7 ms·

AI and two hundred dollar tasks

83 points by azhenley 2y ago

dhumph 2y ago
I thought this was going to be about my wasted 200 OpenAI pro subscription to get operator. It’s failed all its tasks so far.
aprilthird2021 2y ago
It's worth noting that spending $200 on a graphic design from someone online was already a huge reduction in cost and time from what it would take before platforms like Upwork
vunderba 2y ago
When GenAI first started taking off a few years ago I called out that the real market set to be absolutely decimated wasn't corporations - it was the gig economy. The quality of generative AI may not be professional level quality, but it presents an easy and cheap drop-in replacement for one-off tasks that people previously outsourced to platforms like Fiverr (voiceovers, logo design, clip art, copy editing, translation, etc).
- aprilthird2021 2y ago
  I mean, these type of cheap gig work apps already basically destroyed such work for people who were good at it since they can't compete with a guy who will do it for a fiver
  - nurettin 2y ago
    I used to frequent rentacoder back in the 2000s. Got very good reviews, landed $20-50 a day doing C++/pascal/opengl homework for the first-world dunces. Then came the horny indian programmers. (we called them that on yahoo! chat because all they wanted in life was to marry up to a US/Canada lady and migrate). They would put in half the effort for 1/10th of the price and my gig was quickly over.
  - throwaway290 2y ago
    The guy who is good at it and can make a $100 job for $5 will not keep charging $5 for too long
    - dragonwriter 2y ago
      > The guy who is good at it and can make a $100 job for $5 will not keep charging $5 for too long As long as there is a steady supply of new people willing to do it for $5, it will be a $5 job, even if it would still be a viable job at $100 if there was less competition.
      - throwaway290 2y ago
        Market helps take care of that!
- energy123 2y ago
  The real dichotomy will be labor vs. capital as factors of production. AI competes with labor. Capital owns AI. Capital stands to benefit immensely -- that includes corporations. Labor stands to lose -- that includes not only gig economy workers but all people who sell their skills for money.
  - nextworddev 2y ago
    Eh I give most companies about 5 years before serious trouble
  - nostromo 2y ago
    > Capital owns AI DeepSeek is free and you can run it anywhere. The price of intelligence is quickly trending to zero.
    - southernplaces7 2y ago
      >The price of intelligence is quickly trending to zero. Please define intelligence as you see it then, because I see little of the accurate, astute, highly selective and precisely reasoned kind from AI. If anything is caused by AI tools its that the price of semi-coherent filler content (visual and textual for now) is falling to zero. This is far from similar to intelligence.
jongjong 2y ago
It's not just $200 tasks. For example, it's really good with producing music... Which would have cost several thousands of dollars before. E.g: suno.com I've been recording short tunes on my low-quality $50 Ukulele (which I self-taught myself) and then getting Suno to turn it into full songs. The quality is better than anything I could possibly have produced. Even if I paid thousands of dollars to a professional, I could not get better quality than what I'm getting from Suno. I cannot tell that it's produced by AI. AI is surprisingly suitable for music. If I want lyrics, I type out the topic and underlying message of the song and the aesthetics I want (e.g. short lines, rhymes, etc...) inside Claude or ChatGPT and make it generate the lyrics. Also once you have the first draft of lyrics, you can make it refine them by telling it to rhyme in particular ways. For example, the first words of each sentence can rhyme with each other as well as the last word of each sentence and you can tell it to change the rhyme pattern each paragraph. It's amazing how it can keep the meaning of the lyrics the same but totally transform the sounds of it by swapping out words with synonyms. AI video capability is impressive but it can't get it all the way to a production-quality film. For music though, it definitely seems to be production-quality. Sometimes it takes a few attempts but it definitely seems to cross the 'professional' line regularly. Often, you don't need any tuning, trimming or intervention to the piece; it's just done.
- glimshe 2y ago
  Many people see AI as a replacement for the human, but current-gen AI is in my view a replacement for the hammer. It's a tool that needs to be wielded with skill for good results... And when that happens, the productivity can be truly amazing.
  - jongjong 2y ago
    Agreed, I think music is one of the areas which it nails though (pun intended). The size of the human input can be very small and still produce very high quality output. I mean you can produce 0 input and fully automate it and it will still sound professional... Maybe it will lack a bit of creativity but typically only a professional would be able to know that. I think what Suno produces is often higher quality and more creative than what most modern pop stars produce... Just because the bar there happens to be quite low. If I listen to 80s music, I can see the creativity gap (at least relative to the AI's typical ouput)... But AI output is often superior to modern artists IMO.
mohsen1 2y ago
AI probably can do very nice landscaping design too. It's just that image generation models are not made for it. If we manage to give AI a more structured input, you'll get a nice design in return.
- joshmarinacci 2y ago
  I don't think so. Good landscaping requires knowledge of the site, the local ecosystem, and an understanding of how water and soil flow. It's a whole lot more than generating an image. The image is simply an output of the process.
  - cpursley 2y ago
    Those are not esoteric things, there’s generally data available for things like climate zones, soil type, plat maps, zoning and height restrictions (for trees). I was a commercial landscaper for a decade and have done my fair share of reading architectural plans as well as design some of my own. This I think it’s doable; it could even put together a shopping lest and check with local supplies for whats in stock and generate an estimate.
