[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I'm "disrupte...
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Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I'm "disrupted"? Work in
video and CG
I work in video / filmmaking / ads in London. Most of the work in
this space is short form video for YouTube / Instagram and TV. Now
I am seeing the video generating AI (imagen video from Google on
the front page) and I'm 100% sure a good percentage of the work
will vanish. There's loads of work that ad agencies will just hire
an AI prompt guy to generate for ads. Big companies will still make
ads, of course, but smaller gigs that keep the whole industry
afloat? What about even 10 million $ shots with CG characters that
will now become commonplace? I've retrained before. I started off
as an editor, then did VR video, now moved into CG. I'm pretty good
at my job - I've worked on stuff for Dell and Apple, including
stuff you've probably seen. It's funny to think I might have to
retrain yet again. I didn't expect image generation AI to be the
next big leap. I was already moving into more storytelling content
(ie documentaries) because that's more defensible against AI. But I
expected 3-4 years before video generation would just come out.
Now it seems like it's happening so quickly I'm not sure they won't
have good stuff out in 6 months to a year. So - HN - what do I do
now? And what about the other fellas in my industry who will be out
of a job? In my estimate, we are talking about tens of thousands.
To counter the obvious: I have learnt web dev at one point I
thought I'd make the jump, even started learning React but I found
the work to be mind numbing. I just love making images. But I feel
like Pierre Auguste Renoir's who was a plate painter in France and
did a good living out of it - until the process was industrialised
and he struggled (maybe for the rest of his life? I don't quite
recall). To counter the second suggestion: AI prompt design is not
image making as far as it would interest me. I also don't think
there will be a huge learning curve. Becoming a filmmaker on my
standard requires about 10 years experience or an excellent school
(of which there are maybe 10-20 in the world). I would imagine AI
promoting will be done by the lowest paid interns available. What
do I do HN?
Author : kranke155
Score : 90 points
Date : 2022-10-05 18:15 UTC (4 hours ago)
| cwkoss wrote:
| Working on ads is a profession with significant moral hazard:
| thought manipulation is inherently antisocial. Being disrupted
| out of the industry could end up being a blessing for your mental
| wellbeing.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Doesn't this art need to be trained on original human art?
| Eventually the styles being copied by ai will get stale. AFAIK
| these ai image generators aren't actually creating new styles
| hackeraccount wrote:
| I understand you're not interested in learning a new tool set.
| That totally sucks especially when it at least appears orthogonal
| to what you currently know (not to be a dick but I would
| underline appears).
|
| As a related thought, if not an upside, did you read that story
| about the guy who outsourced his job to China? He worked for some
| telecom and just hired out whatever they wanted him to do to
| randos overseas and basically ended up doing nothing other then
| going to meetings that set up scope.
|
| I believe he was fired but - end result aside - it's not hard to
| see how this might fit into your situation.
| kube-system wrote:
| Find the weaknesses of AI generated imagery and do the things
| that it can't.
| smm11 wrote:
| Everybody in the world is carrying a camera with them full-time.
| I'm still dodging pro photographers shooting weddings, graduates,
| and teens every time I ride through the park.
| simonw wrote:
| I suggest becoming an expert user of generative AI systems. You
| can start by exploring Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, then move
| on to video systems once those start becoming available.
|
| Effective prompt design is a very deep subject, and one that is
| changing all the time.
|
| My optimistic version of all of this is that people like yourself
| will be able to continue doing the work you are doing today...
| but better, and faster. You'll be able to produce higher quality
| work because the generative AIs will be able to speed up a whole
| bunch of the more time-consuming tasks for you, allowing you to
| spend more time on the creative and editorial side of things.
|
| I believe people with genuine skill, talent and taste will
| produce better work with the assistance of generative AI than
| people that do not have that existing background.
|
| I might be wrong! I hope I'm right.
| yrgulation wrote:
| If anything the number of jobs will increase. Simply because
| technologies such as what you describe are enablers. Suddenly
| everyone and their cat will want good looking ai generated
| videos. But someone will need to make that little tweak that
| makes them look good. For instance, i wouldnt be able to produce
| nice content regardless of how many ais you throw at me simply
| because i dont have an eye for it.
|
| But suddenly john in marketing is able to create a few amateurish
| sketch videos, crappy and naive, but they will lead to ideas for
| proper videos that he can collaborate with someone like you to
| turn into professional content. Similarly you will be able to
| iterate ideas faster and thus keep clients happy.
|
| Its the same with web development. The more libraries the more
| tools and the more automation the more jobs out there. John in
| marketing or Sandra the ceo are now able to experiment with
| mockups, show them to stakeholders and gain their attention much
| quicker. As a result there are more funding and more product
| development leading to more tech jobs.
|
| Therefore, enabler tech like this will lead to growth.
| freedude wrote:
| It probably depends upon you.
|
| Is AI a tool or a trap?
|
| Can it make some of your jobs iterate more quickly and weed out
| the cruft or heavy lifting?
|
| Or is it only something that gets in your way of production?
|
| It is up to you.
| NotHereNotThere wrote:
| While I think humanity is bad at predicting what the future will
| look like (where's my damn flying car..), _my_ prediction is that
| AI video generation will not be a major disrupter to ad agencies
| / film makers.
