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.

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.

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.

So, what aspects are completely different in your opinion? I don't see any fundamental differences. People's wants are unlimited, so the workers no longer necessary due to automation can move to fields where automation can't be applied. There will always be plenty of those because, again, unlimited wants. I mean, in Japan, people are already paying for artificial friends, who will go out for dinner with them. I think we'll have much more work in human contact and companionship in the future. Hopefully, much more doctors per patients and much more teachers per student than today. Etc.

Software jobs don’t scale like manufacturing jobs. If you automate a particular profession’s work, they’ll lose their jobs, but meanwhile maybe now 10x more customers can afford the service they provide. But now, scaling the automating software to serve 10x the customers won’t require 10x as many programmers, maybe just a couple good devops people to tend the flock.

You might then argue that customers will still find things to want from the newly freed up labor, but I also think we’re going to start being hard-pressed for categories of work where “the human touch” makes a difference, and also where there is room to employ large sectors of the workforce. Add in that customers “new demands” won’t necessarily correlate with the need for human workers, and it becomes easier to see a world where people keep coming up with new wants, and automation keeps swooping in and immediately satisfying the demand.

are you aware of how taxing that work is on the body ? How isolating it is ?

so you're asking those people who farm (using huge machines and automation to do so extremely efficiently) to give you free food? Why would they want to do that?

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.

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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.

together with the previous comment on mechanics and stablehands, i wonder how many people in history grew up training and wanting to be a mechanic, only to be told, sorry we just don't have that many automobiles in the world, we need more stablehands. i wonder how many people went to do fine art in school only to be told 'look you have good skills and all but we just need more tweening artists'.

I think retraining to an adjacent field is definitely possible - the only thing i see disagreements in is the cost, and who bears that cost.

it's not zero sum, because the resources that used to be spent paying you now could be spent on something else. This increase in efficiency means more goods/services could be produced!

Of course, that newly saved money would be spent on someone else, instead of the person being made redundant by automation. It is thus a societal responsibility to retrain/reskill that person, and the training perhaps also partially be paid for by the entity benefiting directly from the automation.

Don’t forget about musicians and junior software engineer work…very soon.

I am not a lawyer but I don't really see the "it's not fair use" argument.

People have been inspired to write about subject matter because of their experiences.

AI takes lots of things that currently exist and mixNmatch.

It's not nearly the same thing.

why not? Just because people take in experiences slowly, via senses, doesn't mean that an AI isn't replicating that learning via a fast method.

If you answer no, then you must necessarily admit it's different.

It can do a lot of things, but in the end it's still just a glorified function.

a compiler is not transformative. You translating a book into another language doesn't make it a new work.

But an AI that takes billions of images, and uses it to synthesize something different and new, is fairly transformative under my eyes, and deserves new copyright. Unless the AI generated image is largely composed of a small number of works, i don't see why anyone should have copyright ownership of such an output!

if anything I would argue that human taking code from multiple places and making it compile into something more useful is much more synthetiz-ing than AI...

Is it ok to scan copyrighted works. I think Google Books' win at the Supreme Court shows that yes it is.

Is it ok to process them down to the rawest information?

Is it ok for people to generate content from the raw information (and ok for them to charge for it)?

The last two I don't have an answer for, but I understand the fear of artists and the anger that their hard work is being shovelled into the monster that is going affect their work. But also more broadly the make-up industry, the lighting industry, studio spaces, lens makers, paint manufacturers, etc etc etc.

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?"

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.

This is very much not a fact.

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.

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.

Fortunately I enjoy writing code.

I still remember splicing together There Will Be Blood and enjoying looking at some of the beatiful still frames.

My boss at the time spliced together Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse, and somehow fucked up and spliced an entire reel out of order... and nobody ever noticed (because Grindhouse was full of intentional fake projectionist mistakes, being an homage to an old era). He ended up noticing on his own on the second day of showings and fixing it overnight!

In the worst case corporations will just rebuild the A.I. models from data licensed from stock photo sites, getty, etc. All you can get from this is a one-time bulk-discount payment, and then you will be paying them for use of the model in the next Photoshop.

Plus there are copyright-abusing corporations that jump on any excuse to kill off fair use and scraping, so any attempt to legislate scraping may instead end up creating more Disney copyright and link-tax laws.

I make 100k a year in London making CG. I don’t see how that will be available to me doing AÍ prompt work.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33099182#33100703

You’re crazy if you think many artists I know don’t outwork 99% of the population. Condescending and inappropriate. Many artists I know are the most hard working people I’ve ever met - because making it in this area is fucking hard. And a lot of the laziest people I know are well paid data scientists. I don’t blame either of them. But your comment is just a lazy ridiculous preposterous idea. Read the biography of Patti Smith and tell me she didn’t work hard. Such a presumptuous comment.

BTW I'm sorry you might be getting disrupted. It truly sucks.

And if you think the vast majority of the human population in history, subsistence farmers, didn't work harder than virtually every artist in existence, I'm not sure what to tell you. Being an artist for a living is absolutely a privileged position for 99.999% of the world's population.

nor does the art that humans create - the emotion comes from the human viewing/experiencing a work. The "source" that work is perhaps irrelevant, if the human viewing it is being evoked.

I think this is what people have in mind when they talk about integration. It doesn't seem ridiculous to me.

[1] https://weirdwonderfulai.art/general/stable-diffusion-integr...

Moving somewhere less expensive than London and doing your current work remotely might be an option, everything’s become less focused on going into the studio to work after the ‘rona. Lower your expenses and start playing with personal work, your client history can probably get you some interesting gallery opportunities to give you a decent chance at selling Authentically Human-Made work to rich folks at an absurd price.

I ditched your kind of career path a while back, I’m using the drawing skills learnt chasing the Hollywood animation dream to draw indy comics and furry porn. Makes less money but I can eke out a living in a much cheaper town than Los Angeles, and I pretty much draw what I want.

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?

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.

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.

For now I think it'll only replace some low level commercial stuff and perhaps add images where there were none before.

I wish it were that simple. As a person who genuinely enjoys being a data scientist, and practices all those skills in a project I create on my own: the industry says otherwise. Integrating a technology into your practice that takes nuance out of it, just really means that managers and c-suites are going to expect you to give more nuance to your choices (which they deadlocked you out of). ML DevOps for the last two years are just me integrating more services.

I understand your livelihood is being threatened, and that’s very scary. Can we please avoid using the legal system to kill nascent competitors? Surely there are better responses than this.

Burn it all down.

Finally people will get culture back. We won't have to appeal to corporate giants to have access to movies, images and music.