God it’s so fucking depressing to see all you techies debating whether or not the skill I have dedicated my life to getting good enough at to earn a quiet, modest living with should be automated away or not. And insisting that surely your jobs are too special and complex for this to ever happen to you.
At least I can take solace in the fact that for now these things aren’t gonna be taking a bite out of the furry art commissions I like to take, since that’s way too associated with crazy cartoon porn for them to not censor relevant keywords.
Of course it should be. You aren't entitled to my money for your services if a computer can do a good enough job for free. And human history is full of examples of innovations displacing humans and temporarily unemploying them until they found other jobs. That's basically what "productivity" is about in economics, and overall it's a good thing we're not still in the stone age in the name of protecting people's jobs.
Please save this comment somewhere and read it to yourself when the successor to GitHub’s Copilot makes you start worrying about your ability to earn a living. Thanks in advance.
There absolutely nothing upsetting about that to the CEO of your company. I would expect the destruction of your lifetime of accumulated economic value at an age when you can’t possibly retrain to be able to support your previous lifestyle would be rather upsetting to you. Or if not then I would not call that a typical emotional response.
I would be upset, but that is separate to the question posed of whether we should be trying to innovate and automate. The answer is that innovation and productivity should be sought, even though it's understandably not fun for the people whose skills are being commoditized in the moment. At no point in history was it a good idea to purposefully stop innovation just to preserve some job that was about to be automated. The cumulative impact of jobs being automated and productivity is why we have such easy lives today.
And that is all well and good until the pace of automation outstrips the community's ability to absorb the externality. Then it's not going to be the AI dream future, but heads on spikes. We have hit those points in history before.
Not to mention that the whole goddamn trick here is basically taking the output you and your peers have created, anonymizing it, throwing it in a blender, and then acting like the AI has generated something new and humans aren't needed anymore.
“Draw me Elon Musk fellating a Bitcoin in the style of an artist who spent decades refining their craft and producing enough art to train a neural network to make something resembling it, and completely ignore any potential copyright issues because it’s maybe right on the edge of sufficiently transformative, and anyway we have no idea what’s going on in these damn black boxes any more.” That’ll be one compute token, please.
Thats a bit unfair. The discussion is not about what should happen. But a prediction of what will happen, given these technologies exist. This is a tech forum after all, and speculation about tech and society is a big part of that.
Personally my societal concern is yet another industry where we had multiple small jobs will be ruled by a few conglomerates.
Small business are like democracy in a free market. And we keep evolving to it all ending in the hands of a few.
Wait until the world becomes oversaturated with AI generated imagery and then make a killing when people realize that real artists can actually produce something original.
I can only hope that this doesn’t happen after it has become impossible for young artists to make enough money with almost-pro work to be able to get in enough practice to become pros worth paying for. Finding your particular creative voice is a long process; the Internet opened up a lot of opportunities for people to do that.
I also hope this oversaturation doesn’t happen while I’m still alive, or that it happens as quickly as people became obsessed with Mandelbrot sets. You saw them everywhere and then suddenly they weren’t cool any more, and it always feels faintly embarrassing to see one used when you go back to look at something from that era.
I’m fifty years old and I doubt the people making these AI art tools are gonna send a single penny towards supporting and/or retraining the artists they displace, even the ones whose names constantly show up in the lists of things to type into the text box to get a better image.
I sympathize greatly because I think over the short term it's going to be worse all around for artists. I think anything that gets chucked into the ML wood-chipper is going to get old fast.
Have you seen the Dall-E outputs? If anything they do better than the vast majority of artists in terms of originality. Sure there's probably some people out there who can do better, but no where near the amount of people employed in the field today.
Err... more original than the artists that originally conceptualized most of the things it's creating? No, I don't see that at all. Certainly not better than the "vast majority".
> insisting that surely your jobs are too special and complex for this to ever happen to you
This insistence bugs the crap out of me, and shows just how arrogant tech-types (and even more so, business-types) can be. The late David Graeber noted this attitude, and while he's talking about investors/entrepreneurs/financiers, it could equally apply to the cocky software engineers I've met over the years:
"It's possible for futurologists to imagine robots relpacing sports editors, sociologists, or real estate agents, for example, yet I have yet to see one suggest that the basic functions that capitalists are supposed to perform, which mainly consist of figuring out the optimal way to invest resources in order to answer current or potential consumer demand, could possibly be performed by a machine. Why not?"
I optimistically believe that art will never be automated away like software engineering has the potential to be. The human creative element is so core to what art is that replacing it with a machine misses the point entirely, even if a machine could fully replicate an aesthetic.
Trust me, we (the techies) are in strong denial about how much time we have left. I've been programming since the late 1980s and have learned everything from VHDL to Clojure and give us till no later than 2040. Realistically, more like 2030, due to the billions of dollars being thrown at AGI for finance and other monetizations. Of course, money won't be worth anything after that, but I doubt that will stop anyone.
In my own life, I've decided to transition away from shared truth towards manifesting the reality that I want to live in. I try to help people now, I meditate a lot about humans becoming aliens, I try to be in the moment whenever possible and be thankful for consciousness. But I no longer put my energy into the ego-based materialism that captured tech. Since wealth inequality can't be stopped, I feel that the only salvation lies in nonattachment.
Don't worry, while the rest of the industry is busy making artsy abstract images of chimpanzees surfing on a wave of coronavirii, you can quietly work on UX design I guess.
God that’s a fucking sure route to suicide right there. From sitting at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to shitting out buttons for yet another fucking weather app on Dribble.
At least I can take solace in the fact that for now these things aren’t gonna be taking a bite out of the furry art commissions I like to take, since that’s way too associated with crazy cartoon porn for them to not censor relevant keywords.