|
| It's a nice experiment, but I really doubt the level of artistic
| direction required to meet specific customer requirements will
| ever be replaced by "AI"
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I think it probably will within a decade. Just to use still
| images, the tools that have come out with stable diffusion
| already allow a lot in terms of generating variations,
| inpainting, fixing faces, etc. Give these tools time to mature,
| models keep getting better and bigger, and hardware keeps
| getting better - you are absolutely going to replace still
| images "soon" and if you can do still images, video won't be
| far behind.
|
| The guy who needs an image will write a prompt and paste it in
| to some tool. The prompt goes to a language model that's been
| fine tuned on those websites that share prompts and image-gen
| creations. The language model spits out nine variations of the
| original prompt that it thinks will improve the output. The
| nine generations plus the original prompt produce ten
| variations from the next gen, or next next gen, diffusers. The
| original guy put in his prompt and gets back a grid of 100
| examples. Does he like any? Maybe mark a few, refine the
| prompt, mark a few more, get variations of the ones he's
| marked. Expand one or two, edit something out, add something
| in, generate another thousand variations, and he's got
| something really good.
|
| If this process gets fast I think you'll see a few minutes from
| a non-expert can produce better illustrations than professional
| artists. I don't think this means that everyone will be a
| professional-artist-equivalent - just like anyone could deliver
| a pizza but not everyone is a pizza delivery driver. What it
| will mean is that getting professional artist output will
| become something that anyone could reasonably pick up and do if
| they do a small amount of learning to get the hang of the
| tools. Plus, just like you might deliver a pizza to your
| friends or family, if you needed to you could produce high
| quality art.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| egypturnash wrote:
| I am a 2d artist and I have similar feelings.
|
| Are you as full of loathing for all the HN people saying "just
| integrate the AI into your practice" as I am? I _like_ drawing
| stuff and I love that this pays my bills and I really have zero
| interest in becoming a "prompt engineer" instead.
|
| I think a strategy of creating an image of AI art as cheap and
| tacky is useful. For how long, I don't know. If we're lucky then
| it'll turn out that getting these things out of the domain of
| creepy claw hands is a lot harder than anyone thinks it will be,
| and there will be a lot of obvious tells for a long time.
|
| It may also be useful to try and get your professional
| associations to bring some suits against these things for playing
| fast and loose with "fair use". The legality of these things is
| debatable, and so's where "fair use" should fall - personally I
| feel like nobody posting work on the internet anticipated their
| stuff being scraped and fed into a giant neural net designed to
| take their job. Make this shit a lot pricier by demanding that it
| be built on art _explicitly licensed_ for machine training.
|
| Figuring out where the intersection of "art you like to make" and
| "art the AI sucks at" lies is worthwhile. If your passion is
| realistic painterly work then you're fucked, what do you enjoy
| doing that isn't that?
| jemmyw wrote:
| I've been using these ai tools to help imagine some paintings.
| Previously I'd use image search.
|
| If you are drawing completely new images then I'm not sure how
| competitive these tools are. They're just serving a mash up of
| existing works. Sure they can produce something interesting,
| sometimes stunning, but usually not much better than what you
| could just find already.
|
| As for producing a physical painting, that has its own
| constraints of material and ability.
| HellDunkel wrote:
| I work in CGI/design. We have had machine learning denoisers
| for some time but other than that ai has not changed cgi much.
| VR another hype, merely a distraction- the serious work is not
| VR. Now things like stable diffusion- lots of people toying
| around- serious tool for artists- not really. Do not worry.
| Develop your artistic skills and enjoy the journey.
| exolymph wrote:
| > I like drawing stuff and I love that this pays my bills and I
| really have zero interest in becoming a "prompt engineer"
| instead.
|
| I'm not sure how to say this in a non-dickish way, but most of
| us have to do stuff we don't particularly enjoy in order to
| make a living. I get that it sucks from your vantage point, but
| like... I'm sure there were stablehands who loved horses and
| had no interest in becoming mechanics. Shit happens.
|
| I'm a writer and equally in danger of automated replacement,
| but so it goes. Maybe I'll end up curating and editing GPT7
| output instead of drafting everything myself -- I can live with
| that. It's not like my paid work was written for fun in the
| first place.
|
| The art I make for my own satisfaction, I expect to continue
| crafting word by word, and I think people will continue to
| appreciate that painstaking expression of the human spirit.
| Just not in a commercial context.
| shakabrah wrote:
| The problem with your example is that it assumes there is a
| place for him to go to. Stable hands becoming mechanics. That
| is the key concern with automation replacing jobs is that it
| is a zero sum game.
| jacobn wrote:
| The danger is less with automation and more with the
| _speed_ of automation.
|
| It's hard to retrain. When the change happens between
| generations there's a natural progression with parent:
| stable hand, child: mechanic.
|
| When it happens 1-2-5 times in a person's career, then
| those are some really painful resets.
|
| Sure, some will swim. But the social contract with
| democracy isn't that "some" swim, it's that "almost
| everyone swims" (which we generally call "everybody", but
| that's a separate discussion).
|
| Long term and across society automation is absolutely
| positive sum. But short-to-long term for those on the short
| end of the stick it's clearly not.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Lump of labor fallacy. Automation is not a zero sum game
| because it creates new jobs.
| kranke155 wrote:
| Evidence
| Uehreka wrote:
| I hear this a lot, that "automation creates jobs"
| chestnut.
|
| Whenever people try to support this argument, they either
| fall into the "not thinking quantitatively" fallacy by
| pointing out that "sure, 25 writers got laid off, but the
| company used to have no programmers, and now they have
| 2!" Or they fall into the "not explaining the mechanism"
| fallacy by giving examples from the past where
| "stablehands retrained as mechanics" without examining
| _why_ that happened, and what aspects make 20th century
| mechanization and 21st century automation completely
| different in kind.