- cpursley 2y ago
  Now this is an interest idea, have you had any success?
- aprilthird2021 2y ago
  I have a feeling landscaping design is not common in its dataset, not as commonly talked about online, and so it will struggle with the task. Would love to be proven wrong
Arainach 2y ago
This is presented like it's a good thing, but it quite probably implies a local maximum in cultural abilities for a long time. How do experts become experts? Through time and practice. Many great photographers hone their skills or discover their talent when working at entry level and mid level positions - shooting portraits, etc. Most great musicians, bartenders, software engineers, etc. do the same. Without entry level/apprentice jobs the only other model is patronage from the rich, and that was never a good model even before today's rich largely abandoned the belief that they had a responsibility to contribute back to the society that allowed them to become rich. Without a pipeline of new talent, where will new state of the art come from? Where will more training data for the planet burners come from?
- panarky 2y ago
  It's a tool, and just like other tools, it multiplies human labor and intellect. I don't need to spend a decade becoming proficient with a pocket knife, and then another decade becoming an expert with an ax. Instead, an experienced person can show me how to be safe with a chainsaw in an afternoon. I won't be an expert with the chainsaw, that still takes many hours of experience, but I don't need the knife and ax prerequisites.
  - add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
    The calculator has allowed anyone to do complex arithmetic while they're holding a calculator, required by a job or some other formal or necessary context. At the expense of retarding most people's ability to do everyday math at places like the grocery store, a context in which they won't have the wherewithal to pull out the tool. It has not increased intellect regarding anything but rote keypressed calculation.
    - idiotsecant 2y ago
      On the other hand, looking up trigonometric functions in a table to find precise answers is not a valuable human activity. Calculators keep you from having to do that.
fzeroracer 2y ago
It's funny because I see this exact same thing in game dev. A bunch of games have now decided to outsource basic logos, banners, icons etc to AI. They all end up looking very obvious and similar and I pass on them every time. It's THE core advertising for your product.
- raincole 2y ago
  Supermarket Simulator is a game whose Steam capsule (the very first art players see on Steam) is blatantly AI made. The estimated sales are > 2M copies. [0]: https://steamdb.info/app/2670630/charts/ https://steamdb.info/app/2670630/charts/
  - nitwit005 2y ago
    A lot of those simulation games seem rather poorly made, but a couple of them have been big hits regardless. I'm sure you'd do better on average with not terrible marketing.
  - aprilthird2021 2y ago
    Wonder if it would sell more if it had a good art banner instead?
    - maeil 2y ago
      Would it sell more than the additional sales that were obtained by the work done during the time saved through generating it with AI instead of finding an artist?
    - raincole 2y ago
      Of course it's possible, but 2M copies is already the top-seller in this genre. The original Goat Simulator (arguably THE one game that made "funny goofy simulator" a genre) sold ~4M. [0]: https://steamdb.info/app/265930/charts https://steamdb.info/app/265930/charts
jsemrau 2y ago
I wrote a long while about mergekit. Makes one wonder if it will be possible to just "merge" experience from specifically trained LxMs going forward.
raincole 2y ago
I don't want to sound like I am bashing the original designer of the $200 monkey mascot, but I think the author has some misunderstanding here. The market value of that was very unlikely $200. Before AI, there were so many people offering similar services on Fiverr. And from my experience they're mostly not scammers (just novices). Of course they might not live in the US, at least not in big cities. The price range for that was $20~$50. Edit: the article says 2013. I don't know if Fiverr was popular back then. I'm talking about more like 2019. At that point Fiverr and similar platforms had upended this kind of $200 market.
- sdwr 2y ago
  I think you would see a quality difference between 'a monkey mascot' at $40 and $200. The $200 designer is shining a light on his personal brand. The mascot is friendly, vaguely memorable, well-proportioned, soft, and not attention-seeking. Its expression tells a story, adds humanity, and creates unresolved tension. The AI ones are sharp and confident and eye-catching, zero subtlety, completely missing the point. I'm willing to bet a $40 designer would drop the ball in a different, equally bad way (probably make it too corporate, or miss the precise "cute but low-effort" spot the original designer hit).
  - BoorishBears 2y ago
    It's funny because as I read the article, one thought was "the slop results look like they came from very old models" Use a model released this week and the results are (to my untrained eye) no longer distinguishable from a human artist: https://imgur.com/a/tgEsXq8 https://imgur.com/a/tgEsXq8 And it wasn't some pro image prompting magic. Even compared to 12 months ago, the text encoders have very good. I was able to use wording that came to me naturally and get an aesthetically pleasing result in seconds.
    - ebalit 2y ago
      You mentioned a model released this week. Is it Lumina new model by any chance?
breakitmakeit 2y ago
[dead]
lerp-io 2y ago
paying to fix your own bugs sounds like a skill issue
asimpletune 2y ago
All I want to know is did he pay $200 for that little vector illustration of the monkey?
rambambram 2y ago
I'm more happy that a guy who last posted on his blog in 2013 now posts again because of AI. I just started following your website Chris, now add an RSS feed. ;)

