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I've been finding that the strangest part of discussions around art AI among technical people is the complete lack of identification or empathy: it seems to me

• VoodooJuJu 4y ago
  Oh don't worry, they'll learn empathy real fast when Co-pilot becomes just Pilot and they have to take a passenger seat.
  • CuriouslyC 4y ago
    Except engineers won't become passengers, they will become air traffic controllers.
  • dumbaccount123 4y ago
• nikanj 4y ago
  Coders have been using "AI" for ages. You used to write assembly by hand, then got a compiler that you could just instruct to generate the code for you. I don't worry about my job, even though a single prompt to REPL can now replace thousands of hand-crafted machine instructions
• majani 4y ago
  It's quite typical of devs in my experience. I remember during the MegaUpload/Pirate Bay arrests, devs were quite up in arms about big media going after pirates, but when it came to devs going after app pirates with everything they've got, they were real quiet
• CyanBird 4y ago
  Lack of empathy is because we are discussing about systems, not feelings At the dawn of mechanization, these same arguments were being used by the luddites, I'd recommend you to read them, it was quite an interesting situation, same as now The reality is that advances such as these can't be stopped, even if you forbid ml legislation in the US there are hundreds of other countries which won't care same as it happens with piracy
  • astrange 4y ago
    I recommend reading the part in Capital where Marx makes fun of them for being opposed to productivity.
  • CuriousCosmic 4y ago
    Remember, luddites largely weren't against technology. What they were however was against was companies using that technology to slash their wages in exchange for being forced to do significantly more dangerous jobs. In less than a decade, textile work went from a safe job with respectable pay for artisans and craftsmen into one of the most dangerous jobs of the industrialised era with often less than a third of the pay and the workers primarily being children. That's what the luddites were afraid of. And the government response was military/police intervention, breaking of any and all strikes, and harsh punishments such as execution for damaging company property.
  • hippie_queen 4y ago
    I don't disagree, except I don't get what you mean with "because we are discussing systems, not feelings." I think artists feeling like shit in this situation is totally understandable. I'm just a dilettante painter and amateur hentai sketcher, but some of the real artists I know are practically in the middle of an existential crisis. Feeling empathy for them is not the same as thinking that we should make futile efforts to halt the progress of this technology.
    • Kalium 4y ago
      I agree, but we should pay attention when we are asked for empathy. In this very thread we have an excellent demonstration of how easy it is for an appeal to feel empathy for people's position to change into an appeal to protect the same people's financial position. I'll go so far as to say that in many cases, displaying empathy for the artists without also advocating for futile efforts to halt the progress of this technology will be regarded as a lack of empathy.
• conviencefee999 4y ago
  Its not that terrifying the way the these models work they aren't really creating new works, just taking other ones and basically copying them. Honestly, new laws for copyright have to be made I wonder when it will happen. And how the judical systems in the world will deal with it. Or if big tech has enough in the pockets to pretend it isn't an issue.
• FamosoRandom 4y ago
  being afraid is the best way to run away from what's coming. If a computer can easily do some work, simply use that work to your advantage, and do something more complicated. If a computer can generate art, use what's generated to your advantage and do something better. As long as the world is not entirely made of AI, there will always be some expertise to add, so instead of being afraid, you should just evolve with your time
  • amelius 4y ago
    You are assuming that AI will always be "open" and accessible to anyone.
    • FamosoRandom 4y ago
      I do, because I don't see why it wouldn't be. If it's revolutionary and a lot of people need it, or if it change completely the way people work/live/are entertained, it will certainly evolve to be as much accessible as possible. A succesful product is a product used by many. If it's not, why worry about it ?
      • amelius 4y ago
        > I do, because I don't see why it wouldn't be. Because of how capitalism works and people always try to corner markets, extract value from other people, etc. etc.? > If it's not, why worry about it ? Because we can choose different professions that are less susceptible to automation? Or we can study DL to implement our own AI.
        • ajmurmann 4y ago
          > we can choose different professions that are less susceptible to automation What are those? It seems it's low-margin, physical work that's seeing the least AI progress. Like berry picking. Maybe also work that will be kept AI-free longer by regulators like being a judge?
• boredemployee 4y ago
  >> making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of computer programming that is done. I completely agree with it. Take a contemporary pianist for example, the amount of dedication to both theory and practice, posture, mastering the instrument and what not, networking skills, technology skills, video recording, music recording, social media management, etc.
  • drinfinity 4y ago
    You think music theory is more demanding than CS? I've dedicated decades and probably 75% of my youth to mastering this instrument called a computing device. It has numerous layers, each completely different and each significant enough to build a standalone career out of (OS, networking, etc). I feel insulted if you think playing and mastering a piano is the same thing. Extreme specialists are found everywhere. Mastering skateboarding at world level will eat your life too, but it's not "harder" than programming. At least, for any commonsensical interpretation of "harder". All the rest, we do too. Except I don't record videos and I'm sure it is not childishly easy, but it will not eat my life.
    • monsterbasher 4y ago
      I'm literally speechless. What an arrogant and egotistical comment. This is why us tech workers have a such a bad rep as culturally ignorant/bubbled community. Do a bit of research into jazz theory and counterpoint theory before you make this kind of blatant over generalization.
    • dangond 4y ago
      This exact comment could be made by a jazz soloist with a few words changed and be just as valid. I think you're underestimating how deep other fields, including artistic fields, are. Anything as competitive as an artistic field will always result in amounts of mastery needed at the top level that are barely noticeable to outside observers.
      • lmm 4y ago
        > This exact comment could be made by a jazz soloist with a few words changed and be just as valid. It's not that uncommon for professional programmers to be pro-level musical soloists on the side, or for retired programmers to play top-level music. The reverse is far less common. I do think that says something. > Anything as competitive as an artistic field will always result in amounts of mastery needed at the top level that are barely noticeable to outside observers. Sure. Top-level artistic fields are well into the diminishing returns level, whereas programming is still at the level where even a lot of professional programmers are not just bad, but obviously bad in a way that even non-programmers can understand. Even in the easiest fields, you can always find something to compete on (e.g. the existence of serious competitive rubik's cube doesn't mean solving a rubik's cube is hard). A difficult field is one where the difference between the top and the middle is obvious to an outsider.
• rhn_mk1 4y ago
  Not being afraid of AI is not necessarily due to the lack of empathy. It could be due to acceptance: perhaps AI will make programmers obsolete. That is fine, programming is really boring most of the time, when it's just cobbling things together. Even if it will be to the short term disadvantage of some people (including the speaker), AI taking over tedious programming tasks will make humanity richer. It's up to us to distribute those gains back.
  • alxlu 4y ago
    I think the issue is that our laws and economy are not structured in a way that makes it likely for those gains to be distributed back to anyone other than the ultra wealthy. Not that I expect AI to take over most programming jobs anytime soon (or ever), but if it does, it would almost certainly happen long before society manages to agree on a system to distribute those gains back in a way that benefits the average person.
    • rhn_mk1 4y ago
      I believe that was the concern of the Luddite movement. While they failed, we can learn from them this time.
• eddiewithzato 4y ago
  yea no, the difficulty in programming as a career is interaction with other humans. I would like AI to reach the stage where it can comprehend solutions that stakeholders don’t know themselves. Because in my time the stakeholders in companies have never actually been decisive when scoping features. Co-pilot is indeed the endgame for AI assisted programming. So I would say for art, someone mindful could train an AI on their own dataset and use that to accelerate their workflow. Imagine it drawing outlines instead of the full picture.
  • mysterydip 4y ago
    > the difficulty in programming as a career is interaction with other humans It would be great if there was an AI that could be a liaison between developers and stakeholders, translating the languages of each side for mutual understanding.
• ReptileMan 4y ago
  I think that programmers are safe for now - because of the law of leaky abstractions. And there is hardly bigger and leakier abstraction than AI generated code.
• cardanome 4y ago
  I mean sure things will get harder for some artists but what is to be done about it? What will feeling sorry for them accomplish? The job market will always keep on changing, you have to adept to it to a certain degree. Now we can talk about supporting art as a public good and I am all for that but I don't see how artists are owed a corporate job. Many of my current programming skill will be obsolete one day, that's part of the game.
• gus_massa 4y ago
  I think the correct way to get empathy is to use an equivalent that technical people understand, like Copilot: * Can a Copilot-like generator be trained with the GPL code of RMS? What is the license of the output? * Can a Copilot-like generator be trained with the leaked source code of MS Windows? What is the license of the output?
  • imgabe 4y ago
    If a human learns to program by reading GPL code, what is the license of future code they write?
    • 6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago
      Why’s this matter? Corporations aren’t people.
    • zorked 4y ago
      A language model is not a human. You at least have the possiblity that the human learned something. The language model is a parrot with a large memory. That said Microsoft didn't allow their kernel developers to look at Linux code for a reason.
      • ben_w 4y ago
        What definition of learning are you using that makes humans not parrots and a deep learning system not learning? I know current AI is very different from an organic brain at many levels, but I don't know if any of those differences really matters.
        • zorked 4y ago
          Go to a judge in a copyright case and argue that humans are parrots. Then tell me how it went.
        • NateEag 4y ago
          And since you don't know if they matter, you should not presume that they don't.
• XorNot 4y ago
  No one is in programming to "do programming". They're in it to get things done. I didn't learn C++ in high school to learn C++, I learned it to make games (then C++ changed and became new and scary to me and so I no longer say I know C++, possibly I never did). If an AI will take care of most of the finicky details for me and let me focus on defining what I want and how I want it to work, then that is nothing but an improvement for everyone.
  • meebob 4y ago
    I would point out that many (most?) people are in programming to make money, rather than get things done per se. If an AI were to make it impossible to make a living doing programming, would that be an improvement for most readers of this site?
    • ZetaZero 4y ago
      It should be an improvement for people to get a career in something they enjoy, instead of what pays the most money.
