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I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

• web3-is-a-scam 4y ago
  People are already generating entire apps with AI in minutes. Software engineering as a profession is finished. We are all now slaves to Roko’s Basilisk.
  • mr90210 4y ago
    We shall see.
  • enumjorge 4y ago
    Can you share examples of this? I've been doing some searching on my own because I find this stuff interesting, and I haven't seen evidence that current versions of AI tools are capable of helping generate entire apps in minutes, at least non-trivial ones. I keep seeing some real dramatic premonitions about AI, and I'd love to see something to back them up. Even the original post, I'm having trouble understanding. I know Stable Diffusion can create some amazing images, but I don't see how it's being used to create sprite assets for games. You typically need the same character from different angles. Can Midjourney v5 do that? The OP talks about being a 3D artist. Can Midjourney generate meshes and 3D objects or just raster images? I didn't think we were at the point where these tools could fully replace an artist's workflow, but the OP seems to claim so.
    • mrcartmeneses 4y ago
      All knowledge workers are completely screwed. The only way out is UBI and a maximum three-day work week.
      • ChatGTP 4y ago
        Sounds like absolute paradise, I don’t give a shit about “work”, or status or anything of that. I hope Silicon Valley builds itself a starship and ships itself off to Alpha Centuri and leaves me to live a pretty simple life with way less grind.
      • brushfoot 4y ago
        I don't see it. I consult, and AI has just let me take on more clients. Using ChatGPT lets me finish their projects faster. What's ending is the era of CRUD work.
        • grugagag 4y ago
          > don't see it. I consult, and AI has just let me take on more clients. Using ChatGPT lets me finish their projects faster. Get ready to take on more clients and at a smaller and smaller gain. An avalanche of competition is coming your way too if you have no moat.
          • brushfoot 4y ago
            For sure. I recommend anyone in business for themselves productize and build moats. I still work about the same hours, though. AI has just raised the level of abstraction. Less time is spent on looking up specific syntax and more on reviewing, iterating, testing, architecting.
        • blackoil 4y ago
          Today yeah, but tomorrow the clients can use GPT 7 consultant who has better context with access to all the mails/data of the client. It is fast/cheap and is a polymath.
          • mrbombastic 4y ago
            I don’t understand why people see this future as guaranteed, just because GPT4 was a great improvement on 3.5 does not imply this approach will continue accelerating at this rate. I am not saying it definitely won’t happen but I find the confidence that it will pretty baffling.
            • nirvdrum 4y ago
              It seems unlikely to me that this technology has plateaued. The gains have been exponential. It strikes me as prudent to at least consider its continued improvement a possibility and try to work out what that means for society. The best thing on the table so far is people lose jobs and business owners make more money. Some amount of that is unavoidable and maybe even beneficial, but too much of it is unsustainable. Better to have a plan and not need and all that.
      • sublinear 4y ago
        A Marxist can dream
      • luckylion 4y ago
        This has been said for years, first about robotics, now about AI. And today, most developed nations have trouble finding people to work because there's so much work that needs to be done. The opposite is happening, yet it's still repeated.
  • weird-eye-issue 4y ago
    Okay. Link me to a single production app with paying users that was created with AI in minutes. Since it only takes minutes to make you must have a lot of examples.
    • CamperBob2 4y ago
      Why bother issuing such a challenge? You'll win today, but lose decisively in only a few more years.
      • weird-eye-issue 4y ago
        So you are saying they are right but they are just a few years off? That is the same as being wrong.
      • kbelder 4y ago
        We'll have self-driving cars by next year, right?
        • CamperBob2 4y ago
          Those are a tougher nut to crack because the entire road transportation infrastructure is designed for human drivers. Lots of so-called "wicked problems" that don't exist in the art world.
  • brushfoot 4y ago
    Trivial app demos, sure. Non-trivial, no. Influencers have been cranking out the former to sell their course/personal brand/consulting. They stand to gain from making AI look as magical and easy as possible. A decision-maker watches an influencer's video and goes, "Wow! AI can do it all! I need to hire this influencer as a consultant/like their content/buy their course!" The reality isn't quite as flashy. Incorporating LLMs into my workflow has been a great productivity boost, but by no means do they spell the end of software engineering.
    • sumitkumar 4y ago
      True. The influencers are using AI to sell themselves. The amount of human attention which goes into doing a semi repeatable task will surely go down with AI but not so much as they claim to churn out apps in seconds vs hours/minutes with a real developer. Also, I have not seen any insight level help from GPT. It just seems like it has a good recall for everything it has seen. And prompt engineering takes away the mental work away from the problem and more about what the model knows.
  • terminatornet 4y ago
    I'm guessing this tweet is what the OP was referring to https://twitter.com/mortenjust/status/1636001311417319426 https://twitter.com/mortenjust/status/1636001311417319426 This is the first bit of AI news that actually made me want to investigate it for myself. Even though it is pretty impressive to get a working app out of a few prompts, it seems for now it's not capable of producing much more than snippet level code. I like the author's take further in the thread: > Company A fires half their staff yet keeps delivering 100% of their old capacity = they save money > Company B keeps all their staff, but can now deliver 200% of their old capacity = they win the competition > So seems like the strategic move here is to raise the bar rather than replace engineers https://twitter.com/mortenjust/status/1636037312571211777 https://twitter.com/mortenjust/status/1636037312571211777 My hope is that stuff allows me to augment my workflow and automate repetitive and tedious tasks away but doesn't fully replace me (or I get UBI and don't have to work anymore)
    • blackoil 4y ago
      But Company A has reduced product price be 60% because the biggest cost center is now halved. Customers like some new features from B but not justifying the price.
  • sublinear 4y ago
    Most apps worth money have to integrate with existing systems in highly specific ways determined by endless meetings with real people to extract the requirements and probably haven't been done before and are usually all proprietary code ChatGPT doesn't know about and there's not a cobol's chance in hell anyone is going to rewrite it all in a way that's compatible with junk hallucinated by a bot. There's no business case for that. It will probably always be cheaper for humans to maintain what has already accumulated over decades despite the "high" salaries. The knowledge gap between devs and everyone else, including bots, is a chasm. It seems many don't realize how hard some devs work for so little relatively speaking.
    • quonn 4y ago
      I something think that some developers posting here want to be punished for earning a living wage. Strangely lawyers never think that and I can assure you that this is not a more difficult profession [0]. [0] Surely someone will quickly post that it is.
  • spoiler 4y ago
    Ah. I think it still requires you to understand what you're doing. I tried to use both copilot and ChatGPT 3.5 and 4. It doesn't get a lot of things right in my interest areas. I think it's great as a crazy-good autocompletion or refactoring tool. It also helps with boilerplate. But every time you need to know what you want, and it just saves you typing the code. Sometimes it's just amusingly wrong, too. Sometimes annoyingly so, especially after it repeats mistakes. I always said our jobs aren't hard because we have to write code for computer, but because we have to capture intent for other humans in code. Sometimes we don't even know what the intent is, because half the time we don't even know what we're building exactly. So, this all slightly shifts the level of abstraction for developers to think more about intent and less about code. You still have to make sure the code is correct. So, you need to understand the code and the intent. Not much has changed. It's just gotten less mechanical. Anyway, I don't think people need to be scared of AI just yet. Obvs there's programmers that enjoy the nitty gritty keyboard slapping, and they can still do that for problems they find interesting. But for things they want to get out of the way, why not unburden ourselves? Typing on phone so pardon the typos/autocorrect
    • pharmakom 4y ago
      I think LLMs will make a software engineers job harder and more in demand. By removing boiler plate, engineers will be expected to create more output per person, and the job moves up the stack from junior code monkey stuff to architect / senior debugging guru style work. Not everyone can do such a role. It will be a very tough time to be a junior.
