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First, labor laws isn’t the answer to technology. It would be like regulating the camera because it put portrait artists out of work, or steam drills because i

First, labor laws isn’t the answer to technology. It would be like regulating the camera because it put portrait artists out of work, or steam drills because it puts tunnel diggers. Art improved dramatically in a short period of time with the advent of the camera, became reflective of what the camera couldn’t do - reflect the nature of humanity back to us. Second, if you’ve done much with generative imagery you know the raw experience is difficult to control to a specific visual outcome. Fine tuning, in painting, image to image, control nets, all these things help. But it’s easy to make something stunning, but difficult to make your vision come out from the machine. It’s a tool, like any other. It’ll require rethinking what’s better to do with generative ai and what’s better to shoot directly. But direction, cinematography, and acting are about extreme control to achieve a specific outcome. Generative AI doesn’t help that. However what I’ve seen it really do well is take imagery and add detail and nuance, interpolate scenes, and other feats that will likely make post production much more powerful, requiring fewer reshoots, etc. Creating CGI will be simpler, especially bootstrapping, and l will bet it’ll be extremely heavily used preproduction to create visual story boarding. But completely replace humans ? The camera didn’t replace artists, and if you’ve seen a tunnel boring, there’s no lack of humans there. A strong back isn’t as important as a strong engineering mind, but that’s a pressure on labor that’s been building for centuries. These new tools won’t change the dynamic, it’ll just up the game.

