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I'm almost hoping for some enshittification. It's so depressing seeing how many skills and jobs have been instantly devalued. Take a look at the artist communit

I'm almost hoping for some enshittification. It's so depressing seeing how many skills and jobs have been instantly devalued. Take a look at the artist communities and it's total depression that peoples life passion and source of income has just been deleted over the course of a few months. We aren't talking about burger flipping and checkout scanners. This is a creative pursuit which takes years of grinding to become proficient, just wiped out. Right now the current models and tech aren't quite enough to replace real humans, but the rate of progression feels like they will soon. If it all just halted here for a while, that would be quite comforting for a lot of people.

kaashif 3y ago
If things slow down a bit then speed up again in a few years once economics improve or whatever, does that really make any difference in the long run? What's the long term solution here? We're not even talking about decades here, probably.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  Part of me hopes we have hit a kind of wall where we get what we have now, maybe with some more polished UI, but it doesn't continue the exponential improvement path it's on. If it all slowed down, people would have plenty of time to readjust. Rather than just instantly deleting peoples careers. Human artists can quite easily beat the current tech, but there is no real indication that the current stuff is the best we can juice out of the current methods. Which is the depressing part. Why even bother to learn anything when AI will obsolete your effort before you finish.
ToucanLoucan 3y ago
Not even deleted! Actively stolen. No one has yet grappled with the reality that especially in the realm of generative art, these models do not work without a basis of absolutely stressful amounts of stolen artwork to train them. They simply do. Not. Exist. Without that baseline unethical contribution that tons of artists made without their knowledge and certainly without their consent. None of the major figures behind any of this tech will acknowledge this. They make some hand-wavy non-committal gestures towards fair use and "how artists learn" and act like that's an answer, completely discarding tons of points not worth revisiting here because it's frankly been beaten to death already and if you're still fence sitting or pro generative art at this point, it's because you want/need to be to prevent cognitive dissonance in one way or another. And to be clear: this stuff is SO COOL. The idea of entering prompts and getting at least vaguely unique and interesting output is incredibly cool. The notion of machines that learn, even in a restrictive way as the current models do, is so fascinating. And of course, like any cool and interesting new tech, it was immediately adopted/hijacked by the worst people imaginable, determined to fill Amazon self-publishing with generated hack kids books filled with generated text and generated art, at the lowest cost point possible, sold on the cheap, with the idea that they could make them convincing enough to trick some poor overworked parents into buying them and pocketing the cash. Just grift. Every new technology we get now, as few as the true new innovations they are, are always, always, immediately, co-opted by the worst actors in the space and turned to utter garbage.
- sillysaurusx 3y ago
  Oh please. First of all, how do you steal an idea? We’re talking about pictures. Supposing that you buy into the theory that you can, copyright was created to further the arts and sciences; it’s in the US constitution. The point isn’t to control your work — it’s to live in a richer society. And it’s not even clear that training a model counts as infringement. Being able to recite a quote from a book is different than reproducing the entire book. Artists won’t acknowledge that the same applies to their art. If you believe that training models on art is stealing, then I’m a master ninja, since I’m the creator of books3. And even Stephen King today came out and said that he’s fine with it: > Would I forbid the teaching (if that is the word) of my stories to computers? Not even if I could. I might as well be King Canute, forbidding the tide to come in. Or a Luddite trying to stop industrial progress by hammering a steam loom to pieces. https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/08/stephen-king-books-ai-writing/675088/ https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/08/stephen-ki... If he’s not worried, why are you? I take a dim view of people trying to frame researchers as criminals. We’re not. We want to further science. That’s all. You call me a grifter, but I’ve made roughly a hundred bucks from books3, and that’s because someone found my patron buried under a pile of links and subscribed to it many months ago. Most of my researcher colleagues seem to have similar distaste for wanting to make money. The work is the goal.
  - xigoi 3y ago
    If OpenAI believes that copyright is wrong, why are they keeping their software proprietary?
    - sillysaurusx 3y ago
      I agree with you, for what it’s worth. I don’t think it would be a disadvantage for them to open source GPT-4. They’re the ones with the hardware.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      Ostensibly because of the risk of misuse. This may be a losing battle even assuming it's 100% sincere (I'm not interested in debating the assumption).
sillysaurusx 3y ago
It hasn’t been deleted. They’re just annoyed they have to learn to use AI now. Or at least they should be; people will lose their job to someone using AI, not to AI itself. There are a thousand ways the creative game has merely changed, not been supplanted. I wouldn’t have hired an artist before to draw some stories I’ve wanted to make. But once I use Midjourney to create some mockups, I might. The last 10% of polish is still the hardest part, and that’s worth a lot more than raw image generation.
thordenmark 3y ago
That's my profession you're talking about. Many of my colleagues are freaked out about losing their jobs, they've spent decades honing their craft. I heard one art director describe the future of professional artists as "visual janitors" who will spend their time generating images and using their skills cleaning up the weird mistakes the AI makes.
