ChatGPT, stable diffusion and I am sure upcoming music models will enable this mechanization in the arts, where great artists will be unaffected but making it nearly impossible for “good enough” artists to compete while also pushing up the floor of what is an acceptable competency level that merits being paid for making it more difficult for people to support themselves while improving their skills.
Now AI's coming for most of those who survived that first culling. And not just the middling-talent folks this time.
Printing, photography, radio, film, television, etc have all increased the availability and 'quality' of entertainment available at the same time as reducing the number of creators involved. (Obviously there is some debate possible around quality)
Being a half-competent folk musician or good storyteller or being able to sketch pretty well used to be super valuable to your family and community. Not so much anymore. Expressions of those sorts of skills are more often tolerated than genuinely looked-forward-to, now. The need is gone.
People on this site complain about folks being consumers and not producers, not being creative—well, for a large swath of the arts, that's where it started. Recording and photography. Took it from something that was strongly socially encouraged & rewarded to something private. You can't fix that with "maker" movements—not in any major way.
Technology changed the social context and wiped out the external motivation & encouragement for a bunch of kinds of creative expression that were accessible to & achievable by the masses. AI is more of the same.
It also assumes that they were constrained to local creators.
It is possible that people simply did other activities that don't involve a creator. Another possibility is that most people consumed content from a small set of non-local creators, like authors with wide distribution.
My grandfather and group sang. From what tapes I have heard of them, they didn't sound worse than any other group of Appalachian gospel/blue grass singers.
My parents' wedding photos weren't 'professional' and I think they came out pretty well, perhaps even charming.
Sometimes I think people are putting too much stock in the notion of a 'perfect' life, rather than a lived one.
This is going to push us back to making our own music like we use to. Singing/playing should be a fun group activity rather a performance given to a group of non performers. We are all artists.
There's a popular youtuber named Joel Haver who films videos, then uses an AI tool to convert them into animations, so they can be magically put into a space or fantasy setting.
AI dungeon is an text adventure where the content is AI-generated.
I also imagine tools similar to Github Co-pilot for other markets. Some AI could generate music or video games levels based on inputs from a user, then the user can take or modify the best bits. The goal hopefully being that they get something no human could have thought up, instead of just generating a bunch of mediocre content.
Hang on, AI tool? Joel Haver converts every frame manually. His method is the literal opposite of using an AI tool. It's incredibly painstaking.
No, they cost exactly as much as they always had. Before machines, people didn't have wardrobes full of tailor-made clothes. Each person had, give or take one, exactly as many tailor-made clothes as we have today.
Many, perhaps most, people don't have any tailor made clothes because they can't afford a tailor. Which has indeed always been the case. But before machines, people who couldn't afford a tailor had no other option for clothes except homemade. Now, with machines, they do.
Not impossible, but definitely a raising of the bar.
Reminds of the Empire in Asimov's Foundation where they knew just enough to keep the current tech running, but not enough to fix it if something major breaks or create new tech.
When the AI breaks something, we will be missing the people who knew how all this s$%T works.
well, no, you probably didn't listen to much music or see many stories at all because the average person couldn't afford to experience such things more than a few times in their life. shocking that Luddites are still a thing in the 21st century, especially here.
Sorry that was a ramble, please take no offense.
Whereas now we have the complete opposite problem, we're inundated by (much) lesser variants of these things to the point of saturation, addiction, and emotional depletion. I'm not sure either one of the extremes is particularly desirable, nor how acknowledging issues that mass-market consumerist societies currently visibly suffer from makes one a Luddite.
Means that many, many more people can have something of passable quality. For example:
> not that long ago all clothes you wore were custom made by a tailor
If you could afford a tailor; otherwise you had to make do with homemade rags that constantly needed mending and looked terrible.
> all the music you listened to was played live by musicians
If you could afford to go to concerts.
> all stories were brought to life in front of you by theatre actors
If you could afford to go to the theatre.