  • imtringued 4y ago
    ChatGPT is impressive if you start from a clean slate but the moment you do anything more complicated it slows down to being as fast as doing things yourself. After all, you have to know what to input into it and that may take longer than actually processing the information.
    • Yabood 4y ago
      This won’t be a problem once you can feed it an entire solution. I suspect we’re not too far from being able to do that.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  • factsaresacred 4y ago
    Likely sarcasm, still I'll bite. I saw the exact same commentary around the no-code hype of the past few years and it made me increasingly cynical. No-code tools made it super easy to create a boilerplate website that looked pretty but was not fit for purpose. Meanwhile it was advertised as "Build an AirBnB clone without code!". OK fine, hyperbole as a marketing tactic. But many people handed over wads of cash for courses that promised results that were in reality no more than cardboard cutouts of actual websites. The Internet appears to have an endless ability to create markets for don't-do-the-work-and-still-enjoy-the-reward snakeoil. And now we have ChatGPT- an instant boilerplate-creating machine. Watch as a new (or in many cases the same) class of charlatans grease up this technological wave too.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • lewhoo 4y ago
    If this is indeed so simple then why chatGPT (meaning web app not LLM) was so buggy ? Did OpenAI use their LLM to make the app or not ?
• idiotsecant 4y ago
  There were no doubt quite a few nail makers pre-industrial revolution that took pride in making consistent, quality nails. That work was utterly and completely obliterated by the industrial revolution. There may be a few remaining nail makers, producing nails with an extremely niche design, but not many. So goes those jobs our lifetime as well
  • gumby 4y ago
    The Unabomber was notable for manufacturing his own screws, so I'm not sure how many artisanal nail makers remain. In those days nails were re-used, it was such a pain to make them.
    • LegitShady 4y ago
      there are still companies that make cut or square nails - and machines that make them are old.
      • gumby 4y ago
        Sure, but they are made by machines.
  • readthenotes1 4y ago
    Back in the day, I'd call in someone from the secretarial pool to take this sentence down and type it in for me...
  • sportslife 4y ago
    To complete this idea, old nails are better at holding than modern nails in at least some applications and are required for some restoration work. I remember reading (but can't find) a church-restoration project report mentioning it, but more can be read here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30421682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30421682
  • e63f67dd-065b 4y ago
    I think a better analogy is that pre-photography there were many portrait drawers who took pride in drawing good portraits for their clients. Then photography came, and the entire industry died a sudden and miserable death. Portraits still get drawn, but not many, and certainly not for the sake of preserving what somebody looks like.
• runnerup 4y ago
  People with a good understanding of different styles of art and framing/angles/etc should be able to create the "right" prompts for a customer much much faster and get better results than people who don't know art. Generative AI like Midjourney will completely upend the art industry (it already is). But I don't think it's the death knell for the study of art. Here's a solid example of that in the context of creating game assets for a retro computer game: https://hpjansson.org/blag/2022/08/16/adventure-game-graphics-with-dall-e-2/ https://hpjansson.org/blag/2022/08/16/adventure-game-graphic... The author clearly has actually studied art and is able to come up with prompts and concepts that I'd never be able to dream up. They're able to get the AI to generate what they want immediately with specific prompts like: > "mexican hacienda on a sunny day, surrounded by plains, color painting by Charles Sheeler" I have no idea who Charles Sheeler is. But if someone knows 1,500 different artists/photographers/genres/styles and the nuances of them, they can immediately select the right look for the client. It's not a panacea that will allow artists to keep doing what they love, but it is a bright spot and something to focus on for what the future skillset looks like for those who generate art. [0]: https://hpjansson.org/blag/2022/08/16/adventure-game-graphics-with-dall-e-2/ https://hpjansson.org/blag/2022/08/16/adventure-game-graphic...
  • 0xcde4c3db 4y ago
    This seems congruent with a thought I've had, which is that generative image models might enable people commissioning art to be more coherent about what they want. I only have FOAF-tier knowledge of commissioning artwork, but my understanding is that a major source of frustration on all sides is that a lot of work is often wasted because someone commissioning an artist has only the faintest spark of a concept or doesn't know how to communicate it effectively. I imagine a fair number of professional artists would be receptive to something along the lines of "here are my prompts/models, here's the set of the outputs I have opinions about and here's what I do and don't like about them; please use your expertise to compose this into something that actually works".
  • andrewflnr 4y ago
    The market of people who care enough about those aspects to pay an expert is, I'm guessing, much smaller than the market for people who will be fine with whatever they can come up with themselves.
• al2o3cr 4y ago
  LOL at the reply a couple posts down, where OP admits they work at a mobile shovelware sweatshop.
  • dagmx 4y ago
    I don’t know why you’re downvoted (other than maybe the glibness?) because you’re right. They’re working at a company where the goal isn’t to make good content. They were effectively there as a means to churn out stuff. It’s why their boss is making them use AI prompts to get content out as quickly as possible. It doesn’t even matter how good the diffusion results is for that segment. It’s really just about having some representative visual as soon as possible There’s no current model that makes acceptable 3D content for games, and cohesion isn’t good enough for 2D art for anything except visual novels. They can certainly act as a base but this persons post makes it sound like they’re barely adding anything on top. So yes, they’re a shop that’s churning out content to make a buck as quickly as possible. If it wasn’t generative art that replaces this person, it would be someone who could do things even slightly faster or cheaper, even if the quality was worse. This is the most vulnerable part of society to any form of automation. The level where they’re effectively an operator. This person would be miserable in this place regardless of AI because their boss doesn’t value them or the work. They would have a more fulfilling career in another studio, where generative art may still be used, but as a tool not a factory to generate things to rush out the door.
    • Quiark 4y ago
      Yes but are there enough jobs at those higher standard studios?
      • dagmx 4y ago
        That’s not the point I’m making. I’m saying that people extrapolating this to the full spectrum of artists (both on HN and the Blender Reddit) are missing the context. I already acknowledged that the people at this low end of the spectrum are vulnerable because they’re basically just used to churn stuff out, without any value for their work. The point is, this persons job has always been one level of automation or efficiency away from being just an operator. If it’s not generative art, it’s other forms of automation or outsourcing or some new high school dropout who’s good enough. Midjourney here is a symptom not a cause. Though it’ll be a symptom that’ll affect the most vulnerable roles: the people who are largely just a factory operator
• wetpaws 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • klntsky 4y ago
    This! Unironically, this. The tragedy of the author of the post is that they expected that the product of their work would be treated like art, but it turned out their boss had different vision. Nothing of value have been lost, because the artistic value of author's work has never been actually appreciated in the first place - but they tricked themselves into thinking it has (because of paycheck I guess).
    • a_t48 4y ago
      The author is also losing out on a lot of opportunities to improve themselves and aim for a higher standard.
      • akudha 4y ago
        What do you mean by this? The author seems good at what they do, seems to love their craft and enjoys their work. The tragedy here is that AI doesn't need to be better than humans (at least in many cases like art, writing etc). It just needs to be "good enough", maybe 80% as good as a human. Since humans can't compete with software on speed or cost, they are gonna lose. How exactly can the author improve to a higher standard here, assuming they want to continue doing what they love, and not change careers?
        • sublinear 4y ago
          They could learn a skill that complements their artistry, go 100% with their visions, and sell whatever product comes out of that. The world still desperately needs art and most of what is out there, even stuff made by humans, is usually incredibly uninspired. Just like how the first time getting fired is usually a blessing in disguise, so is this.