| shakabrah wrote:
| These are some bold claims. Id like to see some evidence.
| dragontamer wrote:
| There are more bank tellers today in USA than at any
| other point, despite the growing number of ATM machines.
|
| https://www.aei.org/economics/what-atms-bank-tellers-
| rise-ro...
|
| This doesn't always happen mind you. But it shows that
| your (and my) economic instincts are piss poor. We can't
| just assume what the future holds.
|
| -------
|
| Another few examples:
|
| 3D animation has killed a lot of tweening artists (the
| people who smoothed out animations for Disney Films like
| 101 Dalmations or Sleeping Beauty). But 3d animation
| created the need of modelers, texture artists, riggers,
| and more.
|
| Automatic Drum machines didn't kill drummers either, but
| allowed for more music to be made in general.
|
| The only thing that automation "killed" recently was
| Lawyers, as online webpages that auto-generated common
| forms removed a ton of jobs that Lawyers used to do.
| IIRC, Lawyers are in somewhat of a decline because of
| this.
|
| So it just goes to show that no one really can predict
| these things.
| [deleted]
| kranke155 wrote:
| It's ridiculous. There will be no integration - my job is just
| going to become less profitable and diverse. It's beyond
| nonsense.
|
| I make 100k a year in London making CG. I don't see how that
| will be available to me doing AI prompt work.
| cercatrova wrote:
| If that's how you feel, then I assume you won't be adapting
| at all (as evidenced by your other comment [0]), so your 100k
| job will go too to the ones who do adapt. I'm not saying this
| to be mean, you asked the question, people answered and it
| seems you don't like the answer. What are _we_ supposed to do
| about how you feel?
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33099182#33100703
| kranke155 wrote:
| It's not about how I feel - it's about the potential
| obliteration of my way of life. The people who will make
| money out of this transition will be AI engineers, not
| image makers. I will bet you 1 ETH and place it under a
| smart contract bet if you'd like.
| yrgulation wrote:
| Personally i find ai created content utter shite. Even
| copilot's autocomplete feels like a toy, let alone that
| it needs to be fed with new content all the time in order
| to stay up to date. If not where will it steal its
| dataset from? Itself?
| cercatrova wrote:
| Then perhaps you'll have to do what the vast, vast
| majority of humanity has done for thousands of years,
| work jobs they don't like to put food on the table.
| Working in art is a luxury reserved for only the highest
| echelon of people, like Michaelangelo or Leonardo. The
| rest of us are not so lucky.
| yrgulation wrote:
| I beg to differ. Art isnt just fancy paintings for pseudo
| intellectuals to show off. Art is a good looking app, a
| nice looking car, a cozy feeing house design or kitchen
| furniture, an ad that communicates vision, and so on. Art
| is emotion which ai cant create. Sure it can randomise
| visuals within the constraints of what it has "learned"
| but it definitely cant create human emotion. No amount of
| micro-dosing can convince the world it is going to
| completely replace artists or indeed programmers.
| lbarrow wrote:
| What's the difference between a human artist walking around in
| the world, seeing images and videos (many of which are under
| copyright) and then using those images as inspiration, versus
| an AI being fed millions of images and videos as part of a
| large training set?
|
| I am not a lawyer but I don't really see the "it's not fair
| use" argument.
| _gabe_ wrote:
| What's the difference between a programmer looking at lots of
| open source code and github copilot looking at open source
| code? (And I'm talking MIT licensed code here).
| Wistar wrote:
| There's a whole lot of unapologetic artistic theft of others'
| work that has contributed to the creation of new art.
| etrautmann wrote:
| why do we even call it theft or pretend that _any_ artist
| arrived at ideas without inspiration?
| someweirdperson wrote:
| For humans the inspiration can be something else than the
| medium to use. Watching reality can provide inspiration
| for creating a video. And I'm pretty sure that's wher
| most inspiration comes from. It cannot for AI. Of course
| in a world where everything exists AI doesn't need
| inspiration from other sources.
| cma wrote:
| It can for AI, it is consuming and mixing in training
| trail cam images, etc. that weren't composed shots.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| That could describe the entirety of art history.
| _dain_ wrote:
| > What's the difference between a human artist walking around
| in the world, seeing images and videos (many of which are
| under copyright) and then using those images as inspiration,
| versus an AI being fed millions of images and videos as part
| of a large training set?
|
| What's the difference between retelling someone's story
| orally, and using a printing press to make an exact replica?
|
| What's the difference between writing down a conversation
| from memory, and recording that conversation?
|
| What's the difference between making a nude painting of
| someone, and taking a nude photograph?
|
| What's the difference between going out in public among human
| beings, and going out in public where there's a facial
| recognition camera on every corner feeding everyone's
| movements into a centralized database?
|
| What's the difference between the grandma who knows everyone
| in the village, vs the social media company that knows
| everyone in the world?
|
| Social customs evolved in a context of fundamental, sharp
| limits to human cognition and skill. When technology smashes
| through those limits, those social customs don't work
| anymore. Copyright law didn't exist in a world where you
| couldn't copy things mechanically. If you apply the old rules
| naively, you end up with a nasty world that nobody wants. So
| we have to invent new rules to limit how people use the new
| technology, otherwise people get exploited and life becomes
| intolerable.