> now all of those while still available are significantly more expensive and niche than the mechanized (production or reproduction) equivalents
Which the vast majority of people can afford, and which significantly improves their quality of life. Now they can buy clothes at Walmart or Target instead of having to wear homemade; sure, not the same as a custom tailored suit, but good enough. Now they can buy digital recordings of world class musicians and theatre actors for much, much less than it would cost to see them live.
> ChatGPT, stable diffusion and I am sure upcoming music models will enable this mechanization in the arts
That already happened decades ago, as soon as mass produced recordings became widely available. It's already next to impossible for any artist who isn't world class (or, more precisely, is not publicized so that people think they're world class) to make a living at their art. ChatGPT and the equivalent in other arts aren't going to affect that much.
Not to mention the degree of control over what music is actually being played.
Sure, people with more disposable income could enjoy more formal, and perhaps more professional, musical performances. The growing middle class created demand for music and other forms of entertainment.
Music was taught in the schools. Even small towns had a bandstand in the park. Music was used in public ceremonies, including church. Any tavern was likely to have a musician, paid or not. Sometimes the pay consisted of food and lodging.
> If you could afford a tailor; otherwise you had to make do with homemade rags that constantly needed mending and looked terrible.
Or you bought clothes infrequently and maintained them, and they lasted longer because the quality was much better.
People are so used to fast fashion these days that they assume that the poor in previous eras suffered in this regard way more than they actually did, because people assume the poor quality of clothing today is representative of how it always was, rather than a recent phenomenon.
The quality of clothing was much, much higher - even for the relatively poor - and clothing wasn't treated as disposable, so people would maintain and repair it, so it would last much longer.
> Which the vast majority of people can afford, and which significantly improves their quality of life. Now they can buy clothes at Walmart or Target
Buying clothes at Walmart or Target is a step down, not a step up. (And ironically, it's not even necessarily cheaper!).
If we're talking about clothing, it's very clear that these trends have served to the detriment of the average person, not to their benefit. The ones who actually benefit are the ones capturing the profit - the Sam Waltons of the world.
And it's nice that when my clothes are stained or irreparably damaged I can afford to replace them quickly.
This is a preference that has been demonstrated time and again throughout the world as it became an option.
So no, I don't believe it is clear at all how this is to the detriment of the average person.
This is extremely incorrect. First of all, fast fashion isn't actually necessarily cheaper. The real difference is that fast fashion exists in an industry that has gutted the entire infrastructure for alternatives, so people actually don't have the alternative options anymore.
It's like saying that "people prefer to drive cars, which is evident if you look anywhere in the US". Sure, almost everyone drives cars, but that's because the previous rail infrastructure was literally ripped up and destroyed by the auto industry, so now there's no alternative.
If you look at the developing world, it's very clear how incorrect your statement is, because there, fast fashion is more expensive, and other forms of clothing are far cheaper, far better quality, and far more common.
All of that is part of fast fashion - including Walmart and Target; it's just the lower end or very far down the pipeline. You can't separate one from the other, because they are economically codependent.
> And the quality is perfectly fine
Fast fashion is indubitably much lower quality, and it's weird to see people here denying that, when the fashion industry itself is completely in agreement about that fact. It's not a secret - they discuss it openly.
Those articles of clothing I'm talking about are almost never worth mending, but they still can last for years.
It's all fast fashion, just different points along the line.
Yes, broccoli and kale look different, and one is a fancier class signifier than the other, but at the end of the day they're still the same species.
So there's only high quality tailor-made clothes... and fast fashion?, of which there may be a spectrum that goes from something like "very fast fast fashion", all the way to "slow fast fashion"?
> Yes, broccoli and kale look different, and one is a fancier class signifier than the other, but at the end of the day they're still the same species.
So you're against... clothes? And possibly also agnostic when it comes to the existence of taste buds?