      • ajmurmann 4y ago
        Yes, and there will be much fewer of those jobs and they might not pay. Ultimately though this isn't a technical problem but an economic one about how we as a society decide to share our resources. AI growth the pie, but removes leverage from some to claim their slice. Automation is why we'll inevitably need UBI at some point
      • meebob 4y ago
        What we're talking about here is the immanent arrival of it being impossible for a very large number of people to get a career in something they enjoy (making images by hand). It's fair to suppose (albeit based on a very small sample size, i.e., the last couple hundred, abnormal years of history) that all sorts of new jobs will arise as a result of these changes- but it seems to me unreasonable to suppose that these new jobs of the future will necessarily be more interesting or enjoyable than the ones they destroyed. I think it's easy to imagine a case in which the jobs are all much less pleasant (even supposing we all are wealthier, which also isn't necessarily going to be true)- imagine a future where the remaining jobs are either managerial/ownership based in nature or manual labor. To me at least, it's a bleak prospect.
• ben_w 4y ago
  I'm mostly seeing software developers looking at the textual equivalent, GPT-3, and giving a spectrum of responses from "This is fantastic! Take my money so I can use it to help me with my work!" to "Meh, buggy code, worse than dealing with a junior dev." I think the two biggest differences between art AI and code AI are that (a) code that's only 95% right is just wrong, whereas art can be very wrong before a client even notices [0]; and (b) we've been expecting this for ages already, to the extent that many of us are cynical and jaded about what the newest AI can do. [0] for example, I was recently in the Cambridge University Press Bookshop, and they sell gift maps of the city. The background of the poster advertising these is pixelated and has JPEG artefacts. It's highly regarded, and the shop has existed since 1581, and yet they have what I think is an amateur-hour advert on their walls.
  • jimmaswell 4y ago
    > code that's only 95% right is just wrong It's still worth it on the whole but I have already gotten caught up on subtly wrong Copilot code a few times.
  • Kye 4y ago
    >> "I think the two biggest differences between art AI and code AI are that (a) code that's only 95% right is just wrong, whereas art can be very wrong before a client even notices [0];" Art can also be extremely wrong in a way everyone notices and still be highly successful. For example: Rob Liefeld.
    • jhbadger 4y ago
      And in the same way as Liefeld has a problem drawing hands! Maybe he was actually ahead of us all and had an AI art tool before the rest of us.
  • meebob 4y ago
    I do appreciate that the way in which a piece of code "works" and the way in which an piece of art "works" is in some ways totally different- but, I also think that in many cases, notably automated systems that create reports or dashboards, they aren't so far apart. In the end, the result just has to seem right. Even in computer programming, amateur hour level correctness isn't so uncommon, I would say. I would personally be astonished if any of the distributed systems I've worked on in my career were even close to 95% correct, haha.
• segmondy 4y ago
  Tools happen, folks get automated away and need to retool to make themselves useful. It will happen in computing, as a matter of fact, it has happened in computing. What do you think cloud computing did? A lot of sysadmins, networking, backups, ops went the way of dinosaurs. A lot of programmers have also fallen on the side by being replaced with tech and need to catch up. Wallowing in pity is not going to make help, we saw a glimpse of this with github-copilot. Some people built the hardware, the software behind these AIs, some others are constructing the models, applying it to distinct domains. There's work to be done for those who wish to find their place in the new world.
  • spinach 4y ago
    But people aren't being automated away - their work is input, and for the AI generated art to remain fresh and relevant instead of rehashing old stuff it would need artists to continue creating new art. It's not a tool that exists independently of people's creative work (although this is true of most AI, though it seems particularly terrible with art).
• imgabe 4y ago
  I've played around a bit with Stable Diffusion and as far as I can tell, it's just a new tool, like a much better paintbrush. It still needs a human to tell it what to paint, and the best outputs generally require hours of refinement and then possibly touch-up in photoshop. It's not generating art on its own. Artists still have a job in deciding what to make and using their taste to make it look good, that hasn't changed. Maybe the fine-motor skills and hand-eye coordination are not as necessary as they were, but that's it.
  • kecupochren 4y ago
    > require hours of refinement Not disagreeing with your comment but this is not the case with Midjourney. Very little is needed to produce stunning images. But afaik they modify/enhance the prompts behind the screen
    • mtrower 4y ago
      There’s a big difference though between “a stunning image” and “the stunning image you wanted”.
      • kecupochren 4y ago
        That's very true, I stand corrected. I see people tuning their prompts for hours on public MJ channels
        • yamtaddle 4y ago
          A key difference is someone with some prompt-writing skills and a tiny amount of aesthetic taste can now compete with trained artists who actually know how to create such images from scratch. Sally in Sales and Tom in Accounting can also do art as part of their job, whenever it calls for art. And copy-writing, et c. Or will be able to in the near future. Fewer dedicated artists, fewer dedicated writers, and so on. One artist can do the work of ten, and almost anyone in the office can pinch-hit to do a little art or writing here and there (by which I mean, tell a computer to make some art, then select which of that art is best).
• mypastself 4y ago
  Tangentially, this is something I think about from time to time: in tech, you can be mediocre and live a very comfortable life. In art (and many other areas), you often have to be extraordinary just to make ends meet. So I don’t think art is “harder”. It’s just harder for the average practitioner/professional to find “success” (however you like to define it).
  • ajmurmann 4y ago
    I wonder if this is due to existing forms of automation in art. Artists have been competing with reproductions of art in the form of recordings and prints for a long time now. That creates a really high floor. How many people who play an instrument have people around them genuinely want to listen to them play rather than a recording? How much lower would the bar be if recordings didn't exist? Of course software gets copied all the time, but we have jobs because so much bespoke software is needed. Looking at some of what AI can do now, I wouldn't need surprised if our floor gets raised a lot in the next few years as well.
  • anticristi 4y ago
    I think about this too and I wonder why? Are artists really "doomed"? Or are they just worse at redistribution?
    • MomoXenosaga 4y ago
      Artists will exist as long as they can entertain the elite with their clown antics. Be entertaining. Be outrageous. Be endearing. An AI can't cut off their ear.
    • eulers_secret 4y ago
      IMO, the 'why' is due to how mature the industry is - it'll absolutely be the future for every profession, given enough time. It's the natural distribution of wealth in our society: Few have too much, most have not enough. We're all "doomed" if this is the case.
• helsinkiandrew 4y ago
  > making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of computer programming that is done Art and programming are hard for different reasons. The difference in the AI context is that a computer program has to do just about exactly whats asked of it to be useful, whereas a piece of art can go many ways and still be a piece of art. If you know what you want its quite hard to get DALL-E to produce that exactly (or it has been for me), but it still generates something that is very good looking.
• mtrower 4y ago
  Consider the compiler. There’s an awful lot of analogy there, if you think about it.
• BurningFrog 4y ago
  This has been going on for 250 years, and humanity still hasn't quite grasped it. The steady progress of the Industrial Revolution that has made the average person unimaginably richer and healthier several times over, looks in the moment just like this: "Oh no, entire industries of people are being made obsolete, and will have to beg on the streets now". And yet, as jobs and industries are automated away, we keep getting richer and healthier.
  • thedorkknight 4y ago
    Collectively, sure. How did that go for the people who's livelihoods got replaced though? I've had family members be forced to change careers from white-collar work after being laid off and unable to find engineering jobs due to people decades younger taking them all nearby. I saw firsthand the unbelievable amount of stress and depression they went through, and it took them years to accept that their previous life and career were gone. "It'll massively suck for you, but don't worry, it'll be better for everyone else" is little comfort for most of us
    • yamtaddle 4y ago
      Especially when promises and plans to use some of those windfalls of progress to help those harmed by it, seem never to see much follow-through. Progress is cool if you're on the side of the wheel that's going up. It's the worst fucking thing in the world if you're on the side that's going down and are about to get smashed into the mud.
      • lmm 4y ago
        > Especially when promises and plans to use some of those windfalls of progress to help those harmed by it, seem never to see much follow-through. The poor are economically better off than at almost any point in history; actual food poverty is almost unknown, objectively people are living in better houses than ever before, and so on. It just doesn't seem like any of that makes poor people any happier or poverty any less wretched, somehow.
• elektrontamer 4y ago
  There's nothing to be depressed about. It's not a lack of empathy it's recognition of the inevitable. Developers realize that there is no going back. AI art is here to stay. You can't ban or regulate it. It would be extremely hard to police. All there is left to do is adapt to the market like you did, even if it's extremely difficult. It's not like AI made it significantly harder anyway. The supply for artists far surpassed the demand for them before the advent of AI art. Edit: Typo
• broast 4y ago
  I'm both a digital artist and programmer. I never thought it would happen before, but I accept that this technology can easily replace some aspects of my professional value. But i don't let it take away from my experience and capacity to be creative, so I still think I have an advantage when leveraging these tools- and I've started to use them every day. Rendering was only ever a small part of the visual arts process anyway. And you can still manually add pixel perfect details to these images by hand that you wouldn't know how to create an AI prompt for. And further, you can mash together AI outputs in beautifully unique and highly controlled ways to produce original compositions that still take work to reproduce. To me, these AI's are just a tool for increased speed, like copy and paste.
• bryanrasmussen 4y ago
  Much of the history of programming has been programmers making other jobs obsolete, and indeed there is a saying that a good programmer makes themselves obsolete.
  • dumbaccount123 4y ago
    If tech that makes programmers obsolete comes then we are living in a new era. Pretty much every single job will obselete by then
• gitfan86 4y ago
  Most of us in technology have had to learn new skills. I used to rack up and wire servers in a lab as part of my dev work. I don't do that anymore and instead had to learn aws and terraform. Personally I don't expect any empathy due to my lab racking skills no longer being as relevant to many jobs.
• anothernewdude 4y ago
  I don't care. After decades of having no TV, film, books or video games aimed at me, they might finally be generated instead of the bullshit written by committees.
  • yunwal 4y ago
    Oh yeah I’m sure the AI that was trained on decades of tv, movies, and books that didn’t appeal to you will do a great job of creating things that appeal to you.
    • anothernewdude 4y ago
      I can literally ask for what I want. That's the whole point. Did the whole AI generation stuff just woosh over your head?
      • yunwal 4y ago
        Do you understand how AI works? It can’t just pop out things that are completely different from what it was trained on. See threads about how Dall-e couldn’t draw a hedgehog without glasses.
