starting out will make cheap card illustrations or whatever. And then in his 5% of time he will make the amazing personal stuff he posts on artstation. You love and share the stuff on artstation - but his income is mostly coming from shitty card illustrations that will never be on his portfolio. Due to HN being clearly unaware of the economics this is being repeated here a lot - just do super high super creative stuff and you’ll be fine. The problem is there isn’t enough of that work to begin with! If you’re working for a good company you know you can place the final work on your portfolio because the creative brief will be good and executed well - Nike, Apple, Squarespace - some people (including myself) will actually reduce our day rate because we know it’s great fun to work on it plus it will be a value add on your portfolio. That’s how competitive it is to GET high end high credit work. The idea that we can all migrate to that is a wild fantasy.

kache_ 4y ago

Unfortunately, it seems that technology is showing no signs of slowing down. If it's any solace, you're only the first set of victims, and the rest of us will soon follow.

t0bia_s 4y ago

AI wouldn't steal your job. I guess your clients require specific taks, nothing that can be precisely done by AI. Sure, it can help to speed up creative process, but if AI generated images/video is enough for your clients, than nothing new and innovative is made.

anothernewdude 4y ago
> than nothing new and innovative is made. But will people notice?
- t0bia_s 4y ago
  Those, who pay for innovations, specific tastk and actual art... Of course.

krapp 4y ago

If you can lift at least 35 pounds and pass a drug test, Amazon is always hiring. I also hear trucking and paralegal are booming fields.

galdosdi 4y ago

> There’s loads of work that ad agencies will just hire an AI prompt guy to generate for ads. I am really skeptical of the idea that soon, working with image AI will involve purely prompt writing. I bet it will involve some prompt writing but still plenty of original art creation, and even more photoshop combining, as now. Think about how much more time a modern employed artist spends fucking around with photoshop tools, as opposed to literally having their pen on their wacom tablet. It's just a continuing trend in that direction -- or at least that's my educated guess which could be wrong.

Aqueous 4y ago

I think you maybe getting ahead of yourself. It’s one thing for AI to produce art that roughly aligns with a prompt, which is as you well know right now what it is capable of. It’s another to fulfill the exact vision of what a person wants. That requires a much higher level and more detailed and more intuitive understanding of what the expectations are and what the vision of the director is. AI is not capable of that level of understanding yet, as far as I know. I suspect it might turn out like the issues we are encountering with self-driving. Autonomous vehicles may be able to deal with 99% of all driving situations right now but that last 1% is the killer. That last 1% is the reason self-driving isn’t good enough. Furthermore, while the first 99% may have taken only 20% of the total time to adoption to solve, I suspect that last 1% may take the remaining 80% before self-driving gains widespread adoption. Just as it could be many years before we can fully rely on self-driving technology to cart us around, it could be many years before AI really starts to supplant human artists, before prompt engineering becomes enough of a precise art to no longer need people who can exactly translate a vision into a visual work. Of course, feel free to print out this comment, hang it on the wall and throw darts at it in a much fewer number of years when my prediction turns out to be totally wrong. It's really just based on an intuition.

kranke155 4y ago
This is true but the problem is I’m in my early 30s. I have to start planning now for what’s my next profession, and I hope I pick one that won’t get disrupted…

ffwacom 4y ago

AI as it stands is a massive legal liability for companies as it interpolates between plagiarised images. The image gen projects are extremely unethical and immoral IMO as they rely on scraped data created by artists to ‘train’.