        • a_t48 4y ago
          We agree I think - I just poorly phrased what I meant
• draw_down 4y ago
  [dead]
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
  Reminds me of the story of Mel. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html Mel obviously took pride in his work, and seemed to look down on compilers in much the same way the author looks down on Midjourney.
• jackblemming 4y ago
  On the other side of the fence, I'm extremely grateful tools like Copilot can automate the mundane process of looking up magic incantations to get some (usually poor) library to do what I want. I have no sympathy for programmers who saw it as a point of pride to memorize hundreds of built in functions and annoying minutiae.
  • culi 4y ago
    This seems like a poor use of Copilot. At least in the JS ecosystem, pretty much every library has TypeScript support now. No need to guess or look anything up. Copilot can still be wrong, especially if the API changes over different updates In my experience Copilot's value add is simply autocompleting simple/boiler-plate-y lines for me. Definitely wouldn't wanna trust something as fuzzy as an AI to "memorize" APIs on my behalf
  • kranner 4y ago
    Knowledge of annoying minutiae can be indispensable when you're trying to debug code that looks like it's calling the right functions based on the function signature.
• paxys 4y ago
  > I am now able to create, rig and animate a character thats spit out from MJ in 2-3 days. Before, it took us several weeks in 3D. The difference is: I care, he does not. For my boss its just a huge time/money saver. This is the crux of it. The bottom line is that you are free to practice your craft and love it, but don't expect a company to pay you big bucks for it for no reason when they can find cheaper and better ways to accomplish the task. Automation eating away jobs (including ones that had a quality of romanticism associated with them) has been a constant in human history, and it is silly to expect that it won't apply to you for whatever reason.
  • miohtama 4y ago
    I posted this earlier today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35301727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35301727 “The Death of a Technical Skill” The case study what happened when Adobe Flash died and how the job market was affected. With AI this will happen for many more industry verticals.
  • Johnny555 4y ago
    And his work isn’t even much better: >I am angry. My 3D colleague is completely fine with it. He promps all day, shows and gets praise. The thing is, we both were not at the same level, quality-wise. My work was always a tad better, in shape and texture, rendering No company is going to spend 5X more time on work that is a “tad” better.
    • teg4n_ 4y ago
      You misunderstand. They were comparing their quality with their coworker’s before AI started to be used.
      • Izkata 4y ago
        You missed the part right above it: > However its hard to see, results are better than my work.
• markles 4y ago
  The lack of empathy the HN community has really shines through in many of these replies: > There were no doubt quite a few nail makers pre-industrial revolution that took pride in making consistent, quality nails. > And nothing of value have been lost. > LOL at the reply a couple posts down, where OP admits they work at a mobile shovelware sweatshop.
  • ChatGTP 4y ago
    I’m a world where you have no “value” you become trash to those who “do business”, it won’t be a pretty transition. I’m concerned about it personally. It wouldn’t be a problem if most people just respected each other, I think deep down inside they do. But while those paying our “wages” are an important part of our lives, we’ll have trouble.
  • sheepscreek 4y ago
    All is not lost. I am sure many of us do care. I feel the frustration and pain of the OP. And I am someone not easily swayed by emotions. The shift that’s happening right now will have far reaching consequences. I often ask myself “at what cost”, but one can ask that question for any major invention in history.
  • wsc981 4y ago
    Yesterday I visited an old, but still reasonably healthy man who has been living in Thailand for 40 years now, maybe longer. Reasonably healthy as in: he doesn't need to visit hospital or use medicine, but his power is now waning a bit due to age. A man originally from Switzerland. 88 years old now. When he arrived in Thailand he bought a nice plot of land and made a quite beautiful garden there, with many fruits and vegetables and trees. Also many salas spread throughout the 8000 m2 terrain. And chickens, dogs, cats walking around and about. The man has had quite an adventurous live in the past, back when the world was more adventurous as well, perhaps ... Anyway, the man is content just tending to his plants. And reading and writing in one of the salas that he uses as a (kind of) outdoor office. In the past he also used to paint, but he's not able to do this anymore. Maybe we'd all be happier with just a nice plot of land and some plants to tend to and perhaps some hobbies to keep us busy. And maybe it would keep us healthier (both mentally as well as physically) as well.
• antibasilisk 4y ago
  Yeah I feel similarly about programming, honestly even the existence of compilers makes me feel this way to a lesser extent, but AI is absolutely crushing any sort of enjoyment out of anything and further turning it into a mediocre slurry of content.
  • nullsense 4y ago
    I'm enjoying programming more than ever because of it.
• Waterluvian 4y ago
  I saw AI as a tool like Photoshop, and for that reason wasn’t buying all this anxiety. I still see it as a tool, but this post has changed my entire perception of the issue: It’s not that a new tool will replace you. It’s that a new tool might be too compelling to avoid, but be boring and miserable to work with and suck the joy out of your craft.
  • Yabood 4y ago
    I think its both. Per OP, the process of producing their art no longer takes weeks when using AI, therefore, less people will be needed.
    • stemlord 4y ago
      Not only that, but it's just fully not their art anymore, it's an approximation based on large-scale data scraping
      • sysstem 4y ago
        One could argue that their art is also not theirs but it's based on the art they have seen before throughout their life. It makes you reflect on what's really 100% original, as the saying if you want to make an apple pie from scratch...
  • chii 4y ago
    > be boring and miserable to work with and suck the joy out of your craft you don't have to use the tool - just don't complain that you're not as competitive commercially as someone else who does. If the craft is what you enjoy, then do it apart from the craft's commercial utility. Make it a separate part of your life - use the AI in your job, and don't use it in your spare time doing art for joy.
    • protonbob 4y ago
      Some people like getting fulfillment in their work and their spare time.
• juujian 4y ago
  From all I have learned about ChatGPT coding copilots, this is going to be bleak. Similar art styles. No sudden surprises. Eerily familiar characters. I don't like the look of this. More reason to cherish hand-drawn/hand-animated (?) unique works though.
  • muyuu 4y ago
    Generally speaking, whatever output people can do, generative AI can do to the point you wouldn't be able to tell it apart.
    • nullsense 4y ago
      I think the point is it's not going to suddenly give us surprises like Banksy shredding art.
      • maxdoop 4y ago
        How do you know it won’t? I don’t mean to sound like a doomer , but I never see evidence for these claims around “AI not ever being creative like a human!” These AI’s are literally trained on all of human creativity… i struggle to see how there’s any indication AI would fail to be as creative as a human in even the near-ish future.
        • NhanH 4y ago
          They aren’t trained on all of human creativity. Most of human communication is verbal, and that still isn’t captured. I am not saying whether it will have much difference, just that your statement is factually wrong.
          • maxdoop 4y ago
            I used “all” instead of “most”, which is indeed inaccurate. A better response would have been “a collection of humanity’s creativity”. However, you fail to recognize that OpenAI also created Whisper, which is a quote capable speech-to-text transcriber; and this tool easily converts audio and video (those verbal bits you mentioned) into text. So the pool of creativity which OpenAI can train its models on is far larger than just original text; further, they demoed image modality a couple weeks back which would allow for VISUAL creative works to be parsed as well.
• mLuby 4y ago
  First they came for the artists, and I did not speak out—because that job doesn't require real creativity. Then they came for the engineers, and I did not speak out—because that job doesn't require real reasoning. Then they came for the sales folks, and I did not speak out—because that job doesn't require real human connection. Then they came for the executives and politicians, and I did not speak out—because that job doesn't require real leadership. Then they came for me, and I did not speak out—because I was just grateful to have any job at all, even one doing manual labor under the ceaseless watch of glorified chatbot. At least Netflix can create any movie that I or my AI girlfriend ask for, so that's cool I guess. —trained on a quote from Martin Niemöller
  • borissk 4y ago
    The progress in IT have already made unemployed millions of people. E.g. there used to be shops selling flights and holidays on every corner. There used to be a number of insurance shops in every town center. Every company used to have rooms full of typewriters and typists. After the software developers made a lot of jobs obsolete, their own job is being made obsolete by the data scientists.