• netheril96 4y ago
  > if AI is able to do these astonishingly difficult things, why shouldn't it, with some finagling, also be able to do the dumb, simple things most programmers do for their jobs? Art is more difficult than programming for people with talents in programming but not in arts. Art is easier than programming for people with talents in arts but not in programming. Granted, those two sentences are tautology, but nonetheless a reminder that the difficulty of art and programming does not form a total order.
• MrPatan 4y ago
  Because we know it's not going to happen any time soon, and when it does happen it won't matter only to devs, that's the singularity. You'll find out because you're now an enlightened immortal being, or you won't find out at all because the thermonuclear blast (or the engineered plague, or the terminators...) killed you and everybody else. Does that mean there won't be some enterprising fellas who will hook up a chat prompt to some website thing? And that you can demo something like "Add a banner. More to the right. Blue button under it" and that works? Sure. And when it's time to fiddle with the details of how the bloody button doesn't do the right thing when clicked, it's back to hiring a professional that knows how to talk to the machine so it does what you want. Not a developer! No, of course not, no, no, we don't do development here, no. We do prompts.
• nonameiguess 4y ago
  The entire history of computer programming is using code generation tools to increase the level of abstraction most programmers work at. Having yet another one of those doesn't seem to present any realistic chance of replacing all of the development, testing, maintenance, and refinement of that entire stack. If your job is literally just being handed over a paragraph or so written requirement for a single function or short script, giving back that function/script, and you're done, then sure, worry. But at least every job I've had so far also entailed understanding the entire system, the surrounding ecosystem, upstream and downstream dependencies and interactions, the overall goal being worked toward, and playing some role in coming up with the requirements in the first place. ChatGPT can't even currently update its fixed-in-time knowledge state, which is entirely based on public information. That means it can't even write a conforming component of a software system that relies on any internal APIs! It won't know your codebase if it wasn't in its training set. You can include the API in the prompt, but then that is still a job for a human with some understanding of how software works, isn't it?
• threatofrain 4y ago
  One of the things that I find problematic is that we enjoy so many conveniences or efficiencies where taking a step back feels unimaginable. We used to have human computers. Going back on this to rescue an old profession would seem unimaginable. Paying individual taxes is very easy for many nations. Going to what the US has just to rescue many accounting jobs seems absurd. Now imagine a future where AI can assist in law. Or should we not have that because lawyers pay so much for education and they work so bitterly? Should we do away with farm equipment as well? Should we destroy musical synths so that we can have more musicians? It’s one thing to say we should have a government program to ease transitions in industry. It’s something else to say that we should hold back technological progress because jobs will be destroyed. How do we develop a coherent moral framework to address this matter?
• knighthack 4y ago
  If "making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of computer programming that is done" - then I'm sorry, you must not be doing very difficult computer programming.
  • NateEag 4y ago
    what's the most difficult art project you've produced? Comparing these is very "apples and oranges", but I think you'd better have a strong background in both if you're gonna try.
    • CadmiumYellow 4y ago
      I have a strong background in both and I think creating good art is worlds more difficult than writing good code. It's both technically difficult and intellectually challenging to create something that people actually want to look at. Learning technical skills like draughtsmanship is harder than learning programming because you can't just log onto a free website and start getting instant & accurate feedback on your work. I do agree that it's very apples and oranges though - creating art requires a level of intuition and emotion that's mostly absent from technical pursuits like programming, and this very distinction is both the reason technical people can be so dismissive of the arts AND the reason why I think making art is ultimately more difficult.
      • quonn 4y ago
        This is a very strange thing to say since great art is often not technically difficult at all. Much of modern and contemporary art is like that, nevertheless the art is superb. > Learning technical skills like draughtsmanship is harder than learning programming because you can't just log onto a free website and start getting instant & accurate feedback on your work. Really? I sometimes wonder what people think programming really is. Not what you describe, obviously.
        • CadmiumYellow 4y ago
          I actually think a lot of modern and contemporary art is more technically difficult than it appears (though certainly not as technically difficult as making a marble sculpture or something). But fair point. Not sure I fully understand your second point: are you implying that I don't really know what programming is?
• mrbombastic 4y ago
  I feel like I am missing something or holding it wrong, I would personally love if we had a tool that i could describe problems at a high level and out comes a high quality fully functional app. Most software is shit and if we are honest with ourselves there is a huge amount of inessential complexity in this field built up over the years. I would gladly never spend weeks building something someone else already built in a slightly different way because it doesn’t meet requirements, I would gladly not end up in rabbit holes wrestling with some dependency compatibility issue when I am just trying to create value for the business. If the tools get better the software gets better and the compexity we can manage gets larger. That said while these tools are incredibly impressive, having messed with this for a few days to try to even do basic stuff, what am I missing here? It is a nice starting point and can be a productivity boost but the code produced is often wrong and it feels a long way away from automating my day to day work.
  • kypro 4y ago
    > I would personally love if we had a tool that i could describe problems at a high level and out comes a high quality fully functional app. I'm sure your employer would love that more than you. That's the issue here. > That said while these tools are incredibly impressive, having messed with this for a few days to try to even do basic stuff, what am I missing here? It is a nice starting point and can be a productivity boost but the code produced is often wrong and it feels a long way away from automating my day to day work. This is the first irritation of such a tool and it's already very competent. I'm not even sure I'm better at writing code than GPT, the only thing I can do that it can't is compile and test the code I produce. If you asked me to create a React app from a two sentence prompt and didn't allow me to search the internet, compile or test it I'm sure I'd probably make more mistakes than GPT to be honest.
    • alt227 4y ago
      If I had the tool that did that, I would be the employer!
      • mrbombastic 4y ago
• chii 4y ago
  The empathy you imply might also require that the artists (or programmer's) jobs be preserved, for the sake of giving them purpose and a way to make a living. I dont think that is absolutely something a society must guarantee. People are made obsolete all the time. What needs to be done is to produce new needs that currently cannot be serviced by the new AI's. I'm sure it will come - as it has for the past hundred years when technology supplanted an existing corpus of workers. A society can make this transition smoother - such as a nice social safety-net, and low-cost/free education for retraining into a different field. In fact, these things are all sorely needed today, without having the AIs' disruptions.
  • deleted 4y ago
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• drinfinity 4y ago
  Making art is not "vastly more difficult" or at least it is (IMO) highly debatable. Some parts of it require decades of experience to do with any kind of excellence, yes. That's also the case with powerlifting, figure skating and raising children and indeed programming. It's just that your boss made a money printer that takes in bullshit and outputs bullshit which gives you your cosy job. But that is not "programming". That is glueing together bullshit until it works and the results of that "work" are "blessing" us everyday. The gift that keeps on giving. You FAANG people are indeed astronomically, immorally, overpaid and actively harm the world. But, luckily, the world has more layers than that. Programming for Facebook is not the same as programming for a small chemical startup or programming in any resource-restricted environment where you can't just spin up 1000 AWS instances at your leisure and you actually have to know what you're doing with the metal.
• Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  While it was far from all of them, lots of the people who are decrying AI art were recently gleefully cheering the destruction of blue-collar jobs held by people with what they view as unacceptable value systems. "Learn to code" was a middle finger both to the people losing their jobs and to those who already code and don't want to see the value of their skills diluted. There's been plenty of "lack of empathy" going around lately, mostly because of ideological fault lines. Perhaps this will be a wake-up call that monsters rarely obey their masters for very long before turning on them.
  • thedorkknight 4y ago
    >lots of the people who are decrying AI art were recently gleefully cheering the destruction of blue-collar job I hear these sorts of statements a lot, and always wonder how people come to the conclusion that "people who said A were the ones who were saying B". Barring survey data, how would you know that it isn't just the case that it seems that way? The idea that people who would tell someone else to learn to code are now luddites seems super counter-intuitive to me. Wouldn't people opposing automation now likely be the same ones opposing it in the past? Why would you assume they're the same group without data showing it? I know a bunch of artists personally and none of them seem to oppose blue-collar work
  • zztop44 4y ago
    Many of the artists I know personally are blue collar workers. One is a house painter, one an airport luggage handler, one works in a restaurant (which is perhaps working class rather than blue collar per se). Honestly, I think “learn to code” is mostly used sarcastically?
• Kalium 4y ago
  What's going to happen if technologists collectively come to the table and engaging in sincere discussion rooted in kindness, compassion, and empathy? I fully expect there will be zero reciprocation. There will, instead, be a strong expectation that that empathy turns into centering of fear and a resulting series of economic choices. AI systems are now threatening the ability of some artists to get paid and those artists would like that to stop. I think we're seeing it right now. You shift effortlessly from talking about empathy to talking about the money. You consider the one the way to get the other, so you deplore the horrifying lack of empathy. Let me put it another way. Would you be happy if you saw an outpouring of empathy, sympathy, and identification with artists coupled with exactly the same decisions about machine learning systems?
  • lilactown 4y ago
    Yes, an outpouring of sympathy, empathy, etc combined with the same unilateral decision making that technologists make would be terrible. I would call continuing to do that unempathetic. Technologists acting like technocrats and expecting everyone to give them sympathy, empathy and identification is laughably rude and insulting.
  • Mezzie 4y ago
    I do find it funny that artists are complaining about things like AI generated art clogging up art sites/reducing commissions/etc. because my particular artistic outlet of choice is writing and visual art has completely overtaken text based content online, particularly for anything fandom or nerd adjacent. The visual artists are also responsible for the monetization of fandom to begin with which I'm still pretty salty about. We moved from discussions and fanfic to 500+ 'commission me to draw your OTP!' and 'Look at this skimpy character art!' daily posts. Shoe's on the other foot now and they don't like it.
• sacado2 4y ago
  In art, you can afford a few mistakes. Like, on many photo-realistic pictures generated by midjourney, if you look closely you'll see a thing or two that are odd in the eyes of characters. In an AI-generated novel, you can accept a typo here and there, or not even notice it if it's really subtle. In a program, you can't really afford that. A small mistake can have dramatic consequences. Now, maybe in the next few years you'll only need one human supervisor fixing AI bugs where you used to need 10 high-end developers, but you probably won't be able to make reliable programs just by typing a prompt, the way you can currently generate a cover for an e-book just by asking midjourney. As for the political consequences of all of this, this is yet another issue.
