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I'm tired of the anthropomorphization marketing behind AI driving this kind of discussion. In a few years, all this talk will sound as dumb as stating "MS Word
by manoDev 1y ago
I'm tired of the anthropomorphization marketing behind AI driving this kind of discussion. In a few years, all this talk will sound as dumb as stating "MS Word spell checker will replace writers" or "Photoshop will replace designers".
We'll reap the productivity benefits from this new tool, create more work for ourselves, output will stabilize at a new level and salaries will stagnate again, as it always happens.
- amelius 1y ago> tired of anthropomorphization The thing is trained on heaps and heaps of human output. You better anthropomorphize if you want to stay ahead of the curve.
- kazinator 1y agoGenerative AI is replacing writers, designers, actors, ... it is nothing like just a spell checker or Phtoshop. Everyday, I see ads on YouTube with smooth-talking, real-looking AI-generated actors. Each one represents one less person that would have been paid. There is no exact measure of correctness in design; one bad bit does not stop the show. The clients don't even want real art. Artists sometimes refer to commercial work as "selling out", referring to hanging their artistic integrity on the hook to make a living. Now "selling out" competes with AI which has no artistic integrity to hang on the hook, works 24 hours a day for peanuts and is astonishingly prolific.
- biophysboy 1y agoYouTube has the lowest quality ads of any online platform I use by several orders of magnitude. AI being used for belly fat and erectile dysfunction ads is not exactly good for its creative reputation
- matheusd 1y agoLocal governments in BR have already made ads using generative AI that were shown during prime time TV hours[1]. You can argue that is a bad thing (local designers/content producers/actors/etc lost revenue, while the money was sent to $BigTech) or that this was a good thing (lower cost to make ad means taxpayer money saved, paying $BigTech has lower chance of corruption vs hiring local marketing firm - which is very common here). [1]https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/tecnologia/video-feito-com-inteligencia-artificial-gera-polemica-no-para-entenda/ https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/tecnologia/video-feito-com-inte...
- biophysboy 1y agoI have no doubt there will be AI advertising. I bet it’s the primary untapped revenue stream. My argument is that it will be associated with cheap, untrustworthy products over time, even if it’s possible to spend more money and get better AI ads. Same thing as social/search ads.
- frank_nitti 1y agoI agree with your sentiment. But where I struggle is: to what degree do each of those ads “represent one less person who would have been paid” versus those that represent one additional person who would not be able to afford to advertise in that medium. Of course that line of reasoning reduces similar to other automation / minimum wage / etc discussions
- boesboes 1y agoIt reminds me of the piracy lawsuits that claimed damages as if every download would have been a sale
- kazinator 1y agoThe extreme opposite idea that no unlicensed use of software is a lost sale is likewise a fantasy.
- Adverblessly 1y agoObviously there's some mix of the two, but given then I've seen AI used (poorly) for both TV commercials (in expensive time slots) and billboards (I think expensive as well, but I don't really know) where you know they can afford to pay "real people" to do it, there's definitely a noticeable amount of real replacement.
- whatever1 1y ago“ Everyday, I see ads on YouTube with smooth-talking, real-looking AI-generated actors. Each one represents one less person that would have been paid.” The thing is that they would not have paid for the actor anyway. It’s that having an “actor” and special effects for your ads cost nothing, so why not? The quality of their ads went up, the money changing hands did not change.
- mjr00 1y ago> Everyday, I see ads on YouTube with smooth-talking, real-looking AI-generated actors. Each one represents one less person that would have been paid. Were AI-generated actors chosen over real actors, or was the alternative using some other low-cost method for an advertisement like just colorful words moving around on a screen? Or the ad not being made at all? The existence of ads using generative AI "actors" doesn't prove that an actor wasn't paid. This is the same logical fallacy as claiming that one pirated copy of software represents a lost sale.
- DrewADesign 1y agoA) J. Crew and others are using AI models instead of real models. Retail modeling was steady pay-the-bills work for models and actors and is actively being replaced by AI image generators— sometimes trained on images of a particular model they’re no longer paying. Writers and stock photographers are in much worse shape. B) Even in cases where AI actors are used where there wouldn’t have been actors before, the skillset is still devalued, and even that modest insulation for higher-end work is almost certainly temporary. Someone doing a worse version of what you do for 1% of your pay affects the market, and saving 99% is great incentive for companies to change their strategy until the worse version is good enough.