endisneigh 3y ago
I disagree, we are clearly in the end phase. Generative AI (not necessarily LLM) is clearly in a completely different category from the things you describe. Suppose it becomes such that it’s equivalent to a human using all the tools of today, but instantly. What would there be to do? I guess we still need to mine for the natural materials, so there’s that.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  Portrait painters and tunnel diggers said the same things. Impressionism, expressionism, modern art, etc weren’t obvious outcomes. The thing AI lacks, and will lack for the foreseeable future as we have a much weaker grasp on its mechanisms, is agency and at the root of that creativity. Most movie making today is a lot of mechanical craftsmanship and a lot of that will probably disappear. The bar for good will be raised dramatically. But the demand for the best won’t disappear, it’ll likely amplify as the stakes get higher. I will wager you we will see a dramatic realignment in the sorts of work that go into production, but the demand for those skills will be so high and the value so immense that we will see a profusion of new work, better output, and more employment in the arts.
  - endisneigh 3y ago
    Creatives are already paid very little, so if what you’re saying is true that is not a good sign despite your enthusiasm. Most of white collar work is very much rooted in the “mechanical” tasks.
    - fnordpiglet 3y ago
      And those tasks will emphasize the creative in the future. At one time a human computer made a ton of money. However they’re a novelty today. Mathematics and computer science are a much more creative endeavor using mechanical computers than someone who could tabulate large numbers rapidly in their head. I do think rote learning is about to seriously take a step back in the world and the future won’t reward the ability to turn the crank nearly as much. The white collar readjustment will be realizing memorizing facts is much less valuable than understanding and synthesizing.
      - endisneigh 3y ago
        We will have to agree to disagree. The real world is about solving actual problems, not solving arbitrary “creative” tasks. And even if it were, go look at salaries in “creative” professions vs engineering.
        TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
        "Actual problems" like crypto scams, NFTs, and both mainstream and "new" manipulations of value tokens that don't even exist? Or an industry like health insurance, which doesn't even need to exist? As for salaries - you can be a hopelessly mediocre engineer, doctor, lawyer, etc, and still earn good money. You can even be a bad professional who is actively incompetent and still earn good money. The fact that salaries can be hyped so they don't accurately reflect social value is a symptom of the problem, not an explanation for it.
        endisneigh 3y ago
janice1999 3y ago
> First, labor laws isn’t the answer to technology. Laws have always been created to deal with new technologies and their fallout. Labour laws are no different. You should read about the musicians strike of 1942 [1]. When the record player was invented some people thought 'why pay a singer for more than one performance if technology allows you to record them and sell infinite copies'? No one would try that today with Taylor Swift for example. [1] https://jacobin.com/2022/03/1940s-musicians-strike-american-federations-of-musicians-afm-labels-streaming https://jacobin.com/2022/03/1940s-musicians-strike-american-...
- overstay8930 3y ago
  No law was created in your link, except ones that made it impossible to create laws like the one you're implying was created.
- fragmede 3y ago
  By "try that with Taylor Swift", you mean I can trivially torrent a copy of The Eras Tour?
fragmede 3y ago
What's the market for a talented saxophone player in a major metropolitan area? It's not zero, but thanks to Spotify, it's not as big as before the advent of recorded music. Recorded music didn't just up the game, it completely changed it. Now you have ultra mega stars that make economic impacts to an area when she tours, but the market for a talented saxophone player in a major metropolitan area just isn't what it once was. I'm not arguing for labor laws, but we'll just have to see where this goes.
- robenkleene 3y ago
  Er, Taylor Swift? Your analogy is wrong, Spotify, or really the phonograph, didn't put musicians out of work. The television did, because once that came along "just" playing well wasn't enough to be a star, on camera presence became more important.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    I think the automobile put the saxophonist underemployed. As people moved away from the city core in the suburbs live music venues suffered. The radio, recorded audio,and TV cemented it, but people would always frequent live music if the venues existed. And they do - where there are enough fans to support them. This is why we have a lot of live music places in NYC, etc, even with Spotify and instant gratification. But I also don’t think the life of the musician is all that dire, at least compared to the portrait artist and tunnel digger. There are plenty of jazz clubs in any major city, and live music that pays enough to at least supplement a day job is a thing. Even at the height of live music your average musician would have needed a day job to get by.
- throwboatyface 3y ago
  I would argue the biggest issue for talented musicians is economic inequality and the rapid increase in the cost of living. If you want to do music as a main job you need to survive on your partner's income or have generational wealth. There's just no room for someone who is talented to keep themselves afloat playing gigs without having 10 roommates and a day job.
jncfhnb 3y ago
I’m not sure I agree it’s hard to create specific things. The tooling, imo, feels infant, but promising. And it can layer upon itself. Right now control net can do pretty good character pose control, but you have to make the pose. Well… next step is to generate the pose with a request. Same for faces.
- robenkleene 3y ago
  When you're editing in an NLE, you can pick the exact frame where your transition begins. When you're editing in DAW, you can change the volume by tiny fractions of a decibel, for a single frequency. Just about every piece of mainstream media (e.g., excluding social media) has had every single frame, and every second of sound, polished to absolute perfection (or at least one sound engineer or editors perception of it). How is AI going to attain the level of polish (via control) we expect from mainstream media?
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    I’m not clear what you mean. If you’re imagining that AI tools mean it has to be a straight text -> output model that’s not correct. They are very much iterative transformations.
    - robenkleene 3y ago
      There's an enormous golf between just being iterative and control down to the last decibel/frame. Professional creative software is design around this fine-grained control.
      - jncfhnb 3y ago
        Ok but what’s your point? This is not outside the capabilities of AI enabled tooling. You can adjust whatever you want, at whatever granularity you want. The goal is of course to make this unnecessary, because adjusting a single element doesn’t benefit much from ai. But there’s nothing say you can’t?
dkarras 3y ago
>Second, if you’ve done much with generative imagery you know the raw experience is difficult to control to a specific visual outcome. Fine tuning, in painting, image to image, control nets, all these things help. But it’s easy to make something stunning, but difficult to make your vision come out from the machine. It’s a tool, like any other. It’ll require rethinking what’s better to do with generative ai and what’s better to shoot directly. But direction, cinematography, and acting are about extreme control to achieve a specific outcome. Generative AI doesn’t help that. However what I’ve seen it really do well is take imagery and add detail and nuance, interpolate scenes, and other feats that will likely make post production much more powerful, requiring fewer reshoots, etc. Creating CGI will be simpler, especially bootstrapping, and l will bet it’ll be extremely heavily used preproduction to create visual story boarding. The problem is not that there will be 0 humans needed. The problem is that something that used to take 100 people, might be done with 5. And that 95 is still creative jobs, jobs that require education, skill, grit. You make a living either by hunting and gathering, or creating value for others and exchanging that value for things you need through a generic value token of money. The bar for being able to generate value that can sustain you (let alone a family) was already increasing day by day. But with the sudden spike of generative AI, the bar shot up faster than any time in known human history. With things as they stand right now, the amount of education and experience you need to generate value for others is going off the charts. It will be unfathomable in a few years. Yes, humans will be needed, but not as many to provide what we need. Yet those people will not simply stop existing. What is in the cards for them? That is the problem.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  My hope is frankly this nudges us into a post scarcity world where turning the crank to eat isn’t so damn meaningful. A WPA / CCC style program might be useful, tapping people to enrich the world rather than press buttons for food pellets. But these are fantasies and unmoored in the present. We will see.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    Given the current state of the world, I don't see this ending in an optimistic lens. At least not in the US.
graphe 3y ago
That's exactly what they do with cameras, you aren't allowed them, and in venues where you're legally allowed to have them thru confiscate it. You can't take a photo of the Eiffel tower either.
Turing_Machine 3y ago
> It would be like regulating the camera because it put portrait artists out of work, or steam drills because it puts tunnel diggers. Modern farm equipment put a whole lot of unfree* agricultural laborers "out of work", but most of us consider that to have been a good thing. *serfs, slaves, indentured servants, etc.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