|
| "What does copyright law say about this" doesn't even make
| sense as a question. Copyright was invented before AI was.
| The question should be, "what would a society someone would
| want to live in, say about this?"
| somesortofthing wrote:
| > What's the difference between retelling someone's story
| orally, and using a printing press to make an exact
| replica?
|
| But that's not what's happening. You can't "crack open" a
| model to find the bitmap of a piece of training data. It's
| not there any more than a painting you've seen is "in" your
| brain. A model sometimes creates things that look similar
| to existing pieces if it got a ton of copies of the same
| image, for the same reason that most people's artistic
| rendition of a tree is going to be more accurate than their
| rendition of an anteater.
|
| The entire AI art debate is a symptom of the fact that
| society is structured such that labor-saving technological
| advancements can harm more people than they help, and it's
| baffling to see otherwise intelligent and ideologically
| similar people fixating on this single, relatively minor
| technology rather than the much more consequential, broader
| issue of the fact that automation always moves wealth into
| the hands of a smaller and smaller group of people.
| _dain_ wrote:
| >But that's not what's happening. You can't "crack open"
| a model to find the bitmap of a piece of training data.
| It's not there any more than a painting you've seen is
| "in" your brain. A model sometimes creates things that
| look similar to existing pieces if it got a ton of copies
| of the same image, for the same reason that most people's
| artistic rendition of a tree is going to be more accurate
| than their rendition of an anteater.
|
| In other words, a technology that has never existed
| before and doesn't follow any of the categories and
| schemas we dreamt up to organize the world. So we need to
| make new rules.
| orangecat wrote:
| _the fact that automation always moves wealth into the
| hands of a smaller and smaller group of people_
|
| This is very much not a fact.
| kranke155 wrote:
| That was a fact during the industrial revolution and it's
| quite possible it will happen now with the digital
| revolution.
|
| The average height of Englishmen actually went down
| during the industrial rev. presumably due to
| malnutrition. New histories of the period think of it as
| potentially as one of the few times we know where there
| was an enormous economic boom alongside a general
| collapse of quality of life.
| unity1001 wrote:
| Could building up on what AI creates not work?
|
| For each technological advancement we had in the past 200 years
| had made it easier to do things at a certain level. Which
| enabled people to do more things and more complex things. Which
| just pushed up the average level of what we create higher.
|
| Can't AI be used to handle what the artists had to spent more
| effort to create before, therefore enabling artists to create
| more complex works of art and therefore push the creative level
| up?
| tengbretson wrote:
| This really resonates with me. I used to enjoy working as a
| 35mm film projectionist. Now that everything is digital the
| opportunities for making money doing it have basically
| disappeared. Am I supposed to be excited that now I can just
| push a button and focus more of my attention on selling
| popcorn?
|
| Fortunately I enjoy writing code.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| I don't think you're necessarily supposed to be excited about
| your job.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Perhaps not, but it certainly makes life a lot more
| enjoyable.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| Why not?
| alliao wrote:
| this reads a lot like what some painters said when photography
| hit, and they weren't interested in "painting with the light"
| as so many photographer would love calling it nowadays.
| Technology disrupts and it is neutral to taste. Seems like
| those who knew the way should probably try and instil better
| taste for the future generation; otherwise we'd be reinventing
| wheels with different tools for the foreseeable future.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| Current AI puts out weird output that is not suitable for
| publication. There will be working fixing it for the foreseeable
| future.
| zeofig wrote:
| A lot of people are telling you to Deal With It. I would argue
| that people are way too hyped about these AI developments. It
| looks cool and it can generate something interesting, but can it
| really generate what you need? Can it make something good enough
| to work like an ad (or whatever) made by people who know what
| they're doing? Maybe sometimes, but usually the answer is No.
| Will it do that soon? Nobody knows for sure, but I think a lot of
| techies are too optimistic. What the AI does is an interpolation
| of existing image data. It doesn't know how to draw what you
| really want, and it can't reliably produce output that's usable
| (let alone "good") for highly specific purposes. And any real
| application of CG/videography is highly specific. It's easy to
| imagine all of that is the next step, but I think that's a lot
| harder than what the AI does at the moment.
| syntheweave wrote:
| In a broad sense, we can think of the economy in terms of
| resource inputs to society and the dependencies that result in
| goods and services. This is the kind of thing you can plot out,
| industry by industry, with Wardley mapping.
|
| Now, clearly, resource extraction jobs aren't going away. The
| methods change as we go from "ape poking at insects with stick"
| to "hydraulic fracking", but someone has to have some oversight
| of the process.
|
| But everything leading to a resulting experience fulfilling some
| human need is subject to change with AI in the picture, because
| we can imagine machines in the loop doing all the processing,
| moving, coordinating, and final delivery. Experiences that used
| to be jobs don't have to be anymore.
|
| And therefore the whole social contract of industrial economies
| is subject to a gradual shift towards indifference: if I have
| some land, some machines, some access to raw materials, I don't
| need a job, or to sell things, or to run an organization. But,
| counterbalancing that, there still have to be voices coordinating
| and controlling access to those things, because there are too
| many ethical dangers involved in making it completely
| permissionless.
|
| What financial systems(hence money, wages, etc.) do in
| controlling access is a way of assigning credit, so that you gain
| general permissions to stuff. If you do things that persistently
| assign credit to yourself, without also turning it into a
| reassignment of credit that makes enemies(power-monging etc.),
| you survive in any economy.