- semi-extrinsic 1y agoYes, this. I recently used Midjourney to generate a super-convincing drone shot video for a presentation. The alternative would have been a stock photo. Probably took me the same amount of time to generate a pleasing video as I would have spent browsing Shutterstock. Only difference is my money goes to one corporation instead of the other. As far as the video is concerned, it adds a bit of a wow factor to get people interested, but ultimately it's the same old graphs and bullet points with words and numbers that matter. And those could just as well have been done on an overhead transparency in 1987.
- nine_k 1y agoIt means that being a live actor is less of a differentiator. Of course great movie stars will remain, playing live, or animating computer characters, no matter. But simpler works like ads featuring a human now become more accessible. Among other things, this will remove most entry-level jobs, making senior-level actors more rare and expensive.
- jvanderbot 1y agoAnecdata: I know writers, editors, and white collar non-tech workers of all kinds who use AI daily and like it. When GPT3.5 first landed a lifelong writer/editor saw a steep decrease in jobs. A year later the jobs changed to "can you edit this AI generated text to sound human", and now they continue to work doing normal editing for human or human-ish writing while declining the slop-correction deluge because it is terrible work. I can't help but see the software analogy for this.
- anthem2025 1y agoAnd as people get more used to the patterns of AI it’s getting called out more and more.
- burnte 1y agoThere's a difference between taking one thing and putting something else in it's spot, and truly REPLACING something. Yes, some ads have AI generated actors. You know because you can tell because they're "not quite right", rather than focusing on the message of the ad. Noticing AI in ads turns more people off than on, so AI ads are treated by a lot of people as an easy "avoid this company" signal. So those AI ads are in lieu of real actors, but not actually replacing them because people don't want to watch AI actors in an ad. The ad ceases to be effective. The "replacement" failed.
- zarzavat 1y agoRealistic video generation only became a thing in the last year or so. How long do you suppose it will be before we can't tell the difference between it and reality anymore? A few years at the most. Then what?
- burnte 1y agoI don't think AI will ever be able to compete with real actors, not in a meaningful way.
- kazinator 1y agoAnimated films have competed for box office dollars since basically the dawn of cinema. Animated characters have fan followings. Just wait; the stuff is coming. Ultra-realistic full-length feature films with compelling AI characters that are not consistent from beginning to end, but appear in multiple features. The public will swallow it up.
- burnte 1y agoAnimation is drawn by humans, not AI. That's why it sells, it still has heart and emotion in it.
- exe34 1y ago> Each one represents one less person that would have been paid or equally, one more advert which (let's say rightly) wouldn't have been made. seriously though, automation allows us to do things that would not have been possible or affordable before. some of these are good things.
- grugagag 1y ago> Generative AI is replacing writers, designers, actors, ... it is nothing like just a spell checker or Phtoshop. For cheap stuff it’s true. However, nobody wants to watch or listen generated content and this will wear thin aside from the niche it’ll take hold of and permanently replace humans.
- ACCount37 1y agoI'm tired of all the "yet another tool" reductionism. It reeks of cope. It took under a decade to get AI to this stage - where it can build small scripts and tiny services entirely on its own. I see no fundamental limitations that would prevent further improvements. I see no reason why it would stop at human level of performance either.
- apercu 1y agoSo maybe the truth is somewhere in between - there is no way AI is not going to have a major societal impact - like social media. If we don't see some serious fencing, I will not be surprised by some spectacular AI-caused failures in the next 3 years that wipe out companies. Business typically follows a risk-based approach to things, and in this case entire industries are yolo'ing.
- SKILNER 1y ago>> It reeks of cope. haha, well said, I've got to remember that one. HN is a smelly place when it comes to AI coping.
- bee_rider 1y agoI’ve seen comments here claiming that this site is either a bunch of coders coping about the limitations of AI and how it can’t take their job, or a bunch of startup dummies totally on the AI hype train. Now, there’s a little room between the two—maybe the site is full of coders on a cope train, hoping that we’ll be empowered by nice little tools rather than totally replaced. And, ya know, multiple posters with multiple opinions, some contradictions are expected. But I do find it pretty funny to see the multiple posters here describe the site they are using as suffering from multiple, contradictory, glaringly obvious blindspots.