endisneigh 3y ago

I disagree, we are clearly in the end phase. Generative AI (not necessarily LLM) is clearly in a completely different category from the things you describe. Suppose it becomes such that it’s equivalent to a human using all the tools of today, but instantly. What would there be to do? I guess we still need to mine for the natural materials, so there’s that.

fnordpiglet 3y ago
Portrait painters and tunnel diggers said the same things. Impressionism, expressionism, modern art, etc weren’t obvious outcomes. The thing AI lacks, and will lack for the foreseeable future as we have a much weaker grasp on its mechanisms, is agency and at the root of that creativity. Most movie making today is a lot of mechanical craftsmanship and a lot of that will probably disappear. The bar for good will be raised dramatically. But the demand for the best won’t disappear, it’ll likely amplify as the stakes get higher. I will wager you we will see a dramatic realignment in the sorts of work that go into production, but the demand for those skills will be so high and the value so immense that we will see a profusion of new work, better output, and more employment in the arts.
- endisneigh 3y ago
  Creatives are already paid very little, so if what you’re saying is true that is not a good sign despite your enthusiasm. Most of white collar work is very much rooted in the “mechanical” tasks.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    And those tasks will emphasize the creative in the future. At one time a human computer made a ton of money. However they’re a novelty today. Mathematics and computer science are a much more creative endeavor using mechanical computers than someone who could tabulate large numbers rapidly in their head. I do think rote learning is about to seriously take a step back in the world and the future won’t reward the ability to turn the crank nearly as much. The white collar readjustment will be realizing memorizing facts is much less valuable than understanding and synthesizing.
    - endisneigh 3y ago
      We will have to agree to disagree. The real world is about solving actual problems, not solving arbitrary “creative” tasks. And even if it were, go look at salaries in “creative” professions vs engineering.
      - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
        "Actual problems" like crypto scams, NFTs, and both mainstream and "new" manipulations of value tokens that don't even exist? Or an industry like health insurance, which doesn't even need to exist? As for salaries - you can be a hopelessly mediocre engineer, doctor, lawyer, etc, and still earn good money. You can even be a bad professional who is actively incompetent and still earn good money. The fact that salaries can be hyped so they don't accurately reflect social value is a symptom of the problem, not an explanation for it.
        endisneigh 3y ago

janice1999 3y ago

> First, labor laws isn’t the answer to technology. Laws have always been created to deal with new technologies and their fallout. Labour laws are no different. You should read about the musicians strike of 1942 [1]. When the record player was invented some people thought 'why pay a singer for more than one performance if technology allows you to record them and sell infinite copies'? No one would try that today with Taylor Swift for example. [1] https://jacobin.com/2022/03/1940s-musicians-strike-american-federations-of-musicians-afm-labels-streaming https://jacobin.com/2022/03/1940s-musicians-strike-american-...

overstay8930 3y ago
No law was created in your link, except ones that made it impossible to create laws like the one you're implying was created.
fragmede 3y ago
By "try that with Taylor Swift", you mean I can trivially torrent a copy of The Eras Tour?

fragmede 3y ago

What's the market for a talented saxophone player in a major metropolitan area? It's not zero, but thanks to Spotify, it's not as big as before the advent of recorded music. Recorded music didn't just up the game, it completely changed it. Now you have ultra mega stars that make economic impacts to an area when she tours, but the market for a talented saxophone player in a major metropolitan area just isn't what it once was. I'm not arguing for labor laws, but we'll just have to see where this goes.