|
| The role of anything artistic in that is, broadly speaking, going
| to be one of storytelling and aesthetic presentation of
| information. And I think the key insight to take from the tools
| we're getting is that direct prompt engineering is going to be
| taken for granted; but prompt engineering as a layer on top of or
| beneath a more specialized skillset will still produce
| distinguished results.
|
| That is, if you can glue a little bit of API code together, you
| can create a job where 90% of your creative time is still spent
| in a more hands-on mode, but then you send it through the machine
| as the last step. The trick is in not getting too dependent on
| someone's platform control play in the process.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Human language is inexact and context sensitive. This means the
| precise meaning of words in communications is unique to the time,
| place, and members of the communication.
|
| Because of this, there will never be a 100% reliable "text prompt
| to AI image" generator. Someone will have to get to know the AI
| and figure out how to make it do what is wanted, or modify it to
| get what is wanted.
|
| Kinda the same way Google and other information repositories have
| not made researcher's jobs obsolete.
| ativzzz wrote:
| The only constant in life is change. There is no guarantee of
| stability or order in life, despite the human desire to carve it
| out where it doesn't exist. You can either embrace that change,
| or fight against it.
|
| Embracing the change means learning the new tools and adapting
| your job around them. Fighting against it means lobbying the
| government to create protectionist laws for your industry to
| prevent new technology from disrupting you.
|
| The former is easier if you are more flexible and open minded.
| The latter is easier if you have a lot of money and are well
| connected. Neither is inherently easy, which is why most of us
| just complain instead.
| kranke155 wrote:
| This is the least BS comment I've seen here. Thanks you're
| right, change is inevitable. I just dropped this here as a
| challenge if you will, but the overall feeling seems to be "you
| will actually make more money" or just "become an AI prompt
| person". The first I don't think is true and the second doesn't
| interest me honestly. I trained in my craft so I could become a
| craftsman, if you will I've always wanted to become a monk who
| would make copies of books, not a printing press operator.
| [deleted]
| asadlionpk wrote:
| I would say add these AI tools to your toolbox and use them to
| get things done quicker.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Right--the ones who survive in the industry will be the ones
| who use these tools to increase their output 5x or more (while
| someone who's _only_ good at the prompt-crafting part and isn
| 't an expert at image manipulation might only hit 1x-2x the
| pro's prior output)
| ttoinou wrote:
| If you were able to retrain in the same industry on different
| jobs 3 times, learnt web development, you are reading HN / are
| tech literate and are aware of the coming changes in the industry
| such as Deep Learning : don't worry. You're on top of the rest of
| workers in this industry. You will eventually find your new niche
| skills, and even if you don't, being on top of your current field
| you have a few years runaway ;)
| dexwiz wrote:
| I am not an ad person, but to me they always contain a specific
| subject (thing, place, etc). If you are making an ad for widget
| XJ900, you don't want it to actually show the XK800. What's
| harder, trying to prompt the AI into generating content on your
| specific subject, or just modeling/filming the subject with
| current methods? Which is harder to incorporate client feedback?
| So far, slight tweaks in prompts can produce radically difficult
| results. Paint back can help, but we'll see.
|
| I have yet to see a stable diffusion output that is high quality
| work. They often lack any compositional sense, and all the lines
| are weirdly wavy. It's like someone trying to do realism but with
| the motor skills and spatial awareness of a toddler. The picture
| that won the state fair awards looked really terrible on further
| inspection. Basic composition elements like the horizon line or
| the giant circle in the middle were all skewed, and not in an
| attractive way. Any elements beyond the central figures are just
| noise. I see that story as more about bad judging than anything
| else.
|
| Stable diffusion has its own version of uncanny valley, and it
| may be a long time before we can cross it. The people who decree
| stable diffusion as the death of human art don't often to have a
| firm grasp on artistic or design fundamentals.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| Become a plumber. It'll be a while till robots can replace you in
| the trades.
| KMnO4 wrote:
| You're telling a highly creative person to pursue an
| unstimulating job that they're not passionate about.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| This kind of comes across like you're implying there are
| different classes of people and _our_ kind are too good to be
| plumbers. If you 're worried about AI taking your job, then
| taking a job that AI can't do seems like a pretty reasonable
| response.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The upper-middle class have a god-given right to make a
| very good living expressing their creativity and opinions.
| hackeraccount wrote:
| When I do plumbing it's both creative and very stimulating;
| at least to the senses.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| There are millions of people working unstimulating jobs
| they're not passionate about. Why is the OP special?
| 10u152 wrote:
| Perhaps, but jobs are what you make of them. I know a guy
| that does floor polishing and epoxy floors. Not a very
| creative job but plenty of work.
|
| Him and his crew spend a lot of time together. They have deep
| discussions about philosophy, art and ethics while spreading
| smelly goop around concrete floors. I bet they go home pretty
| intellectually satisfied from doing epoxy floors.
| kyleyeats wrote:
| People like you will do 10x the amount of work in the future. So
| we don't need about 90% of you.
|
| For this I think you should try to be one of the 10% that's left.
| You're on HN and you're really early in this AI image generation
| game.
| simonw wrote:
| I wonder about that. Sometimes when technology makes people 10x
| more productive society responds by increasing the demand for
| what they can do by a factor of ten.
|
| One example: I'm running an early-stage startup. If an
| explainer video for my product will cost me $20,000 I'm
| probably not going to commission one. If it costs $2,000 then
| maybe I will.