I'm sorry but your line of reasoning is making zero sense to me. This is getting to the point where I have to ask: Have you ever bought clothes yourself or does someone else buy them for you? Can you put into words of your own (without googling) what makes an article of clothing like a shirt not fast fashion?
They made econmic trade offs depending on their level of poverty.
> Means that many, many more people can have something of passable quality.
There is also a feedback loop where automation puts people out of work, and even though it helps make products cheaper, it also creates less of a market for the products. Your post makes it seems like there are only positives.
This one really puzzles me.
Voice recognition replaced phone trees. And from what I can tell, it's just worse. In this particular use case I don't think it really replaced tier 1 support. Either I'm missing something that it's a lot better for some group(s) of people, or people adopted it because of promises that failed to materialize.
A manager with misaligned incentives that reduced call center costs by 50% and got promoted also wins.
Customer service, be it commercial or tech support, is always treated horribly.
I could see it saying "I understand you want to reach customer representative", "Please select from these options while I connect you to a representative" while circling you around a graph of options or just automatically hanging up after 45 minutes to an hour of being on the call.
It's 100% internal metrics.
When I was in the military, there was some metric that the clinic was graded on - I think it was number of days between when an appointment was made and when the visit happened. So the clinics just didn't allow unimportant people to make appointments more than 2 weeks out.
Can get on with life until they ring you back then.
A call deferred is a call denied.
Convincing the customer to give up is one way to reduce workload.
See also: automated systems that play a prerecorded message along the lines of "we're currently experiencing higher than normal call volume" regardless of how long wait times even are.
It took a global pandemic for the California DMV to finally start an email ticket system. It is hands down so much better than going in to the DMV and has to be way more efficient for them. You simply fill out a form and you get an email with a ticket number. They respond within 3 business days asking you to send images of documents or whatever is missing. A comparatively pleasant experience.
This would provide the customer with a written record which could be used against the corporation. Phone is generally favorable to the corporations because the corporation can decide whether/how to retain/destroy records, but the customer will almost never have a transcript or recording to use for their own evidence.
Many corporations have moved to a system where you can either call an automated line which does its best to make you hang up...or you can fill out a browser form which provides the customer no ticket/confirmation number/email/any record that you ever filled it out.
So the companies save money by then cutting the size of their call centers.
Looks very much like a race to the bottom dominated by a few big players to me. Consumers don't seem to care that much.
100 year houses are only livable because someone put a ton of money into retrofitting things like plumbing, electric, and HVAC. Most of that has had major rework done several times as well since it was first added. Even at that, the fundamentals of those houses mean that they cannot be retrofitting for good insulation, and it can be argued they should all be scrapped for that reason.
I think there is an ethos of buying new and overpriced (and also buying "experiences") to show off that you have money for that and aren't some poor nerd trying to optimize their budget at the expense of consumerism. Often you don't actually have that much money for actual conspicuous consumption, so at least you're trying to imitate the Apple aesthetic. I am getting this vibe from talking to a distinct set of people of my age group, of course not all.
Office furniture seems to have been incredibly well-built, though, by modern standards. Kinda like how office and government buildings used to be built a lot better. Institutions seem to have cared a lot more about that kind of thing back then. They built desks for ordinary low-paid clerks or typists like they expected the office to still be running, and still using that same desk, in 200 years.
[EDIT] Also, part of what makes older furniture seem so nice is that excellent-quality wood was abundant. It seems so nice because they used wood that'd be ultra-expensive luxury-grade today, for, like, interior structural parts you never even see. Same story for houses. I've seen wooden support beams that'd be almost impossible to find at any price, today, the quality's so high and the piece is so large. Floor underlayment (again, not even intended to be seen) so knot-free it'd probably be used for veneer, now. That kind of thing.
100 years ago, how much did the family dinner table cost? Would you measure it in hours or days of salary? When that family in 1923 went table shopping, they were either going to buy from a company like Sears Roebuck or from a local store and there probably wasn't much variety from either source.