robenkleene 3y ago
Er, Taylor Swift? Your analogy is wrong, Spotify, or really the phonograph, didn't put musicians out of work. The television did, because once that came along "just" playing well wasn't enough to be a star, on camera presence became more important.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  I think the automobile put the saxophonist underemployed. As people moved away from the city core in the suburbs live music venues suffered. The radio, recorded audio,and TV cemented it, but people would always frequent live music if the venues existed. And they do - where there are enough fans to support them. This is why we have a lot of live music places in NYC, etc, even with Spotify and instant gratification. But I also don’t think the life of the musician is all that dire, at least compared to the portrait artist and tunnel digger. There are plenty of jazz clubs in any major city, and live music that pays enough to at least supplement a day job is a thing. Even at the height of live music your average musician would have needed a day job to get by.
throwboatyface 3y ago
I would argue the biggest issue for talented musicians is economic inequality and the rapid increase in the cost of living. If you want to do music as a main job you need to survive on your partner's income or have generational wealth. There's just no room for someone who is talented to keep themselves afloat playing gigs without having 10 roommates and a day job.

jncfhnb 3y ago

I’m not sure I agree it’s hard to create specific things. The tooling, imo, feels infant, but promising. And it can layer upon itself. Right now control net can do pretty good character pose control, but you have to make the pose. Well… next step is to generate the pose with a request. Same for faces.

robenkleene 3y ago
When you're editing in an NLE, you can pick the exact frame where your transition begins. When you're editing in DAW, you can change the volume by tiny fractions of a decibel, for a single frequency. Just about every piece of mainstream media (e.g., excluding social media) has had every single frame, and every second of sound, polished to absolute perfection (or at least one sound engineer or editors perception of it). How is AI going to attain the level of polish (via control) we expect from mainstream media?
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  I’m not clear what you mean. If you’re imagining that AI tools mean it has to be a straight text -> output model that’s not correct. They are very much iterative transformations.
  - robenkleene 3y ago
    There's an enormous golf between just being iterative and control down to the last decibel/frame. Professional creative software is design around this fine-grained control.
    - jncfhnb 3y ago
      Ok but what’s your point? This is not outside the capabilities of AI enabled tooling. You can adjust whatever you want, at whatever granularity you want. The goal is of course to make this unnecessary, because adjusting a single element doesn’t benefit much from ai. But there’s nothing say you can’t?

dkarras 3y ago

>Second, if you’ve done much with generative imagery you know the raw experience is difficult to control to a specific visual outcome. Fine tuning, in painting, image to image, control nets, all these things help. But it’s easy to make something stunning, but difficult to make your vision come out from the machine. It’s a tool, like any other. It’ll require rethinking what’s better to do with generative ai and what’s better to shoot directly. But direction, cinematography, and acting are about extreme control to achieve a specific outcome. Generative AI doesn’t help that. However what I’ve seen it really do well is take imagery and add detail and nuance, interpolate scenes, and other feats that will likely make post production much more powerful, requiring fewer reshoots, etc. Creating CGI will be simpler, especially bootstrapping, and l will bet it’ll be extremely heavily used preproduction to create visual story boarding. The problem is not that there will be 0 humans needed. The problem is that something that used to take 100 people, might be done with 5. And that 95 is still creative jobs, jobs that require education, skill, grit. You make a living either by hunting and gathering, or creating value for others and exchanging that value for things you need through a generic value token of money. The bar for being able to generate value that can sustain you (let alone a family) was already increasing day by day. But with the sudden spike of generative AI, the bar shot up faster than any time in known human history. With things as they stand right now, the amount of education and experience you need to generate value for others is going off the charts. It will be unfathomable in a few years. Yes, humans will be needed, but not as many to provide what we need. Yet those people will not simply stop existing. What is in the cards for them? That is the problem.

fnordpiglet 3y ago
My hope is frankly this nudges us into a post scarcity world where turning the crank to eat isn’t so damn meaningful. A WPA / CCC style program might be useful, tapping people to enrich the world rather than press buttons for food pellets. But these are fantasies and unmoored in the present. We will see.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  Given the current state of the world, I don't see this ending in an optimistic lens. At least not in the US.

graphe 3y ago

That's exactly what they do with cameras, you aren't allowed them, and in venues where you're legally allowed to have them thru confiscate it. You can't take a photo of the Eiffel tower either.

Turing_Machine 3y ago

> It would be like regulating the camera because it put portrait artists out of work, or steam drills because it puts tunnel diggers. Modern farm equipment put a whole lot of unfree* agricultural laborers "out of work", but most of us consider that to have been a good thing. *serfs, slaves, indentured servants, etc.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]