| bombcar wrote:
| This is a huge part of it, and if you can ride that wave, you
| can be the person charging $10k for what everyone else is
| scrambling around trying to charge $2k.
| kyleyeats wrote:
| Yeah it's really like the 90% are in a race to the bottom
| and the 10% are in a new field.
| kranke155 wrote:
| Yeah like I said the thing is becoming an AI prompt
| person doesn't interest me in the least. I trained to be
| a craftsman that's what interests me.
| illwrks wrote:
| For any large company (with a brand team) these tools will only
| ever be a starting point to get a general direction. It might
| remove some initial back and forth working through some basic
| things that a junior might do. The output might then be used as a
| prompt for the creative agencies they work with. The brand is the
| sacred and I doubt anyone would take the risk with anything that
| isn't 100% controlled (photoshoot, CGI etc)
|
| For the smaller companies, the mom and pop ones mentioned
| elsewhere in the thread, this will probably kill any creative
| work from them.
|
| Also, consider going in-house into a large corporate. They
| usually have marketing and comms teams, if not external facing
| then internal. Then when these tools mature you could leverage
| them to knock out internal work at tighter deadlines.
| whoisjuan wrote:
| Learn how to write. It's as simple as that. These models will
| require well-crafted prompts to produce the desired outputs.
|
| Your way to get ahead of this is to learn how the models
| transform a prompt into a video or image. You will quickly
| realize there's way more nuance and need for precise terminology
| than the shelf examples you're seeing.
|
| These models are only as good as the prompts they receive.
| Someone needs to write those precise prompts. You are way ahead
| of everyone else because you already understand the concepts,
| terminology, and process of video production and CG.
| Uehreka wrote:
| Yeah, but what happens when GPT-3 starts writing better prompts
| than humans? People are talking like that's not going to
| happen, just like a few years ago people wouldn't have foreseen
| how far AI Art would come. I feel like putting bounds on where
| AI will go next is a bit of a fool's errand.
| whoisjuan wrote:
| You still need to prompt GPT-3 with something. Stacking two
| systems won't improve the outputs if your original input
| lacks precision. Garbage in, garbage out. Granted, GPT-3
| requires way less precision to generate something useful, but
| you still need to pass the proper context.
|
| I think you're right, though. It's hard to speculate how
| these things would turn out, but I think it's reasonable to
| assume that we will still need some relatively sophisticated
| human input to produce the best results out of these systems.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| Learn the new AI tools and market yourself as an AI video
| production consultant.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| If you can't beat em, you might as well join them.
| kranke155 wrote:
| Not a job I'm interested in tbh.
| rory wrote:
| Are you genuinely asking for advice on what to do? It seems
| like your options are embrace the new tech, find a niche
| where you can outcompete it, or find a new way to support
| yourself that you like better. HN can't tell you which of
| those to choose.
|
| Personally I think there's a good chance you're
| overestimating the the extent to which your day-to-day job
| will actually change by incorporating AI. Machine learning
| was supposed to take over data science years ago, but data
| scientists are in more demand than ever, and their work often
| doesn't involve too much actual machine learning.
| kranke155 wrote:
| I am just answering what seems to be a common suggestion,
| which is become an AI prompt person. I have two objections
| to this idea 1. I don't think this is a well paid job with
| a moat of a skillset Thats built over years of experience -
| I assume there will be a race for good UX/UI in AI
| generation of images. The other thing is it doesn't
| interest me simply because I don't see it as a craft of
| imagemaking. Making a good image means knowing about
| composition, lighting, detail, texture. AI imagemaking
| doesn't compare really to spending 10 hours agonising over
| lighting a shot which is what I love.
|
| Also I asked the question a bit as a challenge yes I do
| have my own ideas on what I'll do.
| macawfish wrote:
| Same feeling as a software developer. Programming as we know it
| will be completely transformed before the end of the decade.
| cercatrova wrote:
| Create an agency of one (yourself) and use the AI tools. Profit
| from the margins between the cost of the AI (likely near zero as
| time goes on) and what you charge customers.
|
| This is not without precedent. DesignJoy is run by a single
| designer who makes over $1.5 million a year by himself, doing
| contracts for 20+ clients at a time [0].
|
| [0] https://www.indiehackers.com/post/broke-the-1-5m-arr-mark-
| as...
| badpun wrote:
| I'm not so sure it will be that easy to exactly control the
| output of the AI algos. This is not that important when doing art
| for art's sake but, for commercial purposes, if you can't make
| that can of coke slightly bigger or more redder, or have the
| teenage in the picture hold it slighlty differently (all as per
| client's feedback), the tool might be a failure.
| rory wrote:
| I think it's more likely that people are simply thinking of the
| AI algo as doing too much, rather than this kind of tool
| becoming a general failure. There will likely be many, many
| steps before, during, and after AI image / video generation
| that will need a highly skilled human in the loop to produce a
| great result.
| madsbuch wrote:
| Add these technologies to your toolbox.
|
| It is not easy to do "prompt engineering". Keep in mind that most
| generated material looks awful -- there is a huge selection bias
| going on.
|
| The outputted stuff needs to made production ready also,
| distribution, etc.
|
| If anything, the emergence of these technologies should greatly
| expand. You will have a new customer base that was not available
| before, and you will be able to deliver new products.
| TillE wrote:
| > Keep in mind that most generated material looks awful --
| there is a huge selection bias going on.