- ryathal 3y ago
  That's like 90% or more of programming jobs is just making different APIs talk to each other. Just because you may not like doesn't make it bad.
  - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
    Just because you like it doesn't make it good, either. :)
martindbp 3y ago
What's with the Luddite takes on HN? If you want to stop tech progress then why are you hanging out the forum of a tech accelerator? It would be great if we could keep this attitude to reddit, which has already gone down the drain.
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  What's with all the deluded techno-hopium? Do you just prefer the safety and comfort of your echo chamber to assure you that everyone in the world shares your opinion, while at the same time you get to pat yourself on the back for being smarter than everyone?
squirrel6 3y ago
There’s a lot of “art” that is really just graphic design at its core. Creatives at-large are certainly negatively impacted with respect to the commercial viability of their skills. However, artists who express something in their own unique way (not necessarily in a commercial context) are not necessarily threatened by generative AI. I do think artists can even make use of generative AI if it helps their own artistic process. There has been more thoughtful writing to this effect elsewhere.
moonchrome 3y ago
> but the rate of progression feels like they will soon The rate of progression seems to be logarithmic - so we got "something looks plausible" but to get that last 10% it's probably going to cost more in HW than just using humans, unless there's some breakthroughs. Just like self driving cars. My impressions at least looking at the developments from a sort of technical perspective - they are hitting all kinds of scaling problems - both in terms of data available, runtime complexity, hardware available, etc. nVidia raking it in is a perfect example of how inefficient the whole thing is. Models seem to be doing fairly simple math computation (nowhere near the complexity of a general purpose GPU core required), things are limited by memory bandwidth and memory available. I'm sure a better hardware design specifically for transformer inference could make it cheaper and faster. But it seems like anything like that is years out for general market and nVidia is raking in on selling repurposed GPU architectures, and nobody else can even compete with that based on software stack alone. People selling us on AI replacing software developers are getting fleeced for billions because they can't port their software stack to similar hardware from a different vendor...
kypro 3y ago
The most depressing thing is talking to children about potential careers at the moment... My girlfriend have a couple of younger siblings, one of them loves art and draws endless – he really wants to design characters for cartoons and video games. The other loves programming and wants be a developer. I've always encouraged these passions of theirs, telling them if they work hard they can do the things they love as a job and get paid well for it. I don't know what to tell them anymore... I worry that over the last few decades we've been going through a golden age of career opportunities without really appreciating it. With a few exceptions no career considered desirable has been fully automated, and at the same time the variety of jobs that we can do has grown almost exponentially. I mean even something like farming where there's been a lot of technological innovation we still absolutely need farmers – will the same be said about graphic designers in say 5-10 years? Perhaps we'll need a few people prompting the tools, but will it actually make sense for anyone to physically draw anything? For the most part in the past people had to do whatever job they could. I worry we may be returning to that world. It seems likely there will still be service jobs where human interaction is valued, but eventually it seems all jobs that don't require that human presence will eventually be automated. Although, we're probably still quite a long way off all manual labour jobs being automated fully.
- schnitzelstoat 3y ago
  We aren't even close to development work being automated away. Maybe art because it's often less critical. If your logo looks a bit goofy because it's AI-generated it doesn't matter. If your production server crashes because of a problem in your AI-generated code, it does.
  - bryanrasmussen 3y ago
    >If your logo looks a bit goofy because it's AI-generated it doesn't matter. So, you're evidently not a designer?
    - ben_w 3y ago
      The biggest problem with logos IMO, which AI absolutely won't help with, is that everyone tries to stand out by copying everyone else's design.
hospitalJail 3y ago
> It's so depressing seeing how many skills and jobs have been instantly devalued. Take a look at the artist communities and it's total depression that peoples life passion and source of income has just been deleted over the course of a few months. >We aren't talking about burger flipping and checkout scanners. This is a creative pursuit which takes years of grinding to become proficient, just wiped out. Solve cancer first, then we can weep for jobs that were automated. There is too much suffering in this world for us to be making up jobs that are to waste time.
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  Talk about goalposts.
trimethylpurine 3y ago
Meh. Sure, it can make a picture. But so far AI can't tell me what good art is. The business side of art isn't painting. It's consultation. Even the street vendor spraying away at stencils is selling an experience. The artwork itself isn't what's valuable. And I can say the same about nearly every supposedly devalued profession.
RecycledEle 3y ago
If our countries destroy GPT / LLM AIs, we will fall behind the countries that have a clue.
BeFlatXIII 3y ago
On the flip side, AI tools allow someone to get a prototype going without first grinding for years or coming up with the funding to pay for someone else's time spent on the grind.

kaashif 3y ago

If things slow down a bit then speed up again in a few years once economics improve or whatever, does that really make any difference in the long run? What's the long term solution here? We're not even talking about decades here, probably.