    • pharmakom 4y ago
      Building these AI systems is software engineering, not data science. In fact, data science may be one of the first engineering professions to go.
• muyuu 4y ago
  Some people say there isn't enough empathy to go around for those creatives that are seeing their jobs either endangered or automated to a degree they've become sweatshop janitors with little prospects to be anything else. I wonder if that sort of empathy was so plentiful when the automation was shredding the prospects of farmers, miners, truckers and other blue collar workers? Make no mistake, generative AI is going to affect the creative work market massively over the next few years. People will need to keep adapting and perhaps some humility would be in order when somebody else is going through hardship as the market for his or her work profile is in dire straits.
  • perryizgr8 4y ago
    > wonder if that sort of empathy was so plentiful when the automation was shredding the prospects of farmers, miners, truckers and other blue collar workers Yeah I remember the whole "learn to code" movement that mocked people who were losing their jobs.
    • kybernetyk 4y ago
      And when it was about journalists losing jobs, it quickly got banned as "harassment". By the same people who a few years earlier made fun of blue collar people who lost their jobs. Maybe this is the "learn to weld" moment?
    • JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 4y ago
      Can you give some sources for the "learn to code" thing? I only remember that it was a reaction to the people who wanted to change open-source (perceived as "destroying from the inside") without giving concrete solutions.
      • 7speter 4y ago
        Search for it on quora
  • hotpotamus 4y ago
    Hillary Clinton said some words about it. > "We're going to make it clear that we don't want to forget those people," Clinton said. "Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories. Now we've got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don't want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on." Famously what got quoted was this part: > "we're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business."
• csours 4y ago
  I used to have a job I liked. That job went away in the name of efficiency. I can't even disagree with the analysis - the old way was less efficient. It still sucks to lose something that you enjoy doing and that helps the team. I'm doing fine, I went from specialized tech support to software development; but when we talk about efficiency, we are talking about people's lives.
• superb-owl 4y ago
  I can empathize. I've been using Copilot inside of neovim, and it's frighteningly good. It feels like it's reading my mind. In a few years, a lot of us will be just be writing highly specific Jira tickets instead of doing the hard logic of coding.
  • dilyevsky 4y ago
    I mean I’m using it (also nvim). It’s powerful autocomplete, speeds me up by maybe 20-30% when in “typing in code” phase and that’s that. Dont see it replacing software engs any time soon. SWE+copilot will replace just SWE tho that one is for sure
  • nullsense 4y ago
    Don't even need to write the Jira tickets.
• rafaelero 4y ago
  When DALL-E 2 was released, I remember reading lots of people here in HN saying it would never take the jobs of artists. Well, seems like this argument is aging badly. This is exactly the type of conversation we need to have as a society. Instead of deluding ourselves that our skills are impossible to be reproduced by a machine, we should strive to build a system with values in which we can find a way to build a good live knowing that everything we do will eventually be better reproduced by AI.
  • thomascgalvin 4y ago
    I just wish I was part of the first generation to benefit from post-scarcity, and not the generation that is going to have to go through the turmoil of getting to post-scarcity.
    • thot_experiment 4y ago
      Oh don't worry my guy, the odds that we make it to post-scarcity at all are not super high. Just vibe with the slide down the slippery slope, it's all you can do.
    • chii 4y ago
      the generation that went thru the industrial revolution would have said the same thing, except they'd wished they were in your position today. People just don't realize how good today is compared to the past - and of course, how good the future would be (nuclear war notwithstanding).
      • tspike 4y ago
        Any time this argument gets trotted out it's using a baseline of European post-agrarian feudalism. There were definitely peoples in the past who enjoyed a high quality of life for many generations, but they tended to be small groups concentrated in areas of abundance, and were usually among the first to be exterminated by outsiders.
      • borissk 4y ago
• 6177c40f 4y ago
  What's really the point of AI? Is perfect efficiency and maximized profit really the end goal we've been trying to achieve this whole time?
  • scotty79 4y ago
    The whole point of all progress is democratization of the product/service through making the production process cheaper.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• 462436347 4y ago
  These AI systems will sound the death knell for the creative culture of openness and sharing that emerged during the web 1.0 era with the Creative Commons and OSI-approved licenses and sites like DeviantArt, NewGrounds, and SourceForge, and which still exists today, albeit in a less idealistic form. Once people realize that by putting something, even just a blog post, out for public consumption, especially if done so under a permissive, share-alike license, they're helping to train an AI that will eventually compete with them for their job, they will not only be less inclined to share it (under a permissive license or not), but be less inclined to produce it at all.
  • Gigachad 4y ago
    This is insignificant. The training set already exists. And there are plenty who do not care about having data used for training.
  • kmeisthax 4y ago
    I don't think you actually need copyrighted data to train AI to compete with artists. The argument over copyright is interesting but kind of a sideshow. We already know that copyright protection is not a prerequisite for creativity - as it currently stands copyright only protects the rich. The real reason why AI is going to kill DA/NG/SF/GH/etc is because of spam. Let's say, for every piece a 100% human artist can do with no AI assistance, another artist using AI as a tool can make three. They start off with a prompt in DALL-E, SD, or Midjourney, and then tweak the output with prompts and so on to get exactly what they want quicker. Now imagine a non-artist using the same technology. They don't care about the touchups. They just want to churn out lots of pieces all at once. So that would be nine times more output compared to the unassisted human - three times three. And there are plenty of them doing this, because they all watched the same video on how you can hustle T-shirt and poster stores by submitting lots of AI-generated pieces. The reason why you are seeing art sites ban AI art is purely a matter of practicality. Many of those spaces are able to provide free promotion to people who post quality content because quality is itself a limited resource. Now the human trying to make their magnum opus - AI or no - is going to be buried under lots of low-effort garbage from zombie modernist grifters.
• Julesman 4y ago
  We are going to be seeing so much of this. It is sad. Start up culture at times seems to insist that all progress must be good, as though progress itself will be thwarted by reflection or honesty. Something is lost and something is gained, but that doesn't make the losses painless or irrelevant. We can be pragmatic and have empathy at the same time. What I don't think we should do is act like every change is inherently good. Perhaps something valuable will be lost to efficiency and the bottom line. Hopefully something will also be gained. Let's not be in a hurry to declare implications. And let's try to be helpful.
  • whateveracct 4y ago
    You can still do the old ways. I'm still gonna keep drawing and stuff, myself. I don't really see how the AI actually helps me accomplish my goals on an art or coding front as a gamedev. Where the goal is "make something meaningful and beautiful." I don't like to shout "philistine" or "luddite" but it feels like all the people excited for these tools were tasteless to begin with and already weren't producing works that meet my bar of consumption. I guess we already knew that about the AAA game industry, for instance. I guess it always pays to have taste - doubly in an AI-oriented world. The old ways aren't going anywhere imo.