Today, there's lots of cheap stuff available, but there's also lots of high end custom stuff available as well. We have more of everything.
There's a moat, and it's very evident just by looking at family pictures from the sixties and eighties.
Cheap, mass-produced furniture has taken the bottom of the market but there really is a wide variety available today.
It's been like a 1.5 months since it was released.
For me I am doing a lot my writing with it becuase my writing is worse than mediocre.
As long as you don't expect it to know things off the bat, it has a decent memory, though seems to be unaware of what it knows e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34370057)
So you can just feed it the good info, get it to update things with more context and it will spit out pretty decent prose (though you have to ask to for it to be well written).
Drives me nuts as someone who likes using subtitles.
It's nice to have access sooner, especially for less popular shows that might never get any kind of release outside of Japan, but it's a lot worse then most fan subs and sometimes misses entire sections of dialog.
I've been away from all that for rather a long time, so I don't know. Still, I'd guess these robo-subtitles are probably replacing the "fast and bad" niche. The "slow and good" niche seems like it could survive.
(I’m almost ashamed I watch Star Trek so often that I know this offhand…)
The subtitles are literally the worst, short of being incomprehensible. Like so bad that until someone experiences them, you can’t really grok how terrible they are. They’re a solid D minus.
Maybe it‘s an iOS thing. But every so often, the positioning codes sneak in to the subtitles themselves, so you start seeing x,y coordinates. And any time anything is italicized, the italicized part jumps to the opposite side of the screen, meaning the caption gets split in half. It’d be comical if it wasn’t frustrating.
(Thanks for the opportunity to vent about how sad it is that Star Trek is trapped behind such a bad streaming service. And I even pay for no ads, yet they still show ads every 8th episode or so.)
Subtitles are not something I normally have on since I know almost every word verbatim for stng and voyager... so maybe they are even worse than I realize!
I only pay for this service because I want to support my beloved star trek.. glad it's been getting some new life in recent years at least!
But yes.. it's sad that they have such a crappy service.
I always have YT's subtitles turned on and while they aren't perfect they are way better than the alternative (none).
Network/Streaming TV/Movies should absolutely be paying someone to, at a minimum, clean up the first pass by AI and we should demand that but I'm not at all ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I realise it is not good HN form to talk about the comment instead of adding to the conversation but the subtlety with which you injected this was brilliant.
I was ready to ignore the change as human error/typo until it hit me.
Point about AI driven subtitling very well made!
Public numbers for prime is around 60,000 titles in 2021. Those are most likely going to be in four languages. And there's going to be at least two versions of each of those depending on what regions are playing in. That also assumes that a title is only one piece of content not a TV show if we assume that 50% of the titles are TV shows and each of those has a minimum of 10 episodes and we assume every title is around an hour including movies so that'll average out with shorter shows longer shows and longer movies. That ends up being around 4.8 million hours worth of content.
Let's just assume that the rate of title entry is one-to-one with the length of content though it's much more likely 1.5 to 1 or 2 to 1 given that people have to pause go back and fix things. That gives us with the average worker working 2,000 hours a year 2400 person years to data enter the entire catalog. Manual entry also obviously leaves rooms for poor workers or fat fingering. So if you wanted really high quality you would spot check other workers and so you might bloat that up to 3,000 people years.
So if you hired a brand new team of unskilled workers train them for 6 months with 3,000 people and then spent them for a year you would be able to backfill all of Prime's catalog right now.
But what happens when you on board say 10,000 titles from getting a new licensing deal with searchlight films?
You want that content up as fast as possible and people actually like it less if it doesn't have titles on it then if they're bad as some other comments have said.
Also just running the numbers let's say you pay someone around $30,000 a year to do this data entry at a very low wage double that for facilities and support HR and all that crap. 3000 employees at that wage for a year is 180 million. That training alone is 90M.