83 points by azhenley 2y ago

I thought this was going to be about my wasted 200 OpenAI pro subscription to get operator. It’s failed all its tasks so far.

aprilthird2021 2y ago

It's worth noting that spending $200 on a graphic design from someone online was already a huge reduction in cost and time from what it would take before platforms like Upwork

vunderba 2y ago

When GenAI first started taking off a few years ago I called out that the real market set to be absolutely decimated wasn't corporations - it was the gig economy. The quality of generative AI may not be professional level quality, but it presents an easy and cheap drop-in replacement for one-off tasks that people previously outsourced to platforms like Fiverr (voiceovers, logo design, clip art, copy editing, translation, etc).

aprilthird2021 2y ago
I mean, these type of cheap gig work apps already basically destroyed such work for people who were good at it since they can't compete with a guy who will do it for a fiver
- nurettin 2y ago
  I used to frequent rentacoder back in the 2000s. Got very good reviews, landed $20-50 a day doing C++/pascal/opengl homework for the first-world dunces. Then came the horny indian programmers. (we called them that on yahoo! chat because all they wanted in life was to marry up to a US/Canada lady and migrate). They would put in half the effort for 1/10th of the price and my gig was quickly over.
- throwaway290 2y ago
  The guy who is good at it and can make a $100 job for $5 will not keep charging $5 for too long
  - dragonwriter 2y ago
    > The guy who is good at it and can make a $100 job for $5 will not keep charging $5 for too long As long as there is a steady supply of new people willing to do it for $5, it will be a $5 job, even if it would still be a viable job at $100 if there was less competition.
    - throwaway290 2y ago
      Market helps take care of that!
energy123 2y ago
The real dichotomy will be labor vs. capital as factors of production. AI competes with labor. Capital owns AI. Capital stands to benefit immensely -- that includes corporations. Labor stands to lose -- that includes not only gig economy workers but all people who sell their skills for money.
- nextworddev 2y ago
  Eh I give most companies about 5 years before serious trouble
- nostromo 2y ago
  > Capital owns AI DeepSeek is free and you can run it anywhere. The price of intelligence is quickly trending to zero.
  - southernplaces7 2y ago
    >The price of intelligence is quickly trending to zero. Please define intelligence as you see it then, because I see little of the accurate, astute, highly selective and precisely reasoned kind from AI. If anything is caused by AI tools its that the price of semi-coherent filler content (visual and textual for now) is falling to zero. This is far from similar to intelligence.

