[HN Gopher] AI and two hundred dollar tasks
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AI and two hundred dollar tasks
Author : azhenley
Score : 52 points
Date : 2025-01-28 17:54 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.ninlabs.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.ninlabs.com)
| dhumph wrote:
| I thought this was going to be about my wasted 200 OpenAI pro
| subscription to get operator. It's failed all its tasks so far.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| It's worth noting that spending $200 on a graphic design from
| someone online was already a huge reduction in cost and time from
| what it would take before platforms like Upwork
| vunderba wrote:
| When GenAI first started taking off a few years ago I called out
| that the real market set to be absolutely decimated wasn't
| corporations - it was the gig economy.
|
| The quality of generative AI may not be professional level
| quality, but it presents an easy and cheap drop-in replacement
| for one-off tasks that people previously outsourced to platforms
| like Fiverr (voiceovers, logo design, clip art, copy editing,
| translation, etc).
| jongjong wrote:
| It's not just $200 tasks. For example, it's really good with
| producing music... Which would have cost several thousands of
| dollars before. E.g: suno.com
|
| I've been recording short tunes on my low-quality $50 Ukulele
| (which I self-taught myself) and then getting Suno to turn it
| into full songs. The quality is better than anything I could
| possibly have produced. Even if I paid thousands of dollars to a
| professional, I could not get better quality than what I'm
| getting from Suno. I cannot tell that it's produced by AI. AI is
| surprisingly suitable for music.
|
| If I want lyrics, I type out the topic and underlying message of
| the song and the aesthetics I want (e.g. short lines, rhymes,
| etc...) inside Claude or ChatGPT and make it generate the lyrics.
|
| Also once you have the first draft of lyrics, you can make it
| refine them by telling it to rhyme in particular ways. For
| example, the first words of each sentence can rhyme with each
| other as well as the last word of each sentence and you can tell
| it to change the rhyme pattern each paragraph. It's amazing how
| it can keep the meaning of the lyrics the same but totally
| transform the sounds of it by swapping out words with synonyms.
|
| AI video capability is impressive but it can't get it all the way
| to a production-quality film. For music though, it definitely
| seems to be production-quality. Sometimes it takes a few attempts
| but it definitely seems to cross the 'professional' line
| regularly. Often, you don't need any tuning, trimming or
| intervention to the piece; it's just done.
| glimshe wrote:
| Many people see AI as a replacement for the human, but current-
| gen AI is in my view a replacement for the hammer. It's a tool
| that needs to be wielded with skill for good results... And
| when that happens, the productivity can be truly amazing.
| jongjong wrote:
| Agreed, I think music is one of the areas which it nails
| though (pun intended). The size of the human input can be
| very small and still produce very high quality output.
|
| I mean you can produce 0 input and fully automate it and it
| will still sound professional... Maybe it will lack a bit of
| creativity but typically only a professional would be able to
| know that.
|
| I think what Suno produces is often higher quality and more
| creative than what most modern pop stars produce... Just
| because the bar there happens to be quite low.
|
| If I listen to 80s music, I can see the creativity gap (at
| least relative to the AI's typical ouput)... But AI output is
| often superior to modern artists IMO.
| bccdee wrote:
| > Maybe it will lack a bit of creativity but typically only
| a professional would be able to know that.
|
| Judging by the examples on suno.com, no. All of these are
| noticeably sub-par. They're "professional" in the way that
| slapping a lens flair png on top of a photo makes the photo
| look "professional."
|
| > I think what Suno produces is often higher quality and
| more creative than what most modern pop stars produce
|
| Go listen to any song from Taylor Swift's latest album. I'm
| not a Swift fan, and I don't particularly enjoy her music,
| but she's the current face of pop music. Compare the
| texture of the instrumentation with anything produced by
| suno's model--it's night and day.
|
| I worry that the novelty of generative models that cater to
| their users' every whim will create a culture that is
| uninterested in anything challenging or new. Who would
| bother to look for good art when an endless fountain of bad
| art is right at our fingertips? For goodness' sake, you
| didn't even listen to a pop song before deciding that
| "most" modern pop artists are worse than "suno.com." I
| don't even like pop music, but that's just false on the
| face of it.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Really I think we may be a good ways towards that last
| paragraph just from algorithms designed to drown users in
| whatever content they have recently consumed.
