6 ms·

It didn't take the job in the sense that the OP is still employed. It changed the job into something that barely resembles what the OP was hired to do. It's not

It didn't take the job in the sense that the OP is still employed. It changed the job into something that barely resembles what the OP was hired to do. It's not quite constructive dismissal, but many people choose fields for reasons of maximizing income. It's hard to stay motivated doing something you hate, especially when a week ago your job had you doing something you love. And that says nothing about the OP's ethical quandry about IP laundering. I might be too cynical, but given the reported productivity gains, it's quite possible the company decides they can do with a single artist. Or if less skilled artists can generate similar results with suitable AI prompts, it'll probably drive wages down, making the OP expendable. I'd imagine at the very least it sets a ceiling on advancement.

orbital-decay 4y ago
The reality is that an artist in a mobile games company is hired for their technical skills, with very little creative freedom. The real artist is usually the art director or a similar position responsible for stylistic/creative/conceptual decisions. If your job is mostly technical, be ready to re-learn and reshape your skills when your tool goes the way of cel animation. I personally had to do this at least three times in 25 years, not entirely from scratch of course, but I had to relearn the vast majority of my skills. And I think I'll need to do more of it to stay relevant. So to me it's pretty normal. The work of a creative professional is to deliver meaning. If you can't separate this from your tools and are only able to enjoy one specific tool, you have to question yourself what you're doing in the field. (yes, I'm also being too cynical)
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  I personally had to do this at least three times in 25 years [...] So to me it's pretty normal Very relatable, but it seems unwise to just consider it normal. If you find yourself having to retool 3 times within 25 months, you'll be well on the way to burning out.
  - orbital-decay 4y ago
    25 years, not months; it wasn't that hard. It wasn't just retooling though - aerospace engineering to SE in gamedev, to the management in the unrelated creative area, to ML.
    - anigbrowl 4y ago
      Yes, I know you said 25 years. I was trying to point out that with the accelerating technological capabilities, you could find that need to retool happening faster and faster.
- HervalFreire 4y ago
  You're not being cynical. You're being overly optimistic here about creative professionals. The creative professional IS a target for replacement. What LLMs do best is specifically what the "creative professional" does. Better than coding or mathematics, LLMs excel at creative English text. This is because creative output is trivial when compared with technical skills. I don't think the "creative professional" will get replaced though. Because usually the task is so trivial that positions like these largely only exist because of politics. You convince people around you and yourself that your "creativity" has no peer. It amounts to this: I want a photo-realistic animation of a cowboy with blue skin with a laser cannon riding a unicycle through the grand canyon with a dwarf chasing him. <<This sentence is trivial to come up with, ANYONE can come up with thousands a variations and tweak the sentence in various ways. No special talent needed here. A creative director simply comes up with high level instructions (like the one above) THEN the ultra hard part is making that high level instruction a reality. That is HARD and as of now it looks like both skills are being replaced by AI. But like I said, the directors' position is in actuality largely political. Thus his position is safe even though the actuality of what he does is EASY and therefore a prime target for replacement.
  - orbital-decay 4y ago
    > A creative director simply comes up with high level instructions (like the one above) THEN the ultra hard part is making that high level instruction a reality. That is HARD and as of now it looks like both skills are being replaced by AI. This is the opposite of what I see in reality right now. The hard part is to make the artists do exactly what you want, down to the subtle but meaningful details. That happens because the high-level instructions don't have enough capacity to deliver the full meaning. This is the same with generative models: extremely hard to control with the "prompt engineering" gimmick, it's only fine when you are OK with random output. Besides, they are purely functional and lack feedback mechanisms the creative director usually employ with artists. That's why people are trying to make techniques more complex - large animation houses experiment with training their own model architectures and software. This is the way 3D CGI was born - simple at first, and yes it got plenty of doomposting at first (we are getting replaced by computers!), until it was clear that the field becomes extremely technical and complex, so it even has dozens of specializations inside it. All entertainment is ultimately based on novelty, as human brain is really good at distilling meaning from the ocean of information. If you start with little meaning (your example - "a cowboy with blue skin with a laser cannon riding a unicycle through the grand canyon with a dwarf chasing him"), people get bored - no matter how much randomized artsy-looking stuff you add around it. If you think that AI can generate all meaning that is relevant to people, I don't buy it, as it doesn't have the same training material. It's trained on the result and is forced to reverse engineer what moves people; reverse engineering is a fundamentally more costly and opaque task.
- spoiler 4y ago
  I've had to do something similar in a much shorter career as well (about 10 years or so). I think the rate of change is much quicker these days too. It was still always within the tech field, but for better or worse my career has been incredibly diverse. Not sure if I'll be able to keep up when I'm older (entering my 30ies now) or not, but so far I've always seen it as personal growth opportunities.
linkjuice4all 4y ago
Jobs change and hopefully peoples’ skillset changes and gets better when they do. This job was different 5 years ago and this entire animation process would be unrecognizable 50 years ago. Tweening didn’t ruin animation it just lowered the barrier of entry. This too will lower the barrier of entry so our future will be more high quality animation. Some of it will be lasting and some of it will be appreciated for mere seconds for throw away content such as ads. Maybe when everyone gets home from their boring prompt engineering jobs they can go back to hand rolling animation stacks or whatever other workflow is currently getting destroyed by AI for the “fun” of it.
- 7speter 4y ago
  Everyone isn’t going to be lucky enough to have a prompt engineering job