|
| Yeah. Look at machine translation - it's gotten _pretty good_ ,
| in some limited cases it's perfect, but it's also frequently
| just clueless, and for anything serious you absolutely need a
| real human translator.
|
| I think these AI tools will improve, but I'm extremely
| skeptical that it's going to improve by like an order of
| magnitude any time soon. It will still require extensive
| tuning, heavy selection, and accepting that you probably can
| almost never get it to make exactly what you want.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| I have a childcare provider whose first language is Spanish
| but also speaks English well. In texts, she'll frequently use
| Spanish, and then I can just push a button to translate it.
| The translations are usually good, but sometimes bad. I think
| overall, I wouldn't use machine translation in a scenario
| where I would use a translator before, but I would be more
| likely to work with someone who doesn't speak English
| perfectly. So, it's net increasing the demand for translation
| because the transition costs for small translation work is
| lower.
| adamredwoods wrote:
| Agreed, we're still decades away from solid results. I compare
| this to automated driving: Truck drivers and cab drivers are
| still in business.
|
| Another example is the uncanny valley of CGI people: at what
| point was it acceptable to audiences, and at what point was it
| excellent?
| OJFord wrote:
| > I compare this to automated driving: Truck drivers and cab
| drivers are still in business.
|
| It's pretty early to declare that a victory for human drivers
| isn't it? I'd be worried, if I were them.
| bulbosaur123 wrote:
| > Agreed, we're still decades away from solid results
|
| You spelled "two years" wrong.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Perhaps in the short term you do nothing. It will be many years
| before this moves from "toy" to "tool". The industry is made up
| of humans and humans adapt at human speed. You don't have to
| outrun the AI bears, you just have to outrun your colleagues.
|
| Perhaps this will just make your job easier and not impact your
| ability to make money. Maybe you will make even more money.
|
| And if at some point the industry dries up completely, you will
| move on and do the best you can. We all will.
| freetime2 wrote:
| I agree. The Imagen videos are incredibly impressive, but they
| are also cherry-picked examples and there are noticeable
| quality issues. Similar to what we have seen with self-driving
| cars, I expect it will take years to go from an impressive tech
| demo to the kind of tool that can reliably deliver the kind of
| quality, versatility, and specificity needed for professional
| applications.
|
| So at the very least the parent probably has time to do a bit
| of soul searching to decide and prepare for their next
| undertaking.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| It seems fairly hard to predict to me. There have been huge
| improvements in computer art generally, but that seems to have
| come with rising demand and quality expectations.
|
| If prices for this sort of art does fall, demand will also
| increase. It's hard to guess how big that increase will be.
| nbzso wrote:
| My practical advice: Plan for your future from a blank state of
| mind. Reduce all unnecessary expenses, invest into more self-
| sufficient survival.
|
| The race between semi-pros and professionals is marketing driven,
| same applies in AI situation, AI will not be as good as the best
| in the business, but clients/corporations will use the AI
| argument to lower the reward for professional labor.
|
| This is normal. This is the Surveillance Capitalism. And is the
| direct result of the lack of ethics behind the tech overlords.
| They simply don't care. And now their social position of demigods
| and keepers of "the knowledge" will give them the ultimate power
| over peoples imagination and thoughts.
|
| So be it. I cannot stop this. And the "adaptation" argument is
| utter nonsense. But I can move into the woods and live a simple
| and happy life. I can create my own paper and paints from
| surrounding materials, and I will paint for myself and my
| friends.
|
| The majority of the next generations will have no problem to be
| controlled by AI. Corporations will package this as a "progress"
| and people will swallow it willingly.
|
| So what? It is a choice, a minority will refuse to live in AI
| induced comma and will search for human touch, human emotions,
| human produced reality.
| brudgers wrote:
| Get out of the race to $0.
|
| Develop business relationships.
|
| Good clients are mostly insensitive to price.
|
| That's what makes them good clients.
|
| Good luck
| kranke155 wrote:
| Hmm not sure I follow. I have great clients and they do ask for
| high end work - but often what keeps me afloat is the trashy
| low quality stuff. A few times a year I do the high quality
| high end stuff.
|
| You're right that really high end work will continue, most
| likely unchanged, for at least a decade (maybe). But I'm not so
| sure really - things are moving so fast.
| notjustanymike wrote:
| Auto-generated content has a tendency to raise only the baseline
| in industries. For web development first it was Dreamweaver, then
| WordPress templates, then SquareSpace and Wix. Bootstrap came
| along, then Material and a thousand other prepackaged design
| languages. While these advancements reduced the income from
| building mom & pop restaurant websites, the demand for high-end
| curated sites never really changed.
|
| Just focus your efforts on continuing to produce quality work,
| those clients never dry up.
| smallerfish wrote:
| AI hasn't really come for programming yet. Copilot, imperfect
| as it is, is proof that the problem can be approached.
|
| I think junior software engineers could realistically be
| obsolete in 5 years. Imagine a software architect being able to
| prompt: "write a rest API that exposes user data from system A
| to internal system B", and have a complete API dumped out, with
| tests, ready to be deployed.
| notjustanymike wrote:
| Sounds a bit like Zapier. Love that tool.
| markdown wrote:
| > those clients never dry up
|
| As someone who used to work in web dev, they most certainly do
| and did.
|
| And you have an ever growing pool (worldwide) of workers who
| are jostling over that dwindling supply of gigs.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| I would be surprised to learn that the absolute number of web
| devs today has gone down since SquareSpace came out. Yes, the
| $500 website is dead, but there's still tons of work for tons
| of people.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| Meh. There's plenty of work to go around. At the low end,
| companies are rebuilding their websites all the time, whether
| it's on Webflow or whatever. At the higher end, there is
| plenty of integration work, enterprise apps, etc to be built.