  • mullingitover 4y ago
    I'm not sure that humans are going to beat AI in terms of defect rate in software, especially given that with AI you produce code at a fast enough rate that corner cutting (like skipping TDD) often done by human developers is off the table. I don't think this is going to put developers out of work, however. Instead, lots of small businesses that couldn't afford to be small software companies suddenly will be able to. They'll build 'free puppies,' new applications that are easy to start building, but that require ongoing development and maintenance. As the cambrian explosion of new software happens we'll only end up with more work on our hands.
    • exceptione 4y ago
      Will you be happy to curate bot output? Could the bot not curate its own output? It has been shown that back feeding into the model result in improvement. I got the idea that better results come from increments. The AI overlords (model owners) will make sure they learn from all that curating you might do too, making your job even less skilled. Read: you are more replaceable. Please prove me wrong! I hope I am just anxious. History has proven that increases in productivity tend to go to capital owners, unless workers have bargaining power. Mine workers were paid relatively well here, back in the day. Complete villages and cities thrived around this business. When those workers were no longer needed the government had to implement social programs to prevent a societal collapse there. Look around, Musk wants you to work 10 hours per day already. Don't expect an early retirement or a more relaxed job..
• strken 4y ago
  My empathy for artists is fighting with my concern for everyone else's future, and losing. It would be very easy to make training ML models on publicly available data illegal. I think that would be a very bad thing because it would legally enshrine a difference between human learning and machine learning in a broader sense, and I think machine learning has huge potential to improve everyone's lives. Artists are in a similar position to grooms and farriers demanding the combustion engine be banned from the roads for spooking horses. They have a good point, but could easily screw everyone else over and halt technological progress for decades. I want to help them, but want to unblock ML progress more.
  • allturtles 4y ago
    > My empathy for artists is fighting with my concern for everyone else's future, and losing. My empathy for artists is aligned with my concern for everyone else's future. > I want to help them, but want to unblock ML progress more. But progress towards what end? The ML future looks very bleak to me, the world of "The Machine Stops," with humans perhaps reduced to organic effectors for the few remaining tasks that the machine cannot perform economically on its own: carrying packages upstairs, fixing pipes, etc. We used to imagine that machines would take up the burden our physical labor, freeing our minds for more creative and interesting pursuits: art, science, the study of history, the study of human society, etc. Now it seems the opposite will happen.
    • BudaDude 4y ago
      I don't get this argument. Artists will not be replaced by AI. AI will become a tool like Photoshop for artists. AI will not replace creativity.
      • wnkrshm 4y ago
        It does just that though? Don't tell me nobody is surpised sometimes while prompting a diffusion model, that can only happen if a significant portion of creation happens, in a non-intuitive way for the user - what you could describe as 'coming up with something'.
• Mezzie 4y ago
  I find it weird that they're considered separate talents. Programming is a creative task for me, and one reason I never took it up as a full time job is that I learned I hate trying to do creative work on demand. (I've been paid for both fiction writing and dev work and they produce very similar feelings in me.) Programming is definitely easier to make a living from. I'm a very mediocre artist and developer and I'm never making enough off of art to live on, but I could get a programming job at a boring company and it would pay a living wage. In that sense, it's definitely 'easier'.
• runald 4y ago
  Sorry, I have no reason to be afraid of AI taking my job, not now, not ever. You seem to have a condescending idea of what programming is, given how you describe it as simple and dumb, but I can assure you, programming would be one of the last jobs to be deprecated by AI. If you think ChatGPT is enough to put programmers on the street, I would question what kind of programming you do. I would turn this around to you: if a braindead AI can do these astonishingly difficult art, maybe art was never difficult to begin with, and that artists are merely finagling dumb, simple things to their work. Sounds annoying and condescending right? If you disagree what I said about art, maybe you ought to be more aware of your own lack of empathy.
• CuriouslyC 4y ago
  If you were transported back to the 19th century, would you have empathy for the loom operators smashing mechanical looms? Art currently requires two skills - technical rendering ability, and creative vision/composition. AI tools have basically destroyed the former, but the latter is still necessary. Professional artists will have to adjust their skillset, much like they had to adjust their skillset when photography killed portrait painting as a profession.
  • yunwal 4y ago
    > AI tools have basically destroyed the former Do you people think art is relegated to digital images only? No video? No paintings, sculptures, mixed media, performance art, lighting, woodwork, etc etc. How is it possible that everyone seems to ignore that we still have massive leaps required in AI and robotics to match the technical ability of 99% of artists.
• jhbadger 4y ago
  I think it's more a lack of historical perspective on the part of artists. I remember when Photoshop and other digital art tools became available and many artists were of the opinion "Feh! Digital art isn't really art. Real artists work with pens, brushes, and paper!". Fast forward a couple of decades and you won't find many artists still saying that. Instead they've embraced the tools. I expect the future won't be AI art vs human art but rather a hybrid as art tools incorporate the technique and artists won't think it is any less art than using other digital tools.
  • odessacubbage 4y ago
    the issue at hand has nothing to do with gatekeeping, elitism or any kind of psued debate about what constitutes real art. people are mad because job & portfolio sites are being flooded with aishit which is making them unusable for both artists and clients . people are mad because their copyright is being scraped and resold for profit by third parties without their consent. whether ai is the future is an utterly meaningless distraction until these concerns are addressed. as an aside, ai evangelists telling working professionals that they 'simply don't get' their field of expertise has been an incredibly poor tact for generating goodwill towards this technology or the operations attempting to extract massive profit from it's implementation.
• unshavedyak 4y ago
  I think i have a fair bit of empathy in this area and, well like you said, i think my job (software) is likely to be displaced too. Furthermore, i think companies have data sets regardless of if we allow public use or not. Ie if we ban public use, then only massive companies (Google/etc) will have enough data to train these. Which.. seems worse to me. At the end of the day though, i think i'm an oddball in this camp. I just don't think there's that much difference between ML and Human Learning (HL). I believe we are nearly infinitely more complex but as time goes on i think the gulf between ML and HL complexity will shrink. I recently saw some of MKBHD's critiques of ML and my takeaway was that he believes ML cannot possibly be creative. That it's just inputs and outputs.. and, well, isn't that what i am? Would the art i create (i am also trying to get into art) not be entirely influenced by my experiences in life, the memories i retain from it, etc? Humans also unknowingly reproduce work all the time. "Inspiration" sits in the back of their minds and then we regurgitate it out thinking it as original.. but often it's not, it's derivative. Given that all creative work is learned, though, the line between derivative and originality seems to just be about how close it is to pre-existing work. We mash together ideas, and try to distance it from other works. It doesn't matter what we take as inspiration, or so we claim, as long as the output doesn't overlap too much with pre-existing work. ML is coming for many jobs and we need to spend a lot of time and effort thinking about how to adapt. Fighting it seems an uphill battle. One we will lose, eventually. The question is what will we do when that day comes? How will society function? Will we be able to pay rent? What bothers me personally is just that companies get so much free-reign in these scenarios. To me it isn't about ML vs HL. Rather it's that companies get to use all our works for their profit.
  • wnkrshm 4y ago
    > We mash together ideas, and try to distance it from other works. It doesn't matter what we take as inspiration, or so we claim, as long as the output doesn't overlap too much with pre-existing work. I feel a big part what makes it okay or not okay here is intention and capability. Early in an artistic journey things can be highly derivative but that's due to the student's capabilities. A beginner may not intend to be derivative but can't do better. I see pages of applications of ML out there being derivative on purpose (Edit: seemingly trying to 'outperform' given freelance artists with glee, in their own styles).
• lolinder 4y ago
  Making money through art is already not a feasible career, as you yourself learned. If you want a job that millions of people do for fun in their free time, you can expect that job to be extremely hard to get and to pay very little. The solution isn't to halt technological progress to try to defend the few jobs that are actually available in that sector, the solution is to fight forward to a future where no one has to do dull and boring things just to put food on the table. Fight for future where people can pursue what they want regardless of whether it's profitable. Most of that fight is social and political, but progress in ML is an important precursor. We can't free everyone from the dull and repetitive until we have automated all of it.
  • stemlord 4y ago
    >The solution isn't to halt technological progress Technological progress is not a linear deterministic progression. We decide how to progress every step of the way. The problem is that we are making dogshit decisions for some reason Maybe we lack the creativity to envision alternative futures. How does a society become so uncreative I wonder
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • visarga 4y ago
      > We decide how to progress every step of the way. I think the wheels are turning. It's just a resultant movement from thousands of small movements, but nobody is controlling it. If you take a look not even wars dent the steady progress of science and technology.
    • godelski 4y ago
      But do you know what reducing the progress of generative modeling will do? Because there seems to be this confusion that generative modeling is about art/music/text.
    • MSFT_Edging 4y ago
      You'll find its nearly impossible to imagine a world without capitalism. Capitalism is particularly good at weaponizing our own ideas against us. See large corporations co-opting anti-capitalist movements for sales and PR. Pepsi-co was probably mad that they couldn't co-op "defund the police", "fuck 12", and "ACAB" like they could with "black lives matter". Anything near and dear to us will be manipulated into a scientific formula to make a profit, and anything that cannot is rejected by any kind of mainstream media. See: Capitalist Realism and Manufactured Consent(for how advertising effects freedom of speech in any media platform).