orbital-decay 4y ago

The reality is that an artist in a mobile games company is hired for their technical skills, with very little creative freedom. The real artist is usually the art director or a similar position responsible for stylistic/creative/conceptual decisions. If your job is mostly technical, be ready to re-learn and reshape your skills when your tool goes the way of cel animation. I personally had to do this at least three times in 25 years, not entirely from scratch of course, but I had to relearn the vast majority of my skills. And I think I'll need to do more of it to stay relevant. So to me it's pretty normal. The work of a creative professional is to deliver meaning. If you can't separate this from your tools and are only able to enjoy one specific tool, you have to question yourself what you're doing in the field. (yes, I'm also being too cynical)

anigbrowl 4y ago
I personally had to do this at least three times in 25 years [...] So to me it's pretty normal Very relatable, but it seems unwise to just consider it normal. If you find yourself having to retool 3 times within 25 months, you'll be well on the way to burning out.
- orbital-decay 4y ago
  25 years, not months; it wasn't that hard. It wasn't just retooling though - aerospace engineering to SE in gamedev, to the management in the unrelated creative area, to ML.
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    Yes, I know you said 25 years. I was trying to point out that with the accelerating technological capabilities, you could find that need to retool happening faster and faster.
HervalFreire 4y ago
You're not being cynical. You're being overly optimistic here about creative professionals. The creative professional IS a target for replacement. What LLMs do best is specifically what the "creative professional" does. Better than coding or mathematics, LLMs excel at creative English text. This is because creative output is trivial when compared with technical skills. I don't think the "creative professional" will get replaced though. Because usually the task is so trivial that positions like these largely only exist because of politics. You convince people around you and yourself that your "creativity" has no peer. It amounts to this: I want a photo-realistic animation of a cowboy with blue skin with a laser cannon riding a unicycle through the grand canyon with a dwarf chasing him. <<This sentence is trivial to come up with, ANYONE can come up with thousands a variations and tweak the sentence in various ways. No special talent needed here. A creative director simply comes up with high level instructions (like the one above) THEN the ultra hard part is making that high level instruction a reality. That is HARD and as of now it looks like both skills are being replaced by AI. But like I said, the directors' position is in actuality largely political. Thus his position is safe even though the actuality of what he does is EASY and therefore a prime target for replacement.
- orbital-decay 4y ago
  > A creative director simply comes up with high level instructions (like the one above) THEN the ultra hard part is making that high level instruction a reality. That is HARD and as of now it looks like both skills are being replaced by AI. This is the opposite of what I see in reality right now. The hard part is to make the artists do exactly what you want, down to the subtle but meaningful details. That happens because the high-level instructions don't have enough capacity to deliver the full meaning. This is the same with generative models: extremely hard to control with the "prompt engineering" gimmick, it's only fine when you are OK with random output. Besides, they are purely functional and lack feedback mechanisms the creative director usually employ with artists. That's why people are trying to make techniques more complex - large animation houses experiment with training their own model architectures and software. This is the way 3D CGI was born - simple at first, and yes it got plenty of doomposting at first (we are getting replaced by computers!), until it was clear that the field becomes extremely technical and complex, so it even has dozens of specializations inside it. All entertainment is ultimately based on novelty, as human brain is really good at distilling meaning from the ocean of information. If you start with little meaning (your example - "a cowboy with blue skin with a laser cannon riding a unicycle through the grand canyon with a dwarf chasing him"), people get bored - no matter how much randomized artsy-looking stuff you add around it. If you think that AI can generate all meaning that is relevant to people, I don't buy it, as it doesn't have the same training material. It's trained on the result and is forced to reverse engineer what moves people; reverse engineering is a fundamentally more costly and opaque task.
spoiler 4y ago
I've had to do something similar in a much shorter career as well (about 10 years or so). I think the rate of change is much quicker these days too. It was still always within the tech field, but for better or worse my career has been incredibly diverse. Not sure if I'll be able to keep up when I'm older (entering my 30ies now) or not, but so far I've always seen it as personal growth opportunities.

linkjuice4all 4y ago

Jobs change and hopefully peoples’ skillset changes and gets better when they do. This job was different 5 years ago and this entire animation process would be unrecognizable 50 years ago. Tweening didn’t ruin animation it just lowered the barrier of entry. This too will lower the barrier of entry so our future will be more high quality animation. Some of it will be lasting and some of it will be appreciated for mere seconds for throw away content such as ads. Maybe when everyone gets home from their boring prompt engineering jobs they can go back to hand rolling animation stacks or whatever other workflow is currently getting destroyed by AI for the “fun” of it.

7speter 4y ago
Everyone isn’t going to be lucky enough to have a prompt engineering job