    • spoiler 4y ago
      I'm a developer and a hobby artist. So I could br a bit off on the art front. For development: it's helped me adopt new libraries a bit quicker. It also helped with generating a first draft of documentation/comments, or to help me iterate on the phrasing of some stuff I over explained, or not explained well enough. It's kinda made me a better writer as a result, since I learned phrasing techniques that I previously didn't. It's helped me with boring stuff like converting data type syntax between languages. It's good at doing autocompletion of lines or short snippets. This is a godsend in systems programming, where you type a lot. It also helped me go from "blank page" projects or task by generating the boilerplate or scaffolding. It's often times wrong (and sometimes in funny ways), but it's allowed me to focus on the problem domain rather than the supporting and often boring grunt work. I think an artist probably has similar situations on the job. It wouldn't be a job of everything about it was rainbows and unicorns. Sometimes artists do boring stuff. Why not get that out of the way. Or if working with really poor requirements on something that's not super interesting to them, maybe they can do rapid reference generation or brainstorming through the theses AI tools. Or you realised you want to change the colour palette for a part of the scene. Instead of manually fiddling with thr the selection tools, and curves/HSL/filters, just ask the AI to retouching it. Then correct a bit, since it probably won't get it right. So just quicker iterations. I don't think it necessarily hinders the creative process
• 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
  I imagine portrait painters and later photographers all experienced a similar transition. They had built their livelihoods around a certain visual asset generation technique, and a new technology disrupted that process and pushed them into the nice-to-have luxury corner. The same train will come for prompt engineers eventually too in the usual cycle.
  • barbariangrunge 4y ago
    The term prompt “engineer” is tedious to professional engineers everywhere
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • riwsky 4y ago
      “Softerware Engineer”
• pkdpic 4y ago
  This is a tragic disappointment a lot of (if not most (if not an overwhelming majority (if not literally all))) artists experience at some point early or late in their professional careers. I taught art for a long time and I would always try to frame this inevitable experience as an important moment of growth. When you have to form a deeper relationship to your creative work and think strategically about how you want to support yourself long term. There's no getting around it, it's really hard seeing what this is doing to visual artists. The few of us that could find good work doing what we love...
  • 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
    What's an analogy in the software world to this sort of tragic disappointment? Going from building fun videogame side projects to having to crank out dozens of over-engineered B2B SaaS microservices, for the sake of job security, for yet another sales workflow optimization tool?
    • pkdpic 4y ago
      I too am anxiously trying to imagine what the software dev version of this will be... Sweating it out at every sprint meeting and stand-up...
    • LesZedCB 4y ago
      yes. instead of spending weeks thinking about and designing some sweet algorithm Knuth himself would be proud of, you write the same CRUD app with the same design patterns.
      • Aeolun 4y ago
        > the same CRUD app with the same design patterns The same —hilariously inefficient— design patterns.
        • lowbloodsugar 4y ago
          That's the change in perspective. They are inefficient from a CPU point of view. They are efficient from the perspective of "churning out more shit for less". So it's the same, soul destroying effect as for artistic professions.
• sjaak 4y ago
  What happens to us when AI becomes better than us at every mental task? Ignoring the economic factors, what does that mean for our self worth? If we know it’s easier to ask a machine to do it, will we stop doing everything? Can we reframe our purpose and just be content living? (Above quote from: https://twitter.com/iamharaldur/status/1639368422763970562 https://twitter.com/iamharaldur/status/1639368422763970562)
  • pharmakom 4y ago
    We will become a leisure society. Honestly that sounds great to me.
    • tgv 4y ago
      We will become a terribly impoverished society, with the unemployed fighting over scraps of food. There is no realistic path towards "a leisure" society, save for a world revolution.
    • medvezhenok 4y ago
      Last time that technological revolution threatened this many people's livelihoods we got rise of Hitler and WWII (propelled by the petite-bourgeoisie), and I imagine that this time we won't get away without a conflict of a large caliber either (fighting over the distribution of the AI spoils)
• qwick23 4y ago
  Sounds like viral marketing campaign in flavor of Midjourney
• ummonk 4y ago
  The issue here is that you have to use text prompts (because the overwhelming bulk of training data out there available for AI is in the form of text). Ideally you should be able to sculpt and rig and paint manually via AI tools - the tweaks you do to a sculpture should be inputs to an AI system that can give you an intuitive and responsive system that replaces current procedural generation.
  • tstrimple 4y ago
    You absolutely can use these tools for this. There are stable diffusion plugins for photoshop that allow far more control over what is generated where. https://youtu.be/nnyjQkgccnA https://youtu.be/nnyjQkgccnA
• causality0 4y ago
  Man is it hard not to feel a little schadenfreude. For decades the white collars watched the blue collars lose their jobs to machines and said "well I'm so sorry for you, but you really should've realized the purpose of a human being is to use their mind and create, they can never take that from us". This is going to do for art what YouTube did for video production: obliterate the grind. Now what counts is your genuine creativity, your inspiration.
  • eropple 4y ago
    > This is going to do for art what YouTube did for video production: obliterate the grind. Now what counts is your genuine creativity, your inspiration. These two sentences are so violently at odds as to be comical. YouTube is nothing but the grind. It is an unending content mill and if you stop, you may literally never regain even the precarious position you'd managed so far. Creativity? Inspiration? It's time served above everything else.
  • hooverd 4y ago
    If you want to make it on YouTube, and not just have a channel outside your day job, you basically have to mold yourself and your content to be perfectly palatable to the recommendation algorithm.
  • CatWChainsaw 4y ago
    The scahdenfreude is going to be off the charts in a few years when these "tools" get so advanced that cease making people more productive and cause a massive loss of jobs, and no replacement, and no post-capitalist utopia. The people who were so sanguine about adapting to change are going to realize they were made promises that never stood a chance in hell of being kept.
• quadcore 4y ago
  Midjourney is an illegal product and it's easy to prove. Adobe did a way better job at this btw, protecting artists by simply making a legal product. The way a good lawyer is gonna make a shitload of money is by asking one simple question: who's the artist? Say you generate a picture with Midjourney, who's the artist? Not you, definitely not the AI as it's not a person, so the closest artists you can find is the ones who made the pictures in the training set. Done. Hang tight buddy.
• jeeeb 4y ago
  I suspect this isn’t much different from the direction software development is headed. You can either find satisfaction in the process or the outcome. The process can already be fairly mundane and will become more so with time. A couple of other random thoughts: 1. Currently, these things work best (really need) an operator experienced in the craft. Ironically by eliminating entry level positions they may make it hard for new developers to gain that experience and enter the industry. Instead the entire industry may become one of increasingly aged SEs prompting LLMs to update code, and (occasionally) auditing the output. Somewhat akin to the COBOL developers of today. 2. If we really do get AGI then the marginal value of creative output (be it software or 3d art or otherwise) will be driven to zero. It will be so cheap to produce that competitors will easily arise.
  • anon7725 4y ago
    > 1. Currently, these things work best (really need) an operator experienced in the craft. I guess the question is: how long does the intermediate state of super-powered developers last?
• scotty79 4y ago
  This reads as if floor sweeper is complaining that a company bought a machine to do the sweeping. And now he has to ride the machine all day and it took all the joy of his job because he really liked the hand motions and walking around and was very good at it. His colleague doesn't mind and is no longer slightly worse at sweeping than him. And boss sees it as a huge money saver because floors are vast.
  • tgv 4y ago
    More money for the boss, less (jobs and thus) money for the rest. Such a wonderful prospect.
    • scotty79 4y ago
      That's argument against capitalism not against automation.
      • tgv 4y ago
        As I wrote elsewhere: save for a world revolution. Capitalism is a given, it's not going to go away. The degree swings a bit, but right now the tendency is still pretty "right" wing, so you've got to see the application of AI in that context. Anything else is at best day-dreaming.
        • scotty79 4y ago
          > Capitalism [...], it's not going to go away. And the automation is? We were getting rid of labor that can be automated in monarchy and in feudalism. Capitalism is no different. Future with different organization of production and sharing of its results is imaginable. Future in which most people refuse to pursue automation is not.
