The fundamental conceptual shift is the emergent behaviors displayed by these models. And that is highly unforeseeable.

We’re not working with machines that do what they’re built to do. They’re doing more. And every day we discover something new they’re capable of doing.

Making any sort of statement about the limits of this technology is going to be shortsighted.

At this point if I was an artist I'd probably be looking for a way to leverage my existing skills into AI art, because it seems like drawing skills will go the way of the horse and carriage.

I feel bad because this has happened so quickly. Previously it seems like there was a longer transition period.

This kind of transition has got me thinking the same about coding though. If AI programming does indeed take over, my programming skills will likely be massively devalued.

If you believe this is going to happen, how should you prepare for it? Start learning prompting now? Get involved with building these AIs? Etc.

The exact same thing happened to technical drafters when CAD destroyed the entire (sub-)industry.

And to typesetting, for that matter[1].

Which is a pity in the human sense and the sense that both were forms of artistry and produced things of great beauty, both the product and the machines used to enable them, but they're simply not economical in the face of Solidworks and digital composition. And yet the replacement technologies have also enabled a lot more creativity and further advances. Object with complex geometries are now easy to manufacture, when they previously could not even be accurately drawn, say.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wapping_dispute, where not only could the unions not simply oppose the rising sea-level of technology, but their failure seriously damaged union credibility in general.

I see this in the context of the drawing vs. art analogy. Yes, your typing and maybe syntax skills will be devalued, but your higher level, creative programming skills are probably safe for a good long time yet.

Also, if I'm wrong then I get to be pleasantly surprised.

No, but it means there will probably be less of them, which in turn means most will either be fired or accept a pay cut.

Without the engineering know-how, your "write me an app that displays data from this source in a dashboard" prompt might work, but it won't be robust and when it doesn't work you won't be able to figure out why.

“The machine stops” will seem optimistic in hindsight!

On the more optimistic side. I see an extraordinary explosion in artistic innovation, just look at websites like CivitAI. The massive community all training subcomponents of the models for each other to share. The models rapidly improving every month just through fine-tuning and theoretical innovation, without stabilityAI's involvement (They are distracted by lawsuits now). There are many 3d-artists intensely experimenting with AI art, to say make AI-anime, which has illustration qualities on every frame (A previous impossibility due to the costs involved).

It seems with AI, it'll really cleave communities in two. The ones who eagerly embrace it, seem to enjoy it extraordinarily, and achieve quite a lot of popularity and success. But the rest just want to pretend it doesn't exist, waiting till employers realize that they are no longer needed.

Regarding programming, it doesn't appear that AI programming can replace humans. Programming is very similar to novel writing in terms of complexity for AIs. And AIs are still extremely terrible at long-form storytelling. The lesson is to aggressively use AI tools as much as possible, to understand the long-term weaknesses of AIs, and deliver your values in those areas as a human.

This comment is funny, "I've given the artists fair warning of 6 months that they're careers are over."

But the rest just want to pretend it doesn't exist, waiting till employers realize that they are no longer needed.

So when the employers fire the artists, who will replace them sorry? Will the C-level executives at my company be using DALL-E instead? How does it work? Would they just not hire a "creative assistant" who will probably hire other assistants ?

I've seen artist communities on multiple websites, in multiple languages. At first they tried to laugh at the AI. Now the AI has improved so radically so fast, they universally prefer to stick their head in the sand, and ban discussion of AI altogether, its all denial and rage.

I'd love to see these raging artist discussions? Can you link a few?

A group of individuals who will use AI as an augmentation, even people with inferior drawing skills but able to get better results faster, a man with an excavator replaces several people with a shovel.

I'd love to see these raging artist discussions? Can you link a few?

I'm not OP but Twitter is full, you can start from @kortizart and find all kinds of account of people who are illustrators but now only rage against AI art.

Edit: There is some raging in the replies but it's twitter and everyone is raging on there.

There was some raging about Netflix using "AI" to generate backgrounds for a cartoon, but ultimately everyone will lose, including Netflix if this really is very automated, Almost anyone will soon be able to create a Netflix so I'll just cancel my subscription and watch free generated content uploaded to Youtube I guess?

What’s wrong with that?

I pretty much only watch people doing their thing on YouTube and I’m entertained enough. I have a couple years of tv shows I haven’t gotten around to watching because of YouTube peeps keeping me interested.

To rub it in, they might even call their project...an art project.

I don't think the market for highly technical "computer guys" is going to disappear, but the nature of the job is probably going to change dramatically. But then it wouldn't be the first time - hasn't the job already changed completely since, say, the 1980s? I can't imagine working in this job before the internet existed, but many did. Maybe in another decade or two I'll be saying that I can't remember what it was like to do this kind of work before AI was this good.