jongjong 2y ago

It's not just $200 tasks. For example, it's really good with producing music... Which would have cost several thousands of dollars before. E.g: suno.com I've been recording short tunes on my low-quality $50 Ukulele (which I self-taught myself) and then getting Suno to turn it into full songs. The quality is better than anything I could possibly have produced. Even if I paid thousands of dollars to a professional, I could not get better quality than what I'm getting from Suno. I cannot tell that it's produced by AI. AI is surprisingly suitable for music. If I want lyrics, I type out the topic and underlying message of the song and the aesthetics I want (e.g. short lines, rhymes, etc...) inside Claude or ChatGPT and make it generate the lyrics. Also once you have the first draft of lyrics, you can make it refine them by telling it to rhyme in particular ways. For example, the first words of each sentence can rhyme with each other as well as the last word of each sentence and you can tell it to change the rhyme pattern each paragraph. It's amazing how it can keep the meaning of the lyrics the same but totally transform the sounds of it by swapping out words with synonyms. AI video capability is impressive but it can't get it all the way to a production-quality film. For music though, it definitely seems to be production-quality. Sometimes it takes a few attempts but it definitely seems to cross the 'professional' line regularly. Often, you don't need any tuning, trimming or intervention to the piece; it's just done.

glimshe 2y ago
Many people see AI as a replacement for the human, but current-gen AI is in my view a replacement for the hammer. It's a tool that needs to be wielded with skill for good results... And when that happens, the productivity can be truly amazing.
- jongjong 2y ago
  Agreed, I think music is one of the areas which it nails though (pun intended). The size of the human input can be very small and still produce very high quality output. I mean you can produce 0 input and fully automate it and it will still sound professional... Maybe it will lack a bit of creativity but typically only a professional would be able to know that. I think what Suno produces is often higher quality and more creative than what most modern pop stars produce... Just because the bar there happens to be quite low. If I listen to 80s music, I can see the creativity gap (at least relative to the AI's typical ouput)... But AI output is often superior to modern artists IMO.

mohsen1 2y ago

AI probably can do very nice landscaping design too. It's just that image generation models are not made for it. If we manage to give AI a more structured input, you'll get a nice design in return.

joshmarinacci 2y ago
I don't think so. Good landscaping requires knowledge of the site, the local ecosystem, and an understanding of how water and soil flow. It's a whole lot more than generating an image. The image is simply an output of the process.
- cpursley 2y ago
  Those are not esoteric things, there’s generally data available for things like climate zones, soil type, plat maps, zoning and height restrictions (for trees). I was a commercial landscaper for a decade and have done my fair share of reading architectural plans as well as design some of my own. This I think it’s doable; it could even put together a shopping lest and check with local supplies for whats in stock and generate an estimate.
cpursley 2y ago
Now this is an interest idea, have you had any success?
aprilthird2021 2y ago
I have a feeling landscaping design is not common in its dataset, not as commonly talked about online, and so it will struggle with the task. Would love to be proven wrong

Arainach 2y ago

This is presented like it's a good thing, but it quite probably implies a local maximum in cultural abilities for a long time. How do experts become experts? Through time and practice. Many great photographers hone their skills or discover their talent when working at entry level and mid level positions - shooting portraits, etc. Most great musicians, bartenders, software engineers, etc. do the same. Without entry level/apprentice jobs the only other model is patronage from the rich, and that was never a good model even before today's rich largely abandoned the belief that they had a responsibility to contribute back to the society that allowed them to become rich. Without a pipeline of new talent, where will new state of the art come from? Where will more training data for the planet burners come from?