• syntheweave 4y ago
  I have crossed over the other direction from coding to drawing and suspect that neither side understands their craft well enough to assess what'll happen. Most of coding is routine patterns that are only perceived as complex because of the presence of other coders and the need to "talk" with them, which creates a need for reference materials(common protocols, documentation, etc.) Likewise, most of painting is routine patterns complicated by a mix of human intent(what's actually communicated) and the need for reference materials to make the image representational. Advancements in Western painting between the Renaissance and the invention of photography track with developments in optics; the Hockney-Falco thesis is the "strong" version of this, asserting that specific elements in historical paintings had to have come through the use of optical projections, not through the artist's eyes. A weaker form of this would say that the optics were tools for study and development of the artist's eye, but not always the go-to tool, especially not early on when their quality was not good. Coding has been around for a much shorter time, but mostly operates on the assumptions of bureaucracy: that which is information is information that can be modelled, sorted, searched. And the need for more code exists relative to having more categories of modelled data. Art already faced its first crisis of purpose with the combination of photography and mass reproduction. Photos produced a high level of realism, and as it became cheaper to copy and print them, the artist moved from a necessary role towards a specialist one - an "illustrator" or "fine artist". What an AI can do - given appropriate training, prompt interfaces and supplementary ability to test and validate its output - is produce a routine result in a fraction of the time. And this means that it can sidestep the bureaucratic mode entirely in many circumstances and be instructed "more of this, less of that" - which produces features like spam filters and engagement-based algorithms, but also means that entire protocols are reduced to output data if the AI is a sufficiently good compiler; if you can tell the AI what you want the layout to look like and it produces the necessary CSS, then CSS is more of a commodity. You can just draw a thing, possibly add some tagging structure, and use that as the compiler's input. Visual coding. But that makes the role a specialized one; nobody needs a "code monkey" for such a task, they need a graphic designer...which is an arts job. That is, the counterpoint to "structured, symbolic prompts generating visual data" is "visual prompts generating structured, symbolic data". ML can be structured in either direction, it just takes thoughtful engineering. And if the result is a slightly glitchy web site, it's an acceptable tradeoff. Either way, we've got a pile of old careers on their way out and new careers replacing them.
• odessacubbage 4y ago
  it's been very frustrating to see how much ignorance and incuriosity is held by what i assume to be otherwise very worldly, intelligent and technical people in regards to what working artists actually do.
• incrudible 4y ago
  > In my humble estimation, making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of computer programming that is done. The value of work is not measured by its difficulty. There's a small amount of people who make a living doing contract work that may be replaced by an AI, but these people were in a precarious position in the first place. The well-to-do artists are not threatened by AI art. The value of their work is derived from them having put their name on it. If you assume that most programming work could be done by an AI "soon", then we really have to question what sort of dumb programming work people are doing today and whether that wouldn't disappeared anyway, once funding runs dry. Mindlessly assembling snippets from Stackoverflow may well be threatened by AI very soon, so if that's your job, consider the alternatives.
• davidguetta 4y ago
  Or its a big non event.. tech change, culture change, people hange #shrug What about the horse-powered carrioles devastated by cars !!
• lordfrito 4y ago
  I want to apologize in advance if my response here seems callous considering your personal experience as an artist. I'm trying to talk about AI and labor in general here, and don't mean to minimize your personal experience. That said, I don't think AIs ability to generate art is a major milestone in the progress of things, I think it's more of the same, automating low value-add processes. I agree that AI is/will-be an incredibly disruptive technology. And that automation in general is putting more and more people out of jobs, and extrapolated forward you end up in a world where most humans don't have any practical work to do other than breed and consume resources at ever increasing rates. As much as I'm impressed by AI art (it's gorgeous), at the end of the day it's mainly just copying/pasting/smoothing out objects it's seen before (training set). We don't think of it as clipart, but that's essentially what it is underneath it all, just a new form of clipart. Amazing in it's ability to reposition, adjust, smooth images, have some sense of artistic placement, etc. It's lightyears beyond where clipart started (small vector and bitmap libraries). But at the end of the day it's just automating the creation of images using clipart. Re-arranging images you've seen before so is not going to make anyone big $$$. End of the day the quality of the output is entirely subjective, just about anything reasonable will do. This reminds me a lot of GPT-3... looks like it has substance but not really. GPT-3 is great at making low value clickbait articles of cut-and-paste information on your favorite band or celebrity. GPT-3 will never be able to do the job of a real journalist, pulling pieces together to identify and expose deeper truths, to say, uncover the Theranos fraud. It's just Eliza [1] on steroids. The AI parlor tricks started with Eliza, and have gotten quite elaborate as of late. But they're still just parlor tricks. Comparing it to the challenges of programming, well yes I agree AI will automate portions of it, but with major caveats. A lot of what people call "programming" today is really just plumbing. I'm a career embedded real-time firmware engineer, and it continues to astonish me that there's an entire generation of young "programmers" who don't understand basic computing principles, stacks, interrupts, I/O operations.. at the end of the day their knowledge base seems comprised of knowing which tool to use where in orchestration, and how to plumb it together. And if they don't know the answer they simply google and stack overflow will tell them. Low code, no code, etc. (python is perfect for quickly plumbing two systems together). This skill set is very limited and wouldn't even get you a junior dev position when I started out. I'm not suprised it's easy to automate, as it will generally have the same quality code (and make the same mistakes) as a human dev that simply copies/pastes Stack Overflow solutions. This is in stark contrast to the types of problems that most programmers used to solve in the old days (and a smaller number still do). Stuff that needed an engineering degree and complex problem solving skills. But when I started out 30 years ago, "programmers" and "software engineers" were essentially the same thing. They aren't now, there is a world of difference between your average programmer and a true software engineer today. Not saying plumbers aren't valuable.. they absolutely are as more and more of the modern world is built on plumbing things together. Highly skilled software engineers are needed less and less, and that's a net-good thing for humanity. No one needs to write operating systems anymore, lets add value building on top of them. Those are the people making the big $$$, their skillset is quite valuable. We're in the middle of a bi-furcation of software engineering careers. More and more positions will only require limited skills, and fewer and fewer (as a percentage) will continue to be highly skilled. So is AI going to come in and help automate the plumbing? Heck yes, and rightly so... They've automated call centers, warehouse logistics, click-bait article writing, carry-out order taking, the list goes on and on. I'd love to have an AI plumber I could trust to do most of the low-level work right (and in CI/CD world you can just push out a fix if you missed something). I don't believe for a second that today's latest and greatest "cutting edge" AI will ever be able to solve the hard problems that keep highly skilled people employed. New breakthroughs are needed, but I'm extremely skeptical. Like fusion promises, general purpose AI always seems just a decade or two away. Skilled labor is safe, for now.. maybe for a while yet. The real problem as I see it, is that AI automation is on course to eliminate most low skilled jobs in the next century, which puts it on a collision course with the fact that most humans aren't capable of performing highly skilled work (half are below average by definition). Single parent workig the GM line in the 50's was enough afford an average family a decent life. Not so much where technology is going. At the end of the day the average human will have little to contribute to civilization, but still expects to eat and breed. Universal basic income has been touted as a solution to the coming crisis, but all that does is kick the can down the road. It leads to a world of too much idle time (and the devil will find work for idle hands) and ever growing resource consumption. A perfect storm.... at the end of the day what's the point of existing when all you do is consume everything around you and don't add any value? Maybe that's someone's idea of utopia, but not mine. This has been coming for a long time, AI art is just a small step on the current journey, not a big breakthrough but a new application in automation. /rant [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago
  It’s especially absurd that they have no empathy for this exploiting artists’ work, and then get upset when it spits out GPL code. The people who generated the training data should have a say in how their work is used. Opt-in, not opt-out.
• pkdpic 4y ago
  Sidenote, you don't sound like a failed artist to me man. You sound like someone who survived the art machine and worked hard to make a smart career transition capable of supporting whatever kind of art you want to make. PS I did the same thing, painting MFA --> software development. Wish I was making FAANG money tho...
• akiselev 4y ago
  It’s not about empathy but about the fundamental nature of the job. Developers will be fine because software engineering is an arms race - a rather unique position to be in as a professional. I saw this play out during the 2000s offshoring scare when many of us thought we'd get outsourced to India. Instead of getting outsourced, the industry exploded in size globally and everything that made engineers more productive also made them a bigger threat to competitors, forcing everyone to hire or die. Businesses only need so much copy or graphic design, but the second a competitors gains a competitive advantage via software they have to respond in kind - even if it's a marginal advantage - because software costs so little to scale out. As the tech debt and the revenue that depends on it grows, the baseline number of staff required for maintenance and upkeep grows because our job is to manage the complexity. I think software is going to continue eating the world at an accelerated pace because AI opens up the uncanny valley: software that is too difficult to implement using human developers writing heuristics but not so difficult it requires artificial general intelligence. Unlike with artists, improvements in AI don’t threaten us, they instead open up entire classes of problems for us to tackle
  • oldstrangers 4y ago
    Technically I'd imagine AI threatens developers (https://singularityhub.com/2022/12/13/deepminds-alphacode-conquers-coding-performing-as-well-as-humans/ https://singularityhub.com/2022/12/13/deepminds-alphacode-co...) a lot more than artists because there's a tangible (or 'objectively correct') problem being solved by the AI. Whereas art is an entirely subjective endeavor, and ultimately the success of what is being made is left up to how someone is feeling. I also imagine humans will begin to look at AI generated art very cynically. Maybe we all collectively agree we hate AI art, and it becomes as cliché as terrible stock photography. Or, we just choose not to appreciate anything that doesn't come with a 'Made By Humans' authentication... Pretty simple solution for the artists. Obviously a lot of money will be lost for artists in a variety of commercial fields, but the ultimate "success of art" will be unapproachable by AI given its subjective nature. Developers though will be struggling to compete from both a speed and technical point of view, and those hurdles can't be simply overcome with a shift in how someone feels. And you're right about the arms race, it just won't be happening with humans. It'll be computing power, AIs and the people capable of programming those AIs.
• lxe 4y ago
  > In my humble estimation, making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of computer programming that is done. You're comparing apples to oranges. Digging a trench by hand is also vastly more difficult than art or programming. There's just as much AI hype around code generation, and some programmers are also complaining (https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/8/23446821/microsoft-openai-github-copilot-class-action-lawsuit-ai-copyright-violation-training-data https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/8/23446821/microsoft-openai...). Overall though the sentiment is that AI tools are useful and are a sign of progress. The fact that they are stirring so much contention and controversy is just a sign of how revolutionary they are.