Gigachad 3y ago
Part of me hopes we have hit a kind of wall where we get what we have now, maybe with some more polished UI, but it doesn't continue the exponential improvement path it's on. If it all slowed down, people would have plenty of time to readjust. Rather than just instantly deleting peoples careers. Human artists can quite easily beat the current tech, but there is no real indication that the current stuff is the best we can juice out of the current methods. Which is the depressing part. Why even bother to learn anything when AI will obsolete your effort before you finish.

ToucanLoucan 3y ago

Not even deleted! Actively stolen. No one has yet grappled with the reality that especially in the realm of generative art, these models do not work without a basis of absolutely stressful amounts of stolen artwork to train them. They simply do. Not. Exist. Without that baseline unethical contribution that tons of artists made without their knowledge and certainly without their consent. None of the major figures behind any of this tech will acknowledge this. They make some hand-wavy non-committal gestures towards fair use and "how artists learn" and act like that's an answer, completely discarding tons of points not worth revisiting here because it's frankly been beaten to death already and if you're still fence sitting or pro generative art at this point, it's because you want/need to be to prevent cognitive dissonance in one way or another. And to be clear: this stuff is SO COOL. The idea of entering prompts and getting at least vaguely unique and interesting output is incredibly cool. The notion of machines that learn, even in a restrictive way as the current models do, is so fascinating. And of course, like any cool and interesting new tech, it was immediately adopted/hijacked by the worst people imaginable, determined to fill Amazon self-publishing with generated hack kids books filled with generated text and generated art, at the lowest cost point possible, sold on the cheap, with the idea that they could make them convincing enough to trick some poor overworked parents into buying them and pocketing the cash. Just grift. Every new technology we get now, as few as the true new innovations they are, are always, always, immediately, co-opted by the worst actors in the space and turned to utter garbage.

sillysaurusx 3y ago
Oh please. First of all, how do you steal an idea? We’re talking about pictures. Supposing that you buy into the theory that you can, copyright was created to further the arts and sciences; it’s in the US constitution. The point isn’t to control your work — it’s to live in a richer society. And it’s not even clear that training a model counts as infringement. Being able to recite a quote from a book is different than reproducing the entire book. Artists won’t acknowledge that the same applies to their art. If you believe that training models on art is stealing, then I’m a master ninja, since I’m the creator of books3. And even Stephen King today came out and said that he’s fine with it: > Would I forbid the teaching (if that is the word) of my stories to computers? Not even if I could. I might as well be King Canute, forbidding the tide to come in. Or a Luddite trying to stop industrial progress by hammering a steam loom to pieces. https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/08/stephen-king-books-ai-writing/675088/ https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/08/stephen-ki... If he’s not worried, why are you? I take a dim view of people trying to frame researchers as criminals. We’re not. We want to further science. That’s all. You call me a grifter, but I’ve made roughly a hundred bucks from books3, and that’s because someone found my patron buried under a pile of links and subscribed to it many months ago. Most of my researcher colleagues seem to have similar distaste for wanting to make money. The work is the goal.
- xigoi 3y ago
  If OpenAI believes that copyright is wrong, why are they keeping their software proprietary?
  - sillysaurusx 3y ago
    I agree with you, for what it’s worth. I don’t think it would be a disadvantage for them to open source GPT-4. They’re the ones with the hardware.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Ostensibly because of the risk of misuse. This may be a losing battle even assuming it's 100% sincere (I'm not interested in debating the assumption).

sillysaurusx 3y ago

It hasn’t been deleted. They’re just annoyed they have to learn to use AI now. Or at least they should be; people will lose their job to someone using AI, not to AI itself. There are a thousand ways the creative game has merely changed, not been supplanted. I wouldn’t have hired an artist before to draw some stories I’ve wanted to make. But once I use Midjourney to create some mockups, I might. The last 10% of polish is still the hardest part, and that’s worth a lot more than raw image generation.

thordenmark 3y ago

That's my profession you're talking about. Many of my colleagues are freaked out about losing their jobs, they've spent decades honing their craft. I heard one art director describe the future of professional artists as "visual janitors" who will spend their time generating images and using their skills cleaning up the weird mistakes the AI makes.

ryathal 3y ago
That's like 90% or more of programming jobs is just making different APIs talk to each other. Just because you may not like doesn't make it bad.
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  Just because you like it doesn't make it good, either. :)

martindbp 3y ago

What's with the Luddite takes on HN? If you want to stop tech progress then why are you hanging out the forum of a tech accelerator? It would be great if we could keep this attitude to reddit, which has already gone down the drain.