Should each of the streaming services take a large chunk of their budget just to make sure that a human reviews the subtitles possibly at an accuracy rate only slightly higher than the machine learning can do currently. Would you rather have 5% human coverage or 100% 90% accurate AI coverage.
From my understanding most content doesn't actually have subtitles on it unless it was on a premiere TV network that was required for government regulations to subtitle their shows such as a BBC TV show. That means that the streaming networks are actually doing this out of customer interest as opposed to being required to do so so they're actually backfilling work for the people that produce the videos in the first place. And from the little bit that I've worked in broadcast subtitles sharing isn't all that standard and Netflix for instance may have added subtitles but that doesn't mean that prime video or Hulu is going to get those subtitles if they take on that content later the video producers aren't that interested in pulling the information back into their catalog they don't have the tech support to do stuff like that.
Also almost all of this was dictated via Google voice AKA subtitles via ai and the only mistake I noticed was it didn't understand tangently it instead put 10 generally.
It's already intolerable, but what happenes when scammers can spin up thousands of ChatGPT instances combined with realistic AI voice and even video?
I had to go through hoops talking to the Doordash bot to get a change to my order. And I pray for the poor soul that runs afoul of Google…
My analogy is that it is to writing what the spell checker is to spelling. Very few people in the world have to be good at spelling anymore. Yeah everyone is okay, but it's not as valued a skill as it used to be. ChatGPT is doing the same for writing. Yes you need to be able to write to an okay level but you don't need to be able to write well, ChatGPT does that.
Hit the nail on the head. ChatGPT will replace the wrong things, and probably create a world where we still need to solve problems ChatGPT has become attached to.
It's all noise, I can't perceive a signal at this point.
But give it context and it flies. Ask it to write a cover letter for an engineering role, it will turn out mediocre crap.
Give it the actual role and your CV in the prompts, you're pretty much good to go. It's unique, you still control the narrative (please highlight my ability to work under pressure) and it's done in 10 secs.
I really don't see what isn't to love about that.
Also it usually writes better if you tell to write well.
There was a similar dynamic with translation market and Google Translate. It didn't matter that human translation was superior. What mattered was that Google Translate (or similar) brought down prices so much that it effectively destroyed the market for everyday-type of translations. Why? Because customers said that, well, just use Google Translate and then improve it a bit.
as a result, it's a lot harder to make a living as a freelance translator these days - there are fewer jobs and what jobs exist are often proofreading machine translations, which command lower rates because 'the machine did most of the work already,' even though they often require full rewrites.
at the same time, human translation quality has gone down too, since a lot of people will pass off machine translation as their own work, and when rates are too low, you can't spend too much time on any particular job.
That is, I don't know if I would say getting frustrated by an automated voice system is the same thing as a hammer breaking for your given Dasein, but one could make the argument I bet.
Does it, really? I find that most of the time that while people can spot the difference between facts and a sales pitch, repeating the pitch enough still changes the common discourse.
People can say things like "technology x may be more expensive but saves development time" (where X can be anything from the latest frontend framework to microservices to voice recognition) while in fact there is no data that it saves any development time at all.
Is it even true that voice recognition reduces the amount of customer service compared to a simple menu system? If it isn't, the premise doesn't hold.
1. Creativity can be achieved at faster speeds than humans can consume. 2. We have no evidence to say AI and the techniques behind it wont keep improving (there are already so many low hanging fruits, alot of it is infra problems and the other half that we can't even imagine can probably be solved by AI better than humans can)
To take an analogy: bad voice recognition software abounds everywhere, not because it is better than what it replaced in terms of UX, but because it works just enough and allows massive cost-savings on hiring people to do customer service jobs.
A world where most marketing copy is written by mediocre AI, and more and more written and visual content are generated by big models that are technically impressive but intellectually hollow is going to be one where the quality of everything sucks just a bit more, but it's so cheap that it becomes pervasive.
(This trend is already apparent and not created by, or limited to, ChatGPT.)