• medellin 4y ago
  The lack of empathy in general on online forums is incredible. I don’t think NH is any worse than other places but it would be nice if we could be a little better as it would lead to some more interesting and nuanced topics. As a developer/manager i am not yet scared of AI because i have had to already correct multiple people this week who tried to use chatGPT to figure something out. It’s actually pretty good but when it’s wrong it seems to be really wrong and when you don’t have the background to figure that out a ton of time is wasted. It’s just a better Stackoverflow at the end of the day imo.
• toldyouso2022 4y ago
  The arithmetic a computer can do instantly is much more difficult to me that writing this sentence. Point being: we can't compare human and computer skills. As if I'm worried, I'm not because, if there is no government intervention to ruin things, even if I lose my job as a programmer society becomes richer and I can always move to do another thing while having access to cheaper goods People should stop giving work all this meaning and also they should study economics so they chill. Learn and chill.
• sciclaw 4y ago
  The thing with programming is that it either works or does not work, but there is a huge window of what can be called art. With no training, I, or even a 1 year old, could make something and call it art. I wouldn't claim it's very good but I think most people would accept it as art. The same cannot be said for programming.
• furyofantares 4y ago
  > it seems to me that most computer programmers should be just as afraid as artists, in the face of technology like this!!! I'm just as excited for myself as I am for artists. The current crop of these tools look like they could be powerful enablers for productivity and new creativity in their respective spaces. I happen to also welcome being fully replaced, which is another conversation and isn't really where I see these current tools going, though it's hard to extrapolate.
• eatsyourtacos 4y ago
  >it seems to me that most computer programmers should be just as afraid as artists That is absurd. Sure some basic AI tools have been helpful like co-pilot and it's sometimes really impressive how it can help me autofill some code instead of typing it out... but come on, there is no way we are anywhere close to AI replacing 99.99% of developers. >making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of computer programming that is done I don't know.. art is "easy" in the sense that we all know what art looks like. You want a picture of a man holding a cup with a baby raven in it? I can picture that in my head to some degree right away, and then it's just "doing the process" to draw it in some way using shapes we know. How in the heck can you correlate that to 99% of business applications? Most of the time no one even knows exactly what they want out of a project.. so first there is the massive amount of constant changes just from using stuff. Then there is the actual way the code is created itself. Let's even say you could tell it "Make me an angular website with two pages and a live chat functionality" and it worked. Well, ok great it got you a starting template.. but first, maybe the code is so weird or unintuitive that it's almost impossible to really keep building upon- not helpful. Now let's say it is "descent enough", well fine.. then it's almost like an advanced co-pilot at this point. It helps with boilerplate boring template. But comparing this all to art is still just ridiculous. Again, everyone can look at a picture and say "this is what I wanted" or "this is not what I wanted at all". Development is so crazy intricate that it's nothing like art.. I could look at two websites (similar to art) and say "these look the same", but under the hood it could be a million times different in functionality, how it works, how well it's structured to evolve over time.. etc etc. But if I look at two pictures that look exactly the same, I don't care how it got there or how it was created- it's done and exactly the same. Not true of development for 99% of cases.
  • quonn 4y ago
    This comment is downvoted, but it makes an important point. AI systems that produce an outcome that can be easily verified by non-experts are far more practical. If my mom can get an illustration out of the AI that she wants, she is done. Not so for software, where she cannot really verify it‘s that going to reliably do what was specified. This is especially true for complex pieces. If an AI could produce a world-class totally amazing illustration or even a book I will afterwards easily see or read it. On the other hand real-world software systems consist of hundreds of thousands or lines in distributed services. How would a layman really judge if they work? Nevertheless I also expect AI to have a big impact since less engineers can do much more.
• AlexandrB 4y ago
  Setting aside questions of whether there is copyright infringement going on, I think this is an unprecedented case in the history of automation replacing human labor. Jobs have been automated since the industrial revolution, but this usually takes the form of someone inventing a widget that makes human labor unnecessary. From a worker's perspective, the automation is coming from "the outside". What's novel with AI models is that the workers' own work is used to create the thing that replaces them. It's one thing to be automated away, it's another to have your own work used against you like this, and I'm sure it feels extra-shitty as a result.
  • wwweston 4y ago
    Absolutely this -- and in many (maybe most cases), there was no consent for the use of the work in training the model, and quite possibly no notice or compensation at all. That's a huge ethical issue whether or not it's explicitly addressed in copyright/ip law.
    • api 4y ago
      I really think there's likely to be gigantic class action lawsuits in the near future, and I support them. People did not consent for their data and work to be used in this way. In many cases people have already demonstrated using custom tailored prompts that these models have been trained on copyrighted works that are not public domain.
      • archontes 4y ago
        Consent isn't required if they're making their work available for public viewing.
        • granshaw 4y ago
          For VIEWING. This is like blatantly taking your gpl licensed code and using it for commercial purposes
• xwdv 4y ago
  I have zero empathy for “artists”. Art produced for commercial purposes is no art at all, a more apt title for such a job is “asset creator”, and these people are by no means banned from using AI generation tools to make their work easier. Already artists will generate some logo off a prompt that takes a few minutes and charge full price for it. Why cry about it? I would argue because most AI imagery right now is made for fun and not monetary gains, so it is actually a purer form of art.
• imknewhere 4y ago
  What I find interesting is how people literally cannot see any alternative besides, "This is just the way capitalism works", which implicitly acknowledges "capitalism is the only way it can work".
  • exceptione 4y ago
    Spot on. Our thinking on these matters is more adherence to faith than reason. We are stuck in a collective meme. A belief system that centers around human well being sounds more reasonable than *unbounded* capitalism. We know it, we don't know what to do with it.
  • mallvinegar 4y ago
    Reminds me of this quote from Mark Fisher: "Observing humans under capitalism and concluding it's only in our nature to be greedy is like observing humans under water and concluding it's only in our nature to drown."
• klooney 4y ago
  https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/ https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/ Some programmers are upset and already filing suit.
• r3trohack3r 4y ago
  I’m empathetic, but my empathy doesn’t overcome my excitement. This is a moment where individual humans substantially increase their ability to affect change in the world. I’m watching as these tools quickly become commoditized. I’m seeing low income first generation Americans who speak broken English using ChatGPT to translate their messages to “upper middle class business professional” and land contracts that were off limits before. I’m seeing individuals rapidly iterate and explore visual spaces on the scale of 100s to 1000s of designs using stable diffusion, a process that was financially infeasible even for well funded corps due to the cost of human labor this time last year. These aren’t fanciful dreams of how this tech is going to change society - Ive observed these outcomes in real life. I’m empathetic that the entire world is moving out from under all of our feet. But the direction it’s moving is unbelievably exciting. AI isn’t going to replace humans, humans using AI are going to replace humans who don’t. Be the human that helps other humans wield AI.
• spitBalln 4y ago
  What empathy were you expecting in a nation that refuses to pass easy access to healthcare for all? When was making living through art guaranteed? Society has mocked artists for centuries. Let them make art and give them a UBI. AI will replace programmers too; if a user can ask a future AI to organize their machines state into an arbitrary video game, photorealistic movie, generate reports from sources abc, weighing for xyz on a bar chart; only the AI code base (whatever boot strapping and runtime it needs) becomes necessary. Why would I ask an AI that can produce the end result to produce code? Code is just minimized ideal machine state. You’re correct; there is a lot of empathy lacking in our culture, but it’s not just when it comes to art.
• golemotron 4y ago
  > The lack of empathy is incredibly depressing... The thing is, empathy doesn't really do anything. Pandora's Box is open and there's no effective way of shutting it that is more than a hopeful dream. Stopping technology is like every doomed effort that has existed to stop capitalism.
• LarryMullins 4y ago
  > The lack of empathy Probably has something to do with years of artists trash talking engineers.
  • meroes 4y ago
    Forgive me but I would be lucky to have artists saying anything, positive or negative, about my way of life. Being knowledgeable in something critically studied is very rewarding. You are forsaking opportunity if I dare say so.
    • LarryMullins 4y ago
      I don't understand your response, maybe I should clarify my comment. What I'm saying is there has historically been a fair amount of animosity and mean hearted banter between engineer types and artistic types. Particularly, artists sharing and promoting negative stereotypes about engineers. Claims that engineers are antisocial, can't design interfaces for 'real people', etc. Now that the fruit of engineering labor has threatened artists, it doesn't surprise me that engineers have little sympathy for the artists.
      • boredemployee 4y ago
        Funny enough, engineers are threaten themselves also, no? Everyone is going to the same boat.
        • LarryMullins 4y ago
          Indeed. If the AI had agency in this matter, I'd say it's doing divide and conquer against those who might oppose it. But really it's just an unfortunate circumstance.
• dr-detroit 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
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• exceptione 4y ago
  You have my sympathy. I think you need to see there are 2 types of people: - those who want to generate results ("get the job done, quickly"), and - those who enjoy programming because of it. The first one are the ones who can't see what is getting lost. They see programming as an obstacle. Strangely, some of them believe that on the one hand that many more people can produce lots more of software because of AI, and simultaneously expect to keep being in demand. They might think your job is producing pictures, which is just a burden. I am from the second group. I never choose this profession because of the money, or dreaming about big business I could create. I dread pasting generated code all over the place. The only one being happy would be the owner of that software. And the AI model overlord of course. I hope that technical and artistic skill will gain appreciation again and that you will have a happy live in doing what you like the most.
  • astrange 4y ago
    If you think code generating AI will take your job, you should also never hire junior engineers because one of them might take your job. Nevertheless, having more engineers around actually causes you to be more valuable, not less. “Taking your job” isn’t a thing; the Fed chairman is the only thing in our economy that can do that.
    • exceptione 4y ago
      > If you think code generating AI will take your job, It might take away the joy of programming, feeling of ownership and accomplishment. People today complain about having to program a bunch of api calls might be in for a rude awakening, tending and debugging the piles of chatbot output that got mashed together. Or do we expect that in the future we will suddenly value quality over speed or #features? I love coaching juniors. These are humans, I can help them with their struggles and teach them. I try to understand them, we share experiences in life. We laugh. We find meaning by being with each other on this lonely, beautiful planet in the universe. --- Please do not take offense: observe the language in which we are already conflating human beings with bots. If we do it already now, we will collectively do it in the future. We are not prepared.