• npteljes 4y ago
  I'm not an artist, and I don't mind the general direction the AI is going, but I feel for the people who are impacted like this. It must feel like shit to be replaced in such a way.
• muskmusk 4y ago
  Your job, no matter who you are, is always to please the customer. If you focus on that then you will be fine. But if your focus is a more selfish one then you could be exposed.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• psnehanshu 4y ago
  Not related to the topic: For a change nerds are linking to www.reddit.com rather than old.reddit.com
• Havoc 4y ago
  Thought the top comment is insight too re the whole AI thing: >In a society that judges a persons worth purely on their economic contribution it's going to be a disaster.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• tlocke 4y ago
  We've created a society where there are such things as 'jobs' and unless you're rich, you need a job to support yourself and maybe a family. I think this model of society worked reasonably well for a while, but with AI we're coming to the end of that era. In the next era we'll probably live like aristocrats, but instead of the work being done by servants, it'll be done by AI. Back to the case of the 3D artist, in this new era she won't need to have a job to support herself, and she will have the freedom to create her art as she wishes.
  • lvoudour 4y ago
    This next era may take 100s of years though, AI taking up physical labor is still science fiction (and I'm not fully sold on the utopia angle). She'll need to support herself much sooner than that, let's be realistic
  • throwawaylinux 4y ago
    We've needed "jobs" to support ourselves since we descended from the trees. Actually before that too. "Society" came about because we invented tools and techniques to make our jobs easier so people could spend more time on different things. "AI" is some more steps down that same path. > In the next era we'll probably live like aristocrats, but instead of the work being done by servants, it'll be done by AI. Not in the way you imagine. We live like aristocrats today. We live in vast mansions that have hot running water, electricity, refrigeration, heating and cooling, lighting, we have servants bring us gluttonous feasts whenever we like, we careen around in our horseless carriages and flying machines. We laze around many hours of the day wasting time on frivolities like watching TV, playing computer games, reading books, drinking and taking drugs, etc. We have armies of doctors and security at our disposal if we should break a leg or even get a sniffle. So we live better than kings did 200 years ago. Life might get better for the average commoner in another 200 years. There will still be the haves and have nots though. People with a lot of wealth won't want to share it with others, and people with less will be envious of those with more, that's the constant in the human condition. Nobody with the robots is going to give money to a bunch of hippies to laze around. If they want a piece of it they'll have to either work to create it themselves or to take it by force. Either way it won't come for free.
• testHNac 4y ago
  Reading some of the comments about coding and AI got me thinking. Can modern AI come up with new Javscript libraries, Open source projects, Browser Specifications etc The new way of doing things that improve things. When most people start using AI to make their work easier. Then very few people will develop the competency to create new things, innovate. At some point will that cause progress to slow down ?
  • pharmakom 4y ago
    It’s gonna be tough as a junior dev in the near future. I’m very grateful that I managed to upskill so much before all this happens. In the worst case, I’ll have a crappy job directing and debugging AI output… but in the best case, we have reached AGI.
    • Claude_Shannon 4y ago
      Yeah... How will one be able to find a job when AI will do way better than junior? Of course, seniors will be better. But interns? Why would you pay for lesser quality?
• nbzso 4y ago
  I do work in tech. Almost 25 years. As a traditionally trained artist, my advantage over the years always was the knowledge of composition, color and my drawing skills when producing the visual part of the products. I focused early in my company (2005) on UX and UCD processes, and with the time realized that people don't care about craftsmanship or maximizing the quality. We are approaching a time of generative design. Personalization of UX by data based generative interfaces. So even the flow and journey mapping will be automated soon (UX researchers, hello). For me, this is the end of an era of innovation driven by human creativity. You will have a data scientist and secretary, which will prompt all day the "boss" vision. A.I. art is not art. I will give you a simple example: Who will be the creator of the famous David sculpture? Michelangelo or the rich patron who gave the description of the task? According to the definition of A.I. "art" the patron is the artist. So in this scenario, the art becomes a commodity generated without human touch and personal expression. Just a synthetic membrane of average results trained on stolen data and genius intellectual property laundering machine. Personally, my decision is to capitalize the remains of an industry and detach myself from any form of metaverse interactions. I started to paint recently again and don't give any F* about commercial viability of the process. If people of the future want to live in A.I. induced corporate coma, so be it.
  • jstummbillig 4y ago
    > I started to paint recently again and don't give any F* about commercial viability of the process. That is an affordance a lot of people have to be granted now.
  • fintechie 4y ago
    > A.I. art is not art. IMO you can certainly output art, code, etc from AIs. AI as a new kind of productivity tool, a very powerful one.
    • nbzso 4y ago
      Just yesterday, I gave the ChatGPT prompts to generate Midjourney prompts. It transformed a simple sentence of "Portrait of beautiful woman on the beach with yellow dress." to the specific output of prompts with different lenses and lighting setups generated with astonishing results. My input in the process was minimal. No compositional skills or artistic taste. Powerful tool? Yes. Productivity is not an Artistic measure. Transitional value and personal expression is. But hey, be productive while you can.
• fintechie 4y ago
  I feel bad for people reluctant to embrace the tech. It feels like refusing to adopt email, the web, mobile apps, and so on. Why not use it to your advantage? Truth is, it's going to become a must for many companies very soon, or they'll be unable to compete. Maybe there will be some niches where human artists thrive, but it's uncertain at this stage.
  • dtdynasty 4y ago
    I didn't interpret their article as reluctance to embrace technology. They understandably liked 3d modeling using the current tools and was able to make a living doing something fun. It's a rare occurrence and sadly innovations in technology took away the joyful part of their job. If it was not a tech innovation removing the joy from their job they would probably still be upset about it.
• antirez 4y ago
  "I don’t want to make “art” that is the result of scraped internet content". I guess he/she was ok with creating "art" that was heavily based on other things he/she saw on other games and on the internet. Artists reasoning in this absurd way should ask themselves: I'm ok if a law passes that makes it illegal to get inspiration for other copyrighted work?
  • deely3 4y ago
    There is a difference. 1. Corporation scraped art for AI to learn without permission. 2. Corporation own resulting AI model, and don't want to share it. Only sell the results.
    • antirez 4y ago
      Both arguments are wrong, in my opinion. 1. Artists getting inspiration from all the other works (payed by others) also don't ask any permission. If you want to create a game with a monster heavily inspired to Alines move monsters, you don't need to ask, nor you will be sued. 2. Artists are also against Stable Diffusion.
• moltar 4y ago
  I wonder if horse buggy drivers had the same sentiment when cars came out?
  • konart 4y ago
    I doubt it. Kind of. The reddit use did not loose the job or money. What was lost is motivation. Now it's just a "job". Without any spark.
• andrewstuart 4y ago
  Maybe it's a bit like professional software development where developers no longer get to create products, they just are code monkeys that complete tickets that are specified to the Nth degree and there's no creativity or fun and indeed if you do anything except what's on the ticket then you'll have to answer for it. If you are a developer who loves the art and craft of creation then you have to do that at home. Work is just being a cog in an agile machine.
• dm319 4y ago
  There's no doubt that this artist has lost something as a result of AI (the pleasure and enjoyment of their job). But we should also ask if we are at risk of losing something as a society.