| Competition is fierce but there is opportunity if you
| specialize properly and build the right relationships.
| yrgulation wrote:
| Web dev as in building websites has been dead for a quite a
| while. Web dev as in building web systems is alive and
| kicking. I fail to see how a complex webapp can be written in
| no code. A wordpress kind of app, sure. A complex web ui for
| a complex backend nah.
| can16358p wrote:
| Yup, I second that.
|
| Many places that I've worked with are now considering using a
| zero code website creator instead of actually coding, and for
| many scenarios it just works perfectly, cheap, and
| flawlessly. Of course it's not for everything especially if
| there's customization and server technologies involved, but
| it's very big to create disruption.
| spyder wrote:
| AI for long time will be just another tool to improve your
| production. It will probably reduce the more repetitive boring
| part of the work. Quickly generating content will let you try out
| a lot of ideas faster and seeing the different results will
| inspire you more. Some of the simpler work will probably go away
| but most likely it will be replaced by other work that currently
| is considered more complex but becomes easier and cheaper with AI
| so more customer can afford it.
|
| AI+human will produce better results than just AI for a long time
| but you have to learn how to use it.
|
| One of the interesting possibility will be to train your own AI
| on your private creative work/dataset so others could not have it
| if they don't have access to your private dataset, and it would
| produce your style better than some general AI. There will be
| services that will do it for you as for example Emad from
| StabilityAI already mentioned they will provide something like
| that.
|
| But yeah, if AI keeps improving the end game is a little scary.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Some excerpts from your website in the future:
|
| "We use AI to optimise our early-stage iterations"
|
| "AI is great for generating initial concepts. Here are some of
| ourfavourites, and some that didn't turn out so well!"
|
| "Did you know AI can reduce our turnaround for clients by up to
| 50%?"
|
| In other words: it'll help. It won't replace you.
| yehAnd wrote:
| It will help content producers avoid hiring to achieve good
| results.
|
| I'm using AI to aid development of a game engine with a baked
| in model to replicate and help the user evolve the game world
| style, and rules, to their curiosity and tastes. Games will be
| even easier since familiar experiences are heavily constrained
| through painstaking play test. Game world generation parameters
| are finite. Even the art work we appreciate most is often
| constrained to a handful of style patterns; consider how flat
| web design was suddenly everywhere with only colors differing.
| Whole lot of the same goes into game asset production.
|
| Gabe Newell called content creating AI an extinction level
| event for multimedia business. Of course politics as usual will
| be leveraged to create private monopoly of such technology
| unless open sourced.
|
| Our best bet is such software is open source and thus
| aristocrats cannot lock it up behind artificial scarcity and
| copyright maximalism.
| dan_mctree wrote:
| Artists which use AI and become more efficient will drive up
| supply of art and decrease its price. Additionally, some people
| who need art might just skip the artist entirely now, leading
| to less demand. This means some artists may no longer be able
| to make a living. As in, they're effectively replaced.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| ...which, by the way, is how most automation turns out. I've
| worked in semiconductor manufacturing and software, and in both
| cases the automation that was at one point predicted to
| eliminate jobs, just made the people more productive, which
| made them more valuable, and instead of fewer jobs there were
| more, because more could be done by each person (so the range
| of applications that were economical to do was increased). So
| "it'll help, it won't replace you" is not pie-in-the-sky
| thinking, it's the most likely result, because it's what
| normally happens when automation improves.
| yehAnd wrote:
| It made them appear more productive. The machines just did
| the once basic work. Numerous studies have been conducted to
| quantify which technology made workers more productive. They
| all ended up with models too complex and variable to be
| practical.
|
| Society just needs to accept a whole of our social truism is
| politically correct LARP to the drum beat of a financiers
| profit memes. What are a bunch of rich elders going to do if
| billions quit dancing like jesters for coin? Fight us from
| their far off estates?
|
| 800k sworn LEO in the US working for a paycheck, not fealty
| to a billionaire. The public has all the advantage but isn't
| allowed to know it. Communal health is the future of work
| whether outsider financiers accept or not. We'll just flood
| the inter tubes with AI media and crash the value of their
| copyright constraint system if they don't like it. I have
| zero obligation to do-nothing daddy deep pockets who can
| point to a contract I wasn't a party to. I don't believe such
| people are worth coddling with my agency.
| nindalf wrote:
| Did you generate this comment with GPT-3?
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Ok in this case it did not make him more productive...
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Or you could have the same turnaround and half the employees,
| guess which is cheaper.
| hackeraccount wrote:
| Imagine you have a company. You can get your work force and
| double your gross or keep half your employees and leave your
| gross unchanged.
|
| Which would you pick? Keep in mind you don't have to go
| through the headache of actually hiring people - all you need
| to do is not fire them.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Employees are my biggest expense by a wide margin. I could
| drop half my staff and increase my net overnight. I'm not
| going to double my customers nearly that fast so I'll be
| burning through payroll in the meantime... especially
| considering customer acquisition is going to get harder
| than employee acquisition over the next year.
| CelticBard wrote:
| Being proactive is always a good thing. Use the AI as a tool in
| your process.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
|
| However, I don't think it'll replace much or even a lot of work,
| especially where a minimum level of quality is desired.
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