CatWChainsaw 3y ago
What's with all the deluded techno-hopium? Do you just prefer the safety and comfort of your echo chamber to assure you that everyone in the world shares your opinion, while at the same time you get to pat yourself on the back for being smarter than everyone?

squirrel6 3y ago

There’s a lot of “art” that is really just graphic design at its core. Creatives at-large are certainly negatively impacted with respect to the commercial viability of their skills. However, artists who express something in their own unique way (not necessarily in a commercial context) are not necessarily threatened by generative AI. I do think artists can even make use of generative AI if it helps their own artistic process. There has been more thoughtful writing to this effect elsewhere.

moonchrome 3y ago

> but the rate of progression feels like they will soon The rate of progression seems to be logarithmic - so we got "something looks plausible" but to get that last 10% it's probably going to cost more in HW than just using humans, unless there's some breakthroughs. Just like self driving cars. My impressions at least looking at the developments from a sort of technical perspective - they are hitting all kinds of scaling problems - both in terms of data available, runtime complexity, hardware available, etc. nVidia raking it in is a perfect example of how inefficient the whole thing is. Models seem to be doing fairly simple math computation (nowhere near the complexity of a general purpose GPU core required), things are limited by memory bandwidth and memory available. I'm sure a better hardware design specifically for transformer inference could make it cheaper and faster. But it seems like anything like that is years out for general market and nVidia is raking in on selling repurposed GPU architectures, and nobody else can even compete with that based on software stack alone. People selling us on AI replacing software developers are getting fleeced for billions because they can't port their software stack to similar hardware from a different vendor...

kypro 3y ago

The most depressing thing is talking to children about potential careers at the moment... My girlfriend have a couple of younger siblings, one of them loves art and draws endless – he really wants to design characters for cartoons and video games. The other loves programming and wants be a developer. I've always encouraged these passions of theirs, telling them if they work hard they can do the things they love as a job and get paid well for it. I don't know what to tell them anymore... I worry that over the last few decades we've been going through a golden age of career opportunities without really appreciating it. With a few exceptions no career considered desirable has been fully automated, and at the same time the variety of jobs that we can do has grown almost exponentially. I mean even something like farming where there's been a lot of technological innovation we still absolutely need farmers – will the same be said about graphic designers in say 5-10 years? Perhaps we'll need a few people prompting the tools, but will it actually make sense for anyone to physically draw anything? For the most part in the past people had to do whatever job they could. I worry we may be returning to that world. It seems likely there will still be service jobs where human interaction is valued, but eventually it seems all jobs that don't require that human presence will eventually be automated. Although, we're probably still quite a long way off all manual labour jobs being automated fully.

schnitzelstoat 3y ago
We aren't even close to development work being automated away. Maybe art because it's often less critical. If your logo looks a bit goofy because it's AI-generated it doesn't matter. If your production server crashes because of a problem in your AI-generated code, it does.
- bryanrasmussen 3y ago
  >If your logo looks a bit goofy because it's AI-generated it doesn't matter. So, you're evidently not a designer?
  - ben_w 3y ago
    The biggest problem with logos IMO, which AI absolutely won't help with, is that everyone tries to stand out by copying everyone else's design.

hospitalJail 3y ago

> It's so depressing seeing how many skills and jobs have been instantly devalued. Take a look at the artist communities and it's total depression that peoples life passion and source of income has just been deleted over the course of a few months. >We aren't talking about burger flipping and checkout scanners. This is a creative pursuit which takes years of grinding to become proficient, just wiped out. Solve cancer first, then we can weep for jobs that were automated. There is too much suffering in this world for us to be making up jobs that are to waste time.

CatWChainsaw 3y ago
Talk about goalposts.

trimethylpurine 3y ago

Meh. Sure, it can make a picture. But so far AI can't tell me what good art is. The business side of art isn't painting. It's consultation. Even the street vendor spraying away at stencils is selling an experience. The artwork itself isn't what's valuable. And I can say the same about nearly every supposedly devalued profession.

RecycledEle 3y ago

If our countries destroy GPT / LLM AIs, we will fall behind the countries that have a clue.

BeFlatXIII 3y ago

On the flip side, AI tools allow someone to get a prototype going without first grinding for years or coming up with the funding to pay for someone else's time spent on the grind.