• iamphilrae 4y ago
  The rise of website builders like Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify has drastically changed the web design and development industry. As a co-founder and lead developer of a small design/development team, I loved my job and was passionate about creating beautiful and functional websites. However, as more and more clients turned to these DIY platforms, I found it increasingly difficult to justify our higher prices. While our work was more sophisticated and better optimized for SEO, clients often didn't see the value in paying £10,000 or more for it. Ultimately, I realized that our trade had become commoditized, and I made the difficult decision to sell the business and move on. I transitioned to a new role as a Product Manager, and over the years, I've climbed the ranks to become a CTO at a scaling startup. Although I miss the thrill of being a developer and creating websites from scratch, I've found new challenges and fulfillment in my current position. If you're facing a similar situation, I'd suggest exploring other avenues to keep your passion for development alive. Consider taking on side projects as a hobby, collaborating with industry friends to start an indie project, or even teaching others about web development. Just be sure to carefully review any non-compete agreements with your current employer before pursuing any new ventures. Remember, although your job may have changed, your passion for creating great websites can still thrive in new ways.
  • pdc56 4y ago
    Curious - on a scale out of 10, how much of that was written by ChatGPT? No offense intended - if the answer is zero, my apologies
    • precompute 4y ago
      I don't think it was written by a LLM, the words have a warmth that generated text lacks. Plus you can tell it's written as if it's half-spoken.
      • iLoveOncall 4y ago
        > the words have a warmth that generated text lacks Reminds me of my philosophy teacher in high-school that gave me the best grade of the year and praised how "personal" it felt, for an essay I had bought online for 3 euros. The irony of it still makes me chuckle 15 years later.
• Netcob 4y ago
  > I wanted to create form In 3D space, sculpt, create. With my own creativity. With my own hands. I think this is difficult to get over within a few years, let alone overnight. I can sympathize as a programmer - only very recently did I notice that I can finally implement a feature or create a new program and have it work on the first try. That took years of practice (for me at least) and I feel like I've really learned a "craft". On the other hand, as a kid I first got into programming because I wanted to create computer games. And the only time when I actually did that consistently was before I knew any programming languages, just point-and-click tools specifically made for creating games. I eventually studied CS, on my way to making games got sidetracked by learning OpenGL and graphics programming, interned at a gamedev company where I did more graphics programming and learned that this is not the industry for me even though (or maybe because) I love games. Now I've been doing backend programming for a few years where I've been way more concerned with data and architectures than I am with what it's actually for. I feel bad for people who love the process more than they love achieving a goal. Sometimes I really love coding, solving little challenges, optimizing something, the feeling of having build something basically by meticulously translating an idea into something a computer can understand in every detail. But sometimes it gets really boring. Writing yet another REST controller. Copying and mapping the same data object. Handling errors. It feels like I'm solving the same problem over and over and over again. Then I think about what I would be doing if I didn't feel like it was too much work to make it happen. I have an idea for a game that's currently impossible to do unless you have a team or at least one extremely experienced and multi-talented game developer with no job. I have several ideas for web services that I could figure out, but don't have time for. Finally at my job, my team currently has absolutely no way of properly dealing with a decade of technical debt. With AI, I can see myself actually making these things happen, as long as I'm willing to give up some control over how it's done. Which comes with a little bit of alienation, unfortunately. Maybe that's how older programmers felt when switching from punch cards to assembly, from assembly to compiled languages, and from those to interpreted languages. Obviously the step to AI will be bigger than that. Same with artists: I'm sure many people were discouraged by not holding a brush anymore, or molding something with their hands. Some just love the process of bringing an idea into existence, others just want it to happen by any means necessary. Personally, my way of dealing with this will be focusing on seeing technology as a means to an end again, which it always has been. Falling in love with a specific tool is not a good idea in an era where changes happen faster literally every day.
• throwawayasz 4y ago
  I hated mine and eventually quit working for life because of a stupid CEO and inexperienced coworkers. Copy and paste what everyone was good at over there. Luckily i could afford to retire early. I feel sorry for those who got stuck in jobs
• vermooten 4y ago
  I remember the 90s when manual typesetting and page layout was replaced with Quark Xpress, and when analogue phot retouching was replaced with Photoshop. Lots of highly skilled people suddenly out of work - the ones who didn't retrain to use the new tech. Wasn't overnight but felt like a revolution. Then of course magazine publishing lost out to the internet. I would love to spend my days making stained glass windows, or as a dry stone-wall builder in the Yorkshire Dales. TS, there's no way to make a living in either.
• jeppester 4y ago
  This very well sums up the anxiety I have about how this is going to affect programming. That any creativity and understanding will be sucked out and replaced with prompt engineering. I still think you will have to be a good developer to understand if the solution you get is good, but is that even going to matter when you can just ask again and try again? I think there will be lots of code bases that no-one really understands, but that it won't matter much. All of this is powered by work done by real programmers who are not getting a dime for their effort. That just seems completely unfair to me, and even more so when already insanely rich corporations like MS only stand to gain from it. I'm not sure I want to be part of it to be honest. It feels dirty and wrong as it works now. Laws might be able to change that, but with a whole industry of giant corporations ready to fight any such laws, I'm not optimistic.
  • mattlondon 4y ago
    It will probably end up being more "test driven development"-like. Write your tests/expectations and the tooling automatically prompts/writes the code to meet the tests.
    • code_witch_sam 4y ago
      why not have a system to write the tests as well?
      • emoII 4y ago
        Won't the prompt itself be the test? TDD is literally just providing an expected output on a given input, before implementing the functionality. The prompt we give AIs follows the same pattern, "I have a data that looks like ___, visualize it in a graph that ____"
    • Trasmatta 4y ago
      That sounds pretty miserable, because test writing is one of the least fun aspects of my job
      • 4y ago
• mattlondon 4y ago
  I feel like we are at a bit of an industrial revolution type stage here - lots of old jobs that were previously done by hand (spinning yarn, weaving, making bricks etc) are about to be industrialised and automated. I don't think it will happen overnight, but perhaps a decade or two and a lot of jobs/industries will be irrevocably changed. I am surprisingly sanguine about it. I think there will always be a need to understand what needs to be built, even if it is the AI that is actually coding it up. SWEs will probably end up in more of a supervisory role, responsible for ensuring that the requirements are suitable for automated code generation. Think TDD, but with AI writing the non-code bits. Interesting times.
• ajani 4y ago
  Making art of any form is about you, not about the art. When you learn to paint well you are creating you, the piece is just a side effect. Getting good at something affects the way you see the world. It creates meaning in you. The one sided focus on the finished piece is the outcome of our culture valuing the art more than the creation of the artist. (The creation of you, not your creation.)
• erikstarck 4y ago
  Probably for all the unimportant NPCs running around in a game, AI does a good enough job. But for the main characters and the plot, I suspect a human touch is still needed. Climb up the value chain. If you're cranking out monsters in volume, you're at the bottom.
  • thuuuomas 4y ago
    > I suspect a human touch is still needed This is the motivated reasoning of a comfortable person. AI will eat the Protagonist Jobs too, sooner rather than later.
• jongjong 4y ago
  That's the risk of participating in a completely new industry... You don't know how long it's going to last; it has no track record. It reminds me of my own career as a software developer. I self-taught myself coding since I was 14 in 2004. I'm from a relatively small town and nobody in my family had a tech background or even knew anyone with a tech background. So it was quite a stretch/unlikely for me to become a developer. I would spent my lunch breaks in the school library; sometimes coding by myself on library computers. My dad thought I was wasting my time. Back then, the only people making any money in tech in my town were developing websites for local businesses and it wasn't very profitable. My dad wanted me to be a lawyer. I feel like I did many things right; I got into web development early (while most of the jobs were still for programming for desktop PCs), I was an early adopter of Node.js, I went to university and did a course on AI/Machine learning. I launched a popular open source project. But somehow it never worked out for me financially; I was never accepted into any fast-growing company, my popular project was big among startups but didn't gain enough traction in the corporate sphere (where it could have been monetized). Now AI is threatening the entire profession. I think my dad was right, I should have been a lawyer and done software development as a hobby. The only silver lining that I cling onto is that my main interest has been software architecture and higher level systems/infrastructure thinking. So far, AI hasn't shown itself to be able to effectively solve higher level software architecture/design problems. It's great at answering questions, but not at asking (the right) questions which is what software architecture is about.