If you still want to work as someone who produces code - except your personal code factory has changed from brain and fingers to AI - then yeah, you should probably do both of those things.

Even if you spend 1-2 years and this AI hype doesn't work out, you still have those skills to go back to.

Frankly, this mainstream adoption by Google and Microsoft is, uh, not going great. So you can afford to observe for now, but AI advancements have been made very rapidly, so it's not wise to completely ignore it either.

I believe this is going to happen (and is happening right now, in front of us) not just for programmers but for any role that can be automated.

> How should you prepare for it?

Get equity. I mean ownership stake. If you don't have a legal/financial claim on the output of the machine then you're about to be part of the worthless surplus from the POV of the system.

> Start learning prompting now?

No, the machines will do that well enough in a minute or two.

> Get involved with building these AIs?

No, the machines will do that well enough in a minute or two too.

- - - -

Artificial Intelligence destroys scarcity, which is the fundamental basis of our societies and economies.

Think about it: scarcity is the very problem that societies and economies evolved to solve in the first place.

Now science and capitalism have delivered technology and wealth. There is enough to go around if we just worked out the logistics, and computers can do that for us in a matter of moments. In other words, the "World Game" is not hard! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Game we just have to get over our hangups.

Now here's where it gets really interesting: ChatGPT et. al. don't have glands, they don't have emotional trauma, no PTSD from being humans-on-Earth for generations, etc. We can program them to be sane and perhaps even wise.

We can also attach empirical feedback devices to them, make them scientists...

So we have physical abundance and benevolent, sane, empirically-grounded AI advisors, how much longer will it take to sort things out? I think we could be looking at the start of a Golden Age?

Drawing skills were made redundant for producing most types of high quality image before the motor car but people still pay for hand drawn items

Not sure AI lowering the skill barrier for and speeding up the generation of digital art is really going to change that

Do you believe the number and complexity of software applications will decrease in the next 10 years because of AI, or that it will spawn whole new ecosystems of software and new types of jobs? I believe the second is more reasonable, we will have higher expectations from software in 2033 than in 2023. The easier AI makes it, the more difficult we make the tasks.

Human desires fill the available space like air, AI exponential is slower than our entitlement. So we still need to work.

Short of advocating for artists' unions...

Law is still going to govern anything AI creates, so anyone who develops a skillset in both art and law would be well-positioned to gatekeep as a copyright troll. This carves out a career for yourself and enacts revenge by making it a liability for employers to use AI to replace artists.

HR is the theocratic version of that, since law school isn't cheap. You can still gatekeep, but you'd be playing by more-arbitrary rules ("you can't use that AI because it incorporates images of Women Without Penises," etc.).

Security is pragmatic, but I worry about the long-term stability of it. Every time a breach is announced, there are no consequences, so why even pretend to need it?

I used to suggest pivoting to tangible works and experiences (architecture, sculpture, etc.), but those are easily displaced as well-- I would bet against it now.

Look at porn-- what started as a handful of performers in studios is now done by any college student with a webcam in their bedroom (next up to be replaced with AI-generated content).

For now, you can still add value as a sex worker by offering the GFE, but even that's about to be obsolete. You can get your fix of flirting from a chatbot (TTS or sexting) and 3D print a copy of anybody else's genitalia. Remote-controls, vibrators and fluid pumps add some life to it. And you don't even have to leave the house, which affords you privacy to pursue darker subjects without oversight and save you more time for repeat consumption.

Truly, what a wonderful world...

SD has been great at giving lots of new ideas but frustratingly difficult/impossible to iterate on anything.

This is the critical insight. Human artists having nothing to worry about. Human drawers do.

The decoupling of concept from execution is old news in most forms of art. Writing music and playing an instrument are two very different skills, and indeed any session musician will tell you that playing instruments well is not as valued as writing amazing music.

In fact we went through a similar thing in pop music in the 70’s and 80’s, with the brief moral panic over electronic music and people who “just push a button and don’t even know know to play their instrument.” Turns out nobody cares, as long as the music is good.

AI art decouples concept from execution for visual art. That’s all.

This is destroying them, stealing the joy from the thing they devoted decades of life. My wife is extremely depressed by this, to the point I think she'll need serious therapy. She still has most of her job, but yeah recent developments like ControlNet? Well, shit.

The same thing happened to bank tellers with the ATM. Jobs change and so do industries. Art's become more niche.

Not that it matters, AI is only going to get better from here. I'd also feel depressed if I made my living doing digital art.

If anything, if it is true that AI will render lots of jobs obsolete (I have my doubts), at least there’s a chance this may allow some empathy to grow in those affected. Perhaps we finally get some meaningful social change.