• beardedetim 4y ago
  > making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of computer programming that is done. I'd reframe this to: making a living from your art is far more difficult than making money from programming. > also be able to do the dumb, simple things most programmers do for their jobs? I'm all for Ai automating all the boring shit for me. Just like frameworks have. Just like libraries have. Just like DevOps have. Take all the plumbing and make it automated! I'm all for it! But. At some point. Someone needs to take business speak and turn it into input for this machine. And wouldn't ya know it, I'm already getting paid for that!
• CamperBob2 4y ago
  The lack of empathy is incredibly depressing... You're projecting your own fears on everyone else. I'm a programmer, too, among other things. I write code in order to get other things done. (Don't you?) It's fucking awesome if this thing can do that part of my job. It means I can spend my time doing something even more interesting. What we call "programming" isn't defined as "writing code," as you seem to think. It's defined as "getting a machine to do what we (or our bosses/customers) want." That part will never change. But if you expect the tools and methodologies to remain the same, it's time to start thinking about a third career, because this one was never a good fit for you. This argument has come up many times in history, and your perspective has never come out on top. Not once. What do you expect to be different this time?
• rightbyte 4y ago
  "The cut" for artists is just way closer to 100% than for programmers. It is that simple.
• mattr47 4y ago
  Art is not harder than coding. What is hard is for an artist to make a living because the market for artwork is very, very low.
• aaroninsf 4y ago
  These are society-wide problems, not a failure of empathy on the part of "technical people." The lack you find depressing is natural defensiveness in the face of hostility rooted in the fear, and in most cases, broad ignorance of both the legal and technical context and operation of these systems. We might look at this and say, "there should have been a roll out with education and appropriate framing, they should have managed this better." This may be true but of course, there is no "they"; so here we are. I understand the fear, but my own empathy is blocked by hostility in specific interactions.
• Der_Einzige 4y ago
  A lot of coders have radical open source beliefs. Basically, the argument is that you should not have ever charged for your art, since its viewing and utility is increased when more people see it. The lack of empathy comes from our love of open source. That's why. These engineers have been pirating books, movies, games for a long time. Artists crying for copyright has the same sound as the MPAA sueing grandma 20 years ago.
  • meroes 4y ago
    This could easily be flipped on it's head. Artists wanting more control over their creations ensures bad actors can't use/misuse as easily. Freely creating tools for any bad actors to use/misuse appears incredibly naive in this light. Now was Aaron Schwartz (what I view as on ultimate example of this open source idea you cite) naive, no. Maybe he knew in his heart the greater good would outweigh anything. But I don't think we should judge too harshly merely falling on one side of this issue or not. Perhaps it's down to a debate about what creation/truth/knowledge actually are. Maybe some creators (of which aritsts and computer scientists are) view creations as something they bring into the world, not reveal about the world.
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  I think that programmers here have a lot riding on the naive belief that all new tools are neutral, and there is no pile of bodies under these advances.
• eiiot 4y ago
  > making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of computer programming that is done Creating art is not that much harder than programming, creating good art is much harder than programming. That's the reason that a large majority of art isn't very good, and why a large majority of Artists don't make a living by creating art. Just like the camera didn't kill the artist, neither will AI. For as long as art is about the ideas behind the piece as opposed to the technical skills required to make it (which I would argue has been true since the rise of impressionism) then AI doesn't change much. The good ideas are still required, AI only makes creating art (especially bad art) more accessible.
• shadowgovt 4y ago
  Software engineers are in the business of self-replacement. The idea they could be replaced by an AI doesn't engender fear; it marks a success.
• kmeisthax 4y ago
  Computer programmers have a general aversion to copyright, for a few reasons: 1. Proprietary software is harmful and immoral in ways that proprietary books or movies are not. 2. The creative industry has historically used copyright as a tool to tell computer programmers to stop having fun. So the lack of empathy is actually pretty predictable. Artists - or at least, the people who claim to represent their economic interests - have consistently used copyright as a cudgel to smack programmers about. If you've been marinading in Free Software culture and Cory Doctorow-grade ressentiment for half a century, you're going to be more interested in taking revenge against the people who have been telling you "No, shut up, that's communism" than mere first-order self-preservation[1]. This isn't just "programmers don't have fucks to give", though. In fact, your actual statements about computer programmers are wrong, because there's already an active lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft over GitHub Copilot and it's use of FOSS code. You see, AI actually breaks the copyright and ethical norms of programmers, too. Most public code happens to be licensed under terms that permit reuse (we hate copyright), but only if derivatives and modifications are also shared in the same manner (because we really hate copyright). Artists are worried about being paid, but programmers are worried about keeping the commons open. The former is easy: OpenAI can offer a rev share for people whose images were in the training set. The latter is far harder, because OpenAI's business model is charging people for access to the AI. We don't want to be paid, we want OpenAI to not be paid. Also, the assumption that "art is more difficult than computer programming" is also hilariously devoid of empathy. For every junior programmer crudly duck-taping code together you have a person drawing MS Paint fanart on their DeviantART page. The two fields test different skills and you cannot just say one is harder than the other. Furthermore, the consequences are different here. If art is bad, it's bad[0] and people potentially lose money; but if code is bad it gets hacked or kills people. [0] I am intentionally not going to mention the concerns Stability AI has with people generating CSAM with AI art generators. That's an entirely different can of worms. [1] Revenge can itself be thought of as a second-order self-preservation strategy (i.e. you hurt me, so I'd better hurt you so that you can't hurt me twice).
• deleted 4y ago
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• themagician 4y ago
  I never thought leopards would eat MY face! Creative professionals might take the first hit in professional services, but AI is going to come for engineers at a much faster and more furious pace. I would even go so far as to say that some (probably a small amount) of the people who have recently gotten laid off at big tech companies may never see a paycheck as high as they previously had. The vast majority of software engineering hours that are actually paid are for maintenance, and this is where AI is likely to come in like a tornado. Once AI hits upgrade and migration tools it's going to eliminate entire teams permanently.
  • willsmith72 4y ago
    > The vast majority of software engineering hours that are actually paid are for maintenance Do you have a source for that? Doesn't match my experience unless your definition of maintenance is really broad
    • themagician 4y ago
      Just experience, but my definition is pretty broad. Once you get out of the valley most of what pays well (banking, finance, telecom, analytics, industrial, etc.) is maintenance code IMO. Basically anything that doesn't come out real R&D budget, even if it is a "new feature", is maintenance to me at this point.
    • itronitron 4y ago
      The caveat there is 'paid hours'. The current working model for the industry is that all software engineers leetcodeuberhack on open source repos at night and by day have paying jobs maintaining companies' systems that use open source.
  • scj 4y ago
    I believe the current generation of AI would be better suited to augmenting human understanding of code (through static analysis tools and the like), rather than generating it. On an infinite timeline humans will no longer be needed in the generation of code (we hopefully will still study and appreciate it for leisure), but I doubt we're there yet.
• tshaddox 4y ago
  My (admittedly totally non-rigorous) intuition is that the advances in AI might "grow the pot" of the software engineering, IT, and related industries at roughly the same rate that they can "replace professionals" in those industries. If that's the case, then there wouldn't be some existential threat to the industry. Of course, that doesn't mean that certain individuals and entire companies aren't at risk, and I don't want to minimize the potential hardship, but it doesn't seem like a unique or new problem. As a crude analogy, there are a lot of great free or low-cost tools to create websites that didn't exist 15 years ago and can easily replace what would be a much more expensive web developer contract 15 years ago. And yet, in those last 15 years, the "size of the web pot" has increased enough that I don't think many professional web developers are worried about site builder tools threatening the entire industry. There seem to be a lot more web developers now then there were 15 years ago, and they seem to be paid as well or better than they were 15 years. And again, that doesn't mean that certain individuals or firms didn't on occasion experience financial hardship due to pressure from cheaper alternatives, and I don't want to minimize that. It just seems like the industry is still thriving. To be clear, I really have no idea if this will turn out to be true. I also have no idea if this same thing might happen in other fields like art, music, writing, etc.
• A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  I don't think there is no empathy here, but there are clear divisions on whether this tech will help advance humankind or further destabilize the society as a whole. To be perfectly honest, I absolutely love that particular attempt by artists, because it will likely force 'some' restrictions on how AI is used and maybe even limit that amount 'blackboxiness' it entails ( disclosure of model, data set used, parameters -- I might be dreaming though ). I disagree with your statement in general. HN has empathy and not just because it could affect their future world. It is a relatively big shift in tech and we should weigh it carefully.
• cyborgx7 4y ago
  To be honest, I have been forced to choose a side during all those debates about copyright and advertising/adblocking. And it was artists who forced me to make that choice. It's hard not to see this as just another way in which artist are trying to limit how people use their own computing devices in a way that provides the most value to them. All these talking points about lack of empathy for poor suffering artists have already been made a million times in those other debates. They just don't pack much of a punch anymore.
• fckgnad 4y ago
• orbital-decay 4y ago
  Artists have all my sympathy. I'm also a hobbyist painter. But I have very little sympathy for those perpetuating this tiresome moral panic (a small amount of actual artists, whatever the word "artist" means), because I think that: a) the panic is entirely misguided and based on two wrong assumptions. The first is that textual input and treating the model as a function (command in -> result out) are sufficient for anything. No, this is a fundamentally deficient way to give artistic directions, which is further handicapped by primitive models and weak compute. Text alone is a toy; the field will just become more and more complex and technically involved, just like 3D CGI did, because if you don't use every trick available, you're missing out. The second wrong assumption is that it's going to replace anyone, instead of making many people re-learn a new tool and produce what was previously unfeasible due to the amount of mechanistic work involved. This second assumption stems from the fundamental misunderstanding of the value artists provide, which is conceptualization, even in a seemingly routine job. b) the panic is entirely blown out of proportion by the social media. Most people have neither time nor desire to actually dive into this tech and find out what works and what doesn't. They just believe that a magical machine steals their works to replace them, because that's what everyone reposts on Twitter endlessly.