  • lucidguppy 4y ago
    Didn't software replace a huge chunk of billable hours?
• elforce002 4y ago
  The discussion is creating 3 groups: First group is sure AI will be an enabler and it won't replace them; The second group is saying AI won't replace them at least in the near future (1~10 years); Then we have the third group, which is basically the sentiment the op is living rn: AI is taking away their hopes, dreams, and livelihood. Now, I think we'll see the strongest counterculture in human history against AI and the biggest social unrest to date. I'm talking about massive protests , massive regulations, etc... just because no one, specially the government, is prepared for what's coming.
  • habibur 4y ago
    And then industrial revolution didn't take out jobs, rather created more. So did computers in the 80s and 90s. I remember typesetters in our locality were protesting in the 80s that computers were taking off their jobs. They started something like "burn the computers" movement. More people were later employed as composers than there were typesetters.
    • TeMPOraL 4y ago
      Those typesetters were likely right, tho. Sure, Industrial Revolution and computer revolution ended up creating more jobs than they took out - but what everyone conveniently doesn't mention is, those new jobs went to different people. These kinds of transitions are large scale wealth redistribution. Your random typesetter 20 years into their career, with experience, good pay, and whole life built around economic conditions they spent those decades working hard to achieve, is not going to jump into a role of senior offset printer specialist, or DTP team manager. They're going to become a junior designer at best, most likely fall out of industry and into a junior whatever role. With commensurate drop in salary. If you're over 30, imagine dropping down to whatever you earned when you were 20, and tell me that people protesting automation don't have an argument. And remember: it's only your career that resets; your health and obligations and remaining years to live do not.
    • Xenoamorphous 4y ago
      Sure, as a whole the industrial revolution might have created more jobs. But what about individuals? Are we expecting some dude in his fifties whose job is going to be taken away by AI to switch careers just like that? That stuff is hard enough when someone is in their thirties. And in my country the unemployment rate is already 13%, there’s hundreds of candidates for any decent job opening.
• lysecret 4y ago
  Fascinating, this reminds me a lot of a conversation I had about 4 years ago with a translator, they were working at a translation company which just introduced AI. And their initial implementation of AI looked like this: We give you an initial translation and then you modify it. The thing is this turned the translator from a "creator" to an "editor" and they absolutely hated it. Back then, the power was in the hand of the labor (not the company) so the company actually modified it in a way such that it was completing and recommending things for you but gave you the control of the whole thing. This is much easier to imagine with text, but there might be a way to give people the creative control, even with these new tools.
• drumhead 4y ago
  It's like what happened to cinema musicians after sound on films was developed. They'll still need people like this but not as many. But then that's the nature of a technologically driven society, at any moment your job could be obsolete.
• a_bonobo 4y ago
  >The thing is, we both were not at the same level, quality-wise. My work was always a tad better, in shape and texture, rendering… I always was very sure I wouldn’t loose my job, because I produce slightly better quality. One thing I had to learn the hard way in programming: it doesn't matter how good my code is or how modern the framework is, what counts is results delivered to the customer. Any newbie can outperform me in that regard.
• bradwood 4y ago
  There is "art" and there is "design". It feels like OP might be confusing the two. The latter is about creative expression within the confines of constraints like time, money, function, etc. The former is not. Doing graphic design work at a commercial enterprise is a creative endeavour constrained by commercial realities. Perhaps the OP just needs to accept that he is working in the real world. They should probably find a creative outlet that is creating art in addition to their design day job.
• fauxpause_ 4y ago
  I would be interested in hiring a 3D artist that uses mid journey to go fast. Where can I find such people?
• jrochkind1 4y ago
  The dominant opinion in this thread seems to be that OP has no reason to be sad that they can no longer get a job doing what they love, because... someone else will probably get a job doing something else instead?
• doubtfuluser 4y ago
  I think this is the curse but also the opportunity of AI. OP can now do the same work they did before in just 2-3 days. Could they now open their own studio and offer services for many customers on their own instead of working for one company? What will happen with indie games or indie software? Suddenly one person who is good at inventing ideas will be able to develop whole games, with music, graphics being generated by AI, coding heavily supported by AI (not _yet_ fully taken over), marketing, etc also supported by Ai. My hope is that this will result in a lot more new startups that will also create a lot more jobs. Maybe the ultimate losers will be big-corporations who can’t build these large models on their own and are unwilling to call external services for fear of their data, or who are simply too slow to adapt. I often think that what is happening right now is actually a prototype example of what is described in the “innovator’s dilemma” disruption.
• cuddlyogre 4y ago
  There is something to be said about how dangerous it is to offload your entire workflow to entities that you are competing with. Or have unpredictable morals. Say you start relying on some AI to build all your applications or generate all of your art, or copy. What if you start developing something that competes with the business interests of the entity that owns the AI? At that point, that entity is incentivized to lock you out of their system, leaving you with a project that cannot be finished because no one in your organization knows how to develop that kind of project. Or, say you are developing an application that helps some marginalized group or is working to expose some kind of corruption. But, as it turns out, the owner of the AI profits from that marginalization or corruption in some way. So they lock you out and blacklist you in some way. When it is all said and done, AI will be owned and operated by the same people that own everything else in the tech industry - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple. Are you really content with only being allowed to express yourself in the way they deem appropriate?
  • ngngngng 4y ago
    > There is something to be said about how dangerous it is to offload your entire workflow to entities that you are competing with. Or have unpredictable morals. Yep, this is why I stopped using Github Copilot. But now we're at the point where if I don't use it I'm going to be far less productive than my coworkers. I'm forced to use this thing that I truly believe is going to take my job within 5-10 years max.
    • cuddlyogre 4y ago
      I just can't wrap my head around the time saving thing. Do your coworkers really understand what it is that they are putting into the codebase? If not, that's terrifying and recipe for disaster. If they do understand it, they have to be taking the time to review it to ensure is right. Which cannot save so much more time that it's worth the risk.
• MacroChip 4y ago
  The more specific the source you draw joy from is, the more precarious you have always been in life. This is not a judgement.
• DubiousPusher 4y ago
  Perhaps the most wrongly maligned group in the history of the world were the Luddites. A chaticature of the Luddites comes down to us. It is of a people who would deny progress which was obviously inevitable so that they didn't have to change. They are cast as inflexible, lazy, stupid, belligerent. But when we read the speeches of the Luddite leaders, more than anything else they talk about "liberty". Luddites spoke and wrote about the dangers to their liberty created by wage pressure from power looms. But much more, they spoke and wrote about the danger to their liberty posed by moving away from handloom weaving in homes and small shops towards weaving with power looms in a factory system. What they resisted more than anything was the destruction of their autonomy, their subjection to abusive floor managers and the grinding dullness of repetitive machine labor. Programmers have been facing this down already for some time. As full-stack engineering, excellent automation tools and powerful APIs have proliferated, we don't often get to go deep into some problem. Algorithmic design and development, which is a huge pleasure of mine has faded to the background of gaining a shallow understanding of many technologies, plumbing them and futsing with their numerous configurations. AI is already accelerating this for my work and I am struggling to find it not dismal. It is no surprise that now that the tools exist to comoditize art, the work is following a similar trajectory. AI should be a unifying event for tech labor. Not to resist it entirely but to ensure in whatever future develops that we have some say in how work can remain enriching and dignified alongside the growth of these tools.