> Honestly this whole "adapt" thing is a load of nonsense parroted by people who aren't immediately under threat and have nothing to fear. Who is going to adapt at 30/40/50 years old? How about people who just graduated art school? Go right back into college? Please.

I agree completely, I just don't think a degree being involved has anything to do with it. I assume most people work the best job they could land, so someone doing menial work and losing it due to automation is in about as much pain as someone facing the same situation on a very specialized role. If anything, the person with more education has a much better chance at getting another (perhaps lower paying) job.

I interpreted your first reply as conveying the message that it's not so bad if low skilled labor is automated, and it's a bigger problem if it's high skilled labor that is replaced. My apologies if I misunderstood you.

But automation has been coming for low skilled work for ages and the wisdom was that high skilled work was supposed to be safe(r). I think it is extraordinarily problematic if high skilled workers are forced to start competing for a diminishing pool of low skill jobs. Moving into another high skilled job would be best but without free/subsidized education puts undue burden on people and who is to say what work is safe 10yrs into the future now? Once high skilled work starts getting automated it means there is no protection and therefore no stability. How can we grow the middle class in such an environment?

This also means automation of low skilled work will accelerate. Order kiosks will be replaced by a specialized ChatGPT customer service version. Acts and sounds like a real person. Maybe it's got a floating head avatar while an automated process in the back assembles the food. One store manager and a guy who inspects the equipment across town.

Today it's the artists but tomorrow it could be IT workers. Companies are pyramids and the room at the top is finite. A healthy economy is not a pyramid.

> Today it's the artists but tomorrow it could be IT workers. Companies are pyramids and the room at the top is finite. A healthy economy is not a pyramid.

This is why I said perhaps some meaningful social change may come out of this. If we assume automation will continue to replace jobs higher up the pyramid, at some point it seems the extremes in the range of possible outcomes is "more people competing for a diminishing pool of low skill jobs" on one side, and "we figured out a post-capitalistic () society in which how useful you are to the economy (this is basically your skills vs the demand for them) determines things like if you get the house with the nice view or not, but not whether you get access to good health care, can live in a place without the fear of getting evicted or of getting robbed/murdered when you go out, etc.

I know it's utopic but I rather be utopic than dystopic, I guess.

A great path towards a better (IMHO) arrangement would be to have very good unemployment benefits, including education/training for jobs that are in demand when you get downsized/automated away.

() I use post-capitalistic for lack of a better term, and to make it obvious I don't mean communism. I certainly don't mean that and see societies organized that way closer to dystopia than utopia. My point is, as you say, I believe a pyramid is not a good way to organize an economy (or a society for that matter).

“technical disruption is hard on people” is a much more sympathetic position than “artists should be exempt because they’re special”.

We all face risks. We all have to adapt. We all have opportunities from adapting to the world rather than clinging to the past. Artists are no different from factory workers (or programmers, or bus drivers)

Honestly this whole "adapt" thing is a load of nonsense parroted by people who aren't immediately under threat and have nothing to fear. Who is going to adapt at 30/40/50 years old? How about people who just graduated art school? Go right back into college? Please.

Edit: For the record, I care about anyone getting displaced but not all displacement is of equal level. If highly educated/skilled labor is now at risk this world isn't prepared for what's about to come.

As for art school, I've always heard that it was more fun than IT/computer science/accounting but way more dangerous, as in you weren't guaranteed a job at all. Not everyone has heard that, of course, not everyone has the time/skills/resources to plan their career. I don't really know what to say except that it sucks for them. On the other hand the lower bar of entry may bring way more art in general, like it did with digital art.

We know why rote labor is being automated. Not just to squeeze as much money out as possible but to reduce failures and liability and increase productivity. If a factory pumps out more medicine to save more lives who can judge maybe automation was worth the tradeoff.

But art? Is this something civilization needed to try automating? It's not going to create more jobs than it replaces. It's not going to advance society to the next industrial level. It's not filling a demand because we're already flooded with more media than we could ever consume.

Stability is important for society and tossing golden apples around "because" and telling people to "adapt" to senseless chaos is awful. People will get squeezed out and career change is a bigger deal than adapting from paper to digital.

They're not guaranteed jobs so why make it harder to get them? So failed artists can compete for jobs with the factory, fast food and coal workers whose time is written on the wall?

I think this is just a truth people will have to accept. I used to make music and quickly realized I would have to dedicate 1000s of hours to it if I ever wanted to make it a career. This is simply because there were 1000s of other people that wanted to also make it a career.

I could take artist out of your statement and put blacksmith in and it would be difficult to tell if this was wrote in 1890.

Everyone seems to fight automation in an individual/industry battle rather at the society level. We keep measuring our worth based on work and when we finally run out of work we're going to have a problem.