|
| (I hate the term "content" because it's so associated
| with this sort of view, but it's exactly right here.)
| mohsen1 wrote:
| AI probably can do very nice landscaping design too. It's just
| that image generation models are not made for it. If we manage to
| give AI a more structured input, you'll get a nice design in
| return.
| joshmarinacci wrote:
| I don't think so. Good landscaping requires knowledge of the
| site, the local ecosystem, and an understanding of how water
| and soil flow. It's a whole lot more than generating an image.
| The image is simply an output of the process.
| Arainach wrote:
| This is presented like it's a good thing, but it quite probably
| implies a local maximum in cultural abilities for a long time.
|
| How do experts become experts? Through time and practice. Many
| great photographers hone their skills or discover their talent
| when working at entry level and mid level positions - shooting
| portraits, etc.
|
| Most great musicians, bartenders, software engineers, etc. do the
| same. Without entry level/apprentice jobs the only other model is
| patronage from the rich, and that was never a good model even
| before today's rich largely abandoned the belief that they had a
| responsibility to contribute back to the society that allowed
| them to become rich.
|
| Without a pipeline of new talent, where will new state of the art
| come from? Where will more training data for the planet burners
| come from?
| panarky wrote:
| It's a tool, and just like other tools, it multiplies human
| labor and intellect.
|
| I don't need to spend a decade becoming proficient with a
| pocket knife, and then another decade becoming an expert with
| an ax.
|
| Instead, an experienced person can show me how to be safe with
| a chainsaw in an afternoon.
|
| I won't be an expert with the chainsaw, that still takes many
| hours of experience, but I don't need the knife and ax
| prerequisites.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| The calculator has allowed anyone to do complex arithmetic
| while they're holding a calculator, required by a job or some
| other formal or necessary context. At the expense of
| retarding most people's ability to do everyday math at places
| like the grocery store, a context in which they won't have
| the wherewithal to pull out the tool. It has not increased
| intellect regarding anything but rote keypressed calculation.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| On the other hand, looking up trigonometric functions in a
| table to find precise answers is not a valuable human
| activity. Calculators keep you from having to do that.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| It's funny because I see this exact same thing in game dev. A
| bunch of games have now decided to outsource basic logos,
| banners, icons etc to AI.
|
| They all end up looking very obvious and similar and I pass on
| them every time. It's THE core advertising for your product.
| raincole wrote:
| Supermarket Simulator is a game whose Steam capsule (the very
| first art players see on Steam) is blatantly AI made.
|
| The estimated sales are > 2M copies.
|
| [0]: https://steamdb.info/app/2670630/charts/
| raincole wrote:
| I don't want to sound like I am bashing the original designer of
| the $200 monkey mascot, but I think the author has some
| misunderstanding here.
|
| The market value of that was very unlikely $200. Before AI, there
| were _so many_ people offering similar services on Fiverr. And
| from my experience they 're mostly not scammers (just novices).
| Of course they might not live in the US, at least not in big
| cities.
|
| The price range for that was $20~$50.
|
| Edit: the article says 2013. I don't know if Fiverr was popular
| back then. I'm talking about more like 2019. At that point Fiverr
| and similar platforms had upended this kind of $200 market.
| sdwr wrote:
| I think you would see a quality difference between 'a monkey
| mascot' at $40 and $200. The $200 designer is shining a light
| on his personal brand.
|
| The mascot is friendly, vaguely memorable, well-proportioned,
| soft, and not attention-seeking. Its expression tells a story,
| adds humanity, and creates unresolved tension.
|
| The AI ones are sharp and confident and eye-catching, zero
| subtlety, completely missing the point. I'm willing to bet a
| $40 designer would drop the ball in a different, equally bad
| way (probably make it too corporate, or miss the precise "cute
| but low-effort" spot the original designer hit).
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