- biophysboy 1y agoYou can’t see any bottlenecks? Energy? Compute power? Model limitations? Data? Money?
- 1y ago
- MintPaw 1y agoYou say it as a joke, but spell check has replaced certain tiers of editors. And Photoshop has replaced certain tiers of designers.
- flappyeagle 1y agoBad ones
- MintPaw 1y agoBad by modern standards, there was a point in time where even just compositing two images on top of each other with an alpha cutout was considered a complex task.
- manoDev 1y agoNot a joke. Proofreaders still exist, despite spell checker. Art assistants still exist, despite Photoshop. There's always more work to do, you just incorporate the new tools and bump the productivity, until it gets so commoditized it stops being a competitive advantage. Saying AI "replaces" anyone is just a matter of rhetoric to justify lower salaries, as always.
- the_af 1y ago> all this talk will sound as dumb as stating "MS Word spell checker will replace writers" or "Photoshop will replace designers". You cannot use just a spell checker to write a book (no matter how bad) or photoshop (non-AI) plugins to automatically create meaningful artwork, replacing human intervention. Business people "up the ladder" are already threatening with reducing the workforce and firing people because they can (allegedly) be replaced by AI. No writer was ever threatened by a spellchecker. Hollywood studio execs are putting pressure on writers, and now they can leverage AI as yet another tool against them.
- z2 1y agoI'm not a "real coder" either, but it sounds like the "No True Scotsman" trap when people say, “AI can’t be a real coder,” and then redefine “real coder” to mean something AI can’t currently do (like full autonomy or deep architectural reasoning). This makes the claim unfalsifiable and ignores the fact that AI already performs several coding tasks effectively. Yeah, I get it, context handling, long-horizon planning, and intent inference all stink, but the tools are all 'real' to me.
- throwboy2047 1y agoPeople are stupid, always have been - took thousands of years to accept brain as the seat of thought because “heart beat faster when excited, means heart is source of excitement”. Heck, people literally used to think eyes are the source of light since everything is dark when you close them. People are immensely, incredibly, unimaginably stupid. It has taken a lot of miracles put together to get us where we are now…but the fundamentals of what we are haven’t changed.
- stripe_away 1y ago> took thousands of years to accept brain as the seat of thought because “heart beat faster when excited, means heart is source of excitement” So what you are saying is that beings without a central nervous system cannot experience "excitement"? or perhaps the meaning of too many words has changed, and their context. When Hippocrates claimed that the brain was an organ to cool the blood, perhaps he meant that we use our thought to temper our emotions, i.e. what he said agrees with our modern understanding. However, many people read Hippocrates and laugh at him, because they think he meant the brain was some kind of radiator. Maybe because we stopped talking about "excitable" people as being "hot-blooded"
- krapp 1y ago>or perhaps the meaning of too many words has changed, and their context. When Hippocrates claimed that the brain was an organ to cool the blood, perhaps he meant that we use our thought to temper our emotions, i.e. what he said agrees with our modern understanding. The belief that the heart was the seat of thought and emotion was shared by numerous cultures[0], and was based on their naive interpretation of physiology and biology and cannot be dismissed as a modern misinterpretation of a single vague aphorism by a single person due to the preponderance of documentary evidence to the contrary from contemporary sources. Also, you're probably talking about Aristotle, not Hippocrates. >Maybe because we stopped talking about "excitable" people as being "hot-blooded" Also people still say "hot blooded" all the time. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiocentric_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiocentric_hypothesis
- krapp 1y ago
- tim333 1y agoIn a few years AI will have progressed a fair bit in a way that MS spell checker didn't.
- eMPee584 1y agoThat's based on the assumption models would not soon cross that treshold of autonomy and self-reflection that suddenly makes an escalating number of jobs (with cheap humanoids, even physical) automatable for ridiculous pricing. Even if this isn't certain, likelihood could be considered quite high and thus we urgently need a public debate / design process for the peaceful, post-commercial, post-competitive, open-access post-scarcity economy some (RBE / commoning community) have been sketching for years and years. Seems this development defies most people's sense of imagination - and that's precisely why we need to raise public awareness for the freedom and fun OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING & Universal Basic Services could bring to our tormented world. 2 billion without access to clean water? we can do much better if we break free from our collective fixation on money as the only means and way to deal with things ever.