panarky 2y ago
It's a tool, and just like other tools, it multiplies human labor and intellect. I don't need to spend a decade becoming proficient with a pocket knife, and then another decade becoming an expert with an ax. Instead, an experienced person can show me how to be safe with a chainsaw in an afternoon. I won't be an expert with the chainsaw, that still takes many hours of experience, but I don't need the knife and ax prerequisites.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
  The calculator has allowed anyone to do complex arithmetic while they're holding a calculator, required by a job or some other formal or necessary context. At the expense of retarding most people's ability to do everyday math at places like the grocery store, a context in which they won't have the wherewithal to pull out the tool. It has not increased intellect regarding anything but rote keypressed calculation.
  - idiotsecant 2y ago
    On the other hand, looking up trigonometric functions in a table to find precise answers is not a valuable human activity. Calculators keep you from having to do that.

fzeroracer 2y ago

It's funny because I see this exact same thing in game dev. A bunch of games have now decided to outsource basic logos, banners, icons etc to AI. They all end up looking very obvious and similar and I pass on them every time. It's THE core advertising for your product.

raincole 2y ago
Supermarket Simulator is a game whose Steam capsule (the very first art players see on Steam) is blatantly AI made. The estimated sales are > 2M copies. [0]: https://steamdb.info/app/2670630/charts/ https://steamdb.info/app/2670630/charts/
- nitwit005 2y ago
  A lot of those simulation games seem rather poorly made, but a couple of them have been big hits regardless. I'm sure you'd do better on average with not terrible marketing.
- aprilthird2021 2y ago
  Wonder if it would sell more if it had a good art banner instead?
  - maeil 2y ago
    Would it sell more than the additional sales that were obtained by the work done during the time saved through generating it with AI instead of finding an artist?
  - raincole 2y ago
    Of course it's possible, but 2M copies is already the top-seller in this genre. The original Goat Simulator (arguably THE one game that made "funny goofy simulator" a genre) sold ~4M. [0]: https://steamdb.info/app/265930/charts https://steamdb.info/app/265930/charts

jsemrau 2y ago

I wrote a long while about mergekit. Makes one wonder if it will be possible to just "merge" experience from specifically trained LxMs going forward.

raincole 2y ago

I don't want to sound like I am bashing the original designer of the $200 monkey mascot, but I think the author has some misunderstanding here. The market value of that was very unlikely $200. Before AI, there were so many people offering similar services on Fiverr. And from my experience they're mostly not scammers (just novices). Of course they might not live in the US, at least not in big cities. The price range for that was $20~$50. Edit: the article says 2013. I don't know if Fiverr was popular back then. I'm talking about more like 2019. At that point Fiverr and similar platforms had upended this kind of $200 market.

sdwr 2y ago
I think you would see a quality difference between 'a monkey mascot' at $40 and $200. The $200 designer is shining a light on his personal brand. The mascot is friendly, vaguely memorable, well-proportioned, soft, and not attention-seeking. Its expression tells a story, adds humanity, and creates unresolved tension. The AI ones are sharp and confident and eye-catching, zero subtlety, completely missing the point. I'm willing to bet a $40 designer would drop the ball in a different, equally bad way (probably make it too corporate, or miss the precise "cute but low-effort" spot the original designer hit).
- BoorishBears 2y ago
  It's funny because as I read the article, one thought was "the slop results look like they came from very old models" Use a model released this week and the results are (to my untrained eye) no longer distinguishable from a human artist: https://imgur.com/a/tgEsXq8 https://imgur.com/a/tgEsXq8 And it wasn't some pro image prompting magic. Even compared to 12 months ago, the text encoders have very good. I was able to use wording that came to me naturally and get an aesthetically pleasing result in seconds.
  - ebalit 2y ago
    You mentioned a model released this week. Is it Lumina new model by any chance?

breakitmakeit 2y ago

[dead]

lerp-io 2y ago

paying to fix your own bugs sounds like a skill issue

asimpletune 2y ago

All I want to know is did he pay $200 for that little vector illustration of the monkey?

rambambram 2y ago

I'm more happy that a guy who last posted on his blog in 2013 now posts again because of AI. I just started following your website Chris, now add an RSS feed. ;)