  • thordenmark 4y ago
    You are demonstrating that lack of empathy. Artist's works are being stolen and used to train AI, that then produces work that will affect that artist's career. The advancement of this tech in the past 6 months, if it maintains this trajectory, demonstrates this.
    • idiotsecant 4y ago
      Is 'looking at something' equivalent to stealing it? The use by all these diffusion networks is pretty much the definition of transformative. If a person was doing this it wouldn't even be interesting enough to talk about it. When a machine does it somehow that is morally distinct?
    • Permit 4y ago
      > Artist's works are being stolen It has been fascinating to watch “copyright infringement is not theft” morph into “actually yes it’s stealing” over the last few years. It used to be incredibly rare to find copyright maximalists on HackerNews, but with GitHub Co-pilot and StableDiffusion it seems to have created a new generation of them.
• deleted 4y ago
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• calebcannon 4y ago
  This has happened to developers multiple times. Frankly it’s happened so many times that it’s become mundane. These programs are tools, and after a while you realize having a new tool in the bag doesn’t displace people. What it does is make the old job easy and new job has a higher bar for excellence. Everyone who has been writing software longer than a few years can name several things that used to take them a long time and a lot of specialization, and now take any amateur 5 minutes. It might seem scary, but it’s really not. It just means that talented artists will be able to use these tools to create even more even cooler art, because they don’t need to waste their time on the common and mechanical portions.
  • cwmoore 4y ago
    AI art will become most valuable posthumously.
• nitwit005 4y ago
  It's a bit tiresome having people demand you demonstrate empathy in every single post. Do you truly want everyone typing up a paragraph of how sad they are in every comment? It won't actually help anything.
• dlkf 4y ago
  > why shouldn't it, with some finagling, also be able to do the dumb, simple things most programmers do for their jobs? Because those things, while dumb and simple, are not continuous in the way that visual art is. Subtle perturbations to a piece of visual art stay subtle. There is room for error. By contrast, subtle changes to source code can have drastic implications for the output of a program. In some domains this might be tolerable, but in any domain where you’re dealing significant sums of money it won’t be.
• lkbm 4y ago
  It's worth noting that there are at least two very different things being expressed by artists, at least on Twitter: 1. This is theft and that's bad. 2. People who do this are getting gains without putting the work and that's bad. (And, per quite a few commenters I've seen, are talentless hacks.) I have a lot of empathy for the first, and think it has merit, and have a much smaller amount of empathy for the second. I ended up reading a lot of the quote tweets on this guy the other day: https://twitter.com/ammaar/status/1601284293363261441/retweets/with_comments https://twitter.com/ammaar/status/1601284293363261441/retwee... Here's just a few of thousands in the vein of number 2: > No talent or passion whatsoever > He thinks he created something > Why don't you subscribe to writing and art classes? > This so ugly and shows real disrespect for people who have made stuff by themselves for years. > Men will literally sell AI trash and call it "art" instead of go to therapy > Can’t write or draw but wants to do both > This is nothing but a HUGE disrespect to all the writers and artists around the world, and all it does is belittle their REAL work and effort. > > This is not art. > Nothing to be proud of. > I just spent 8 months illustrating a children’s book by hand—working, not “playing”—after a lifetime of training. > > FUCK OFF! There are also plenty people are complaining about "theft", but it honestly, re-reading through it now, it feels like a minority. If this were done using fully public-domain content, does it sound like any of the people I quoted above been okay with it? There's a clear disdain for "non-artists" creating art in a new way. I very much feel for the people who see their careers going away, and I can also empathize people who spent a long time acquiring a creative skill that's now "unnecessary". Programming has this too—those darn kids programming in Python rather than Assembly, or doing bootcamps that don't teach big-O notation. This is a normal, human way to feel, and I feel that too from time to time. BUT, I also resist that feeling. I choose not to express disdain for newcomers using new technology, or skipping the old ways. A large (or at least loud) part of the art community seen here is expressing absolute disdain for those of us who are "cheating" not because "copyright infringement" but because we're using new technology that bypasses years of learning and that's very much eating into my empathy for the community in general. I find it toxic in the programming community and I find it toxic in the art community. Right now, it's exploding in the art community in a way far beyond what I've witnessed in programming.
• skor 4y ago
  lets just start a “no AI” movement. Humans appreciate effort and when everyone could become a dj, it just got boring, so some people (those exact people that you want at your show) will start looking for that when there is so much AI art that it just becomes dull.
  • int_19h 4y ago
    Societies that choose to do this kind of thing would fall behind those that do not very quickly. One may argue that it doesn't matter so long as it leads to comfortable life, but the problem is that one day you'll wake up to the sound of Commodore Perry's guns.
• melagonster 4y ago
  I don't know, happily let someone starve is very obvious. when I read Japanese artists talk about how to treat AI now, it is difficult to feel sad. they don't know that they are impossible to fight against it. almost ten years ago, someone in Silicon Valley had decided all of them should starve and vanish. no one can stop technology.
• gerdesj 4y ago
  "so I decided to do something easier and became a computer programmer" Get a grip me old fruit. You've basically described "growing up". The world is a pretty wild place and you need to find your niche or not (rince/repeat). You are not a failed artist at all. You probed at something "had a dabble" if you like and it didn't work out. Never mind. Move on and try something else but keep your interest in mind. There are loads of professions that I'd like to have done but as it turns out I'm me and that's who I am. Personally speaking I'm a MD of a little IT firm in the UK that can fiddle up a decent 3-2-1 conc mix and do fairly decent first and second fix wood work. I studied Civ Eng. "The lack of empathy" - really? If you fancy your chances as an artist then go for it. At worst you will fulfill your ambition and create some daubs. At best, you will traverse reality and be a wealthy living artist. Just do it.
  • nonbirithm 4y ago
    > If you fancy your chances as an artist then go for it. At worst you will fulfill your ambition and create some daubs. At best, you will traverse reality and be a wealthy living artist. With AI art gradually improving, I think that line of reasoning will convince less and less people that would otherwise have second thoughts. They would spend a couple of hours on Midjourney and decide that's as far they want to take their "art" hobby. The power of instant gratification will convince many faster than spending hundreds of hours honing a craft. I think in the future a lot of people's gut reaction to failing as a manual artist will be to retreat to Midjourney or similar to satisfy their remaining desire to have creative work they can call their own instead of trying again. I personally find the near-instant feedback loop very addicting, and I think it will have a similar effect to social platforms in normalizing a desire for quick results over the patience needed to hone a craft. But as opposed to scrolling newsfeeds for hours, at least the user obtains a creative output through generative art, and it doesn't carry the same type of guilt for me. This kind of thing is unprecedented and I don't look forward to how it will polarize the various communities involved in the coming years.
• huggingrear 4y ago
  Well of course AI is going to take the programmer jobs, as a developer, this is practically the focal point of all discussions I've had with colleagues the past month, the consensus seem to be that within a 10 year window, software developer is going to be an almost niche occupation. And yes, it will transform art completely, initially by lowering the barrier for producing quality art, and then by raising the bar in terms of quality, it's coming for every artistic field, 3d, film, music etc If you want a career in these fields, you will need to ride this AI wave from the get go, but even that career will eventually succumb to automation, this is the inevitable end point, as an example, eventually you will be able to give a brief synopsis to an AI and it will be able to flesh that out and create a full movie of it with the actors you choose.
• fn1 4y ago
  > In my humble estimation, making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of computer programming that is done. That is only because the vast majority of computer programming that is done is not very good.
• zajio1am 4y ago
  > The lack of empathy is incredibly depressing... My primary empathy is with end users, who could be empowered with AI-based tools to express their dreams and create graphics or software without need to pay professional artists or programmers.
• Saigonauticon 4y ago
  I agree, but perhaps not in the expected way. For me at least, Stable Diffusion has been this great tool for personal expression in a medium that was previously inaccessible to me: images. Now I could communicate with people in this new, accessible way! I've learned more about art history and techniques in the last 3 months than in my entire life up to that point. So I came up with a few ideas about making some paintings for my mother, and children's books for my nieces and nephew. The anger I received from my artistically inclined colleagues over this saddened me greatly, so I tried to talk to more people to see if this was an anomaly. There was more anger, and argument for censorship! I have to admit I struggled to maintain any empathy after receiving that reception. I'm personally really excited about a future where we don't have to suffer to create art, whether it's code, an image, or music. Isn't more art and less suffering in our lives a good thing? If there are economic structures we've set up that make that a bad thing, maybe it would be fruitful take a critical look at those. Presently I'm looking at creating a few small B2B products out of various fine-tuned public AI models. The first thing I realized is that I'd be addressing niches that were just not possible to tackle before (cost, scale, latency). The second thing I noticed is I'd need to hire designers, copywriters, etc. for their judgement -- at least as quality control. So at least in my limited scope of activity, the use of AI permits me to hire creative professionals, to tackle jobs that previously employed zero creative professionals (because previously they weren't done at all, or just done very poorly, e.g. English website copy for small business in non-English-speaking developing economies). I do feel for people that have decided that they need to retool because they feel AI threatens their job. I do that every couple of years when some new thing threatens an old thing that I do, it's a chunk of work, and not always fun. To show better empathy, I think I'm going to reach out to more artists and show them what the current AI tools can and cannot do, to help them along this path. So thank you for your post, because it gave me the idea to take this approach! ...and on the weekends, I can still write code in hand-optimized assembly, because that's the brush I love painting with.
• liberty-bzmh 4y ago
  Why must I be afraid? It's not even started...
• scotty79 4y ago
  AI art and reactions to it remind me of open source software. Yes, it's chipping into someones profits. But it's a benefit for vast majority and society as a whole. It's democratizing what was scarce and expensive. I really can't be mad at that. Ultimately those who are able to integrate it into their creative process will be the winners. There will always be small niche for those who oppose it out of principle.
• j0hnyl 4y ago
  Neither artists nor programmers should be afraid. "AI's" are nice tools, but I think they are very far off from being able to navigate office politics, client relationships, etc.