Yeah, because work pays the bills. Guess what happens when you automate faster than social policy changes? Also people resist change when it threatens their way of life. It's almost like the luddites resisting automation are saying slow down automation people "when we finally run out of work we're going to have a problem".

This is not an artist problem, this is an everyone problem that is unavoidable. Of course here in the US we're playing right versus left instead of a few trillionaires will own everything versus the starving huddled masses that this path seems to be leading to.

I’ll submit that people who feel horrible have mistaken the commodity and value-add aspects of their jobs. AI does not make someone an artist, but nor does great hand-eye coordination and good brush technique. The actual art is concept; brushes and canvas and AI are tools.

I’m sorry that the decoupling of creation from performance is making people you care about feel bad, but really this is hundreds of years old news for most artists (musicians, architects, sculptors, etc).

People who enjoy drawing can still draw, just like people who enjoy playing instruments can still play instruments.

it's probably different in the way that the parent poster described, that artists found drawing an emotionally satisfying process whereas people typing probably didn't think setting styles in MS Word made them complete.

Because driving a car or typing is entirely different from making art.

> People who enjoy drawing can still draw, just like people who enjoy playing instruments can still play instruments.

"You can just sit at home and play your little instrument, and not bother anyone, is that good for you?"

Your contempt for art and artists is just awful. It makes me despair for humanity.

Humans change technology, technology changes humans. It is a tale older than civilization.

Also, many people would consider racing a car a form of art in itself. Same with riding horses that cars caused the general replacement of.

Art shouldn't be the privilege of only those dedicating a lifetime to holding a brush.

You just need better social security.

No clue what you mean by 'menu'. Artists have always chosen from a selection of available possibilities - colors of paint, size and shape of canvas, notes of music, words to write... A book is no less art just because the author had to pick from a menu of 26 letters. Nothing stops you from hacking and molding and mixing the results down to the finest details of every atom if you feel so inclined.

Maybe you can't envision any future for AI in art, but that only says something about you as an artist, or lack thereof.

But I don't think AI art can possibly take away from the beauty and enjoyment that can be found in drawing and making art. You mention how a musician loves playing their instrument. I can download a music edition software and summon a virtual orchestra out of my speakers in seconds. But does this take anything from the musician? Is their feeling any less true, their music any less meaningful to themselves and to those who listen? If I bring my laptop to a party and play Vivaldi's seasons on it, will that elicit the same reaction as if I play it in the living room's piano?

If language models eventually get good enough at programming that I'm out of a job, I won't derive any less enjoyment out of programming. I'll be a lot poorer, sure, but I will still enjoy the process of coming up with a way to express constraints in code, even if a machine can do it for me in the blink of an eye. Just like I find it relaxing to do the dishes myself when I'm anxious, even if I have a perfectly good dishwasher. Just like how people who enjoy solving Sudokus don't find it less fun just because automatic Sudoku solvers exist. The journey is the destination.

And for the record, I don't think human art will disappear because of AI art, or human programming will disappear because of AI programming. If there's one thing that's demonstrably true through the history of humanity, is that humans have a strong human-centric bias. The sooner we commodify something and remove the human element from it, the sooner we bring that human element back, now elevated to the status of luxury and catered to a niche.

Let me explain what I mean: I can buy black garlic in a plastic container for cheap, but I can also go to the weekend farmer market and pay three times as much for black garlic from a lady who lives up the mountains and can tell me the shape of the jar she fermented it in. IKEA makes perfectly good furniture that you can use to play board games for less than a hundred, but board game enthusiasts pay hundreds or thousands for custom furniture with nooks and bezels to stop the tokens from sliding out. Glass blowing as a form of art continues to exist, regardless of the availability of perfectly fine, industrially-made glass appliances. It's just in artisanal fairs in Venice, not in your living room.

And sure, you won't be able to make a living anymore out of cranking out uninspired corporate Memphis for bay-area startups, or drawing cartoon furries for Twitter randos on commission. And, in a way... thank fuck for that, right? The combinatorial space of drawing people with smooth curves in fantasy skin colors using technological appliances in collaborative settings can be exhausted by an AI, and you can actually focus on making art that breaks the mold, art that hasn't been made before, art that is meaningful to you. You can imbue art with meaning and use art to communicate with other humans, while the "art" that ticks out boxes and replaces placeholders in landing pages can be cranked out by AI.

Yes, it will be harder to make a living out of that, but I'm sure it won't be impossible. Computers have been able to generate Mondrian paintings since the 80s, and that hasn't made Mondrian paintings any less valuable. An AI may be able to produce the exact same drawing that you do, but it can't imbue human meaning in it.

Drawing Corporate Memphis bullshit for startups is a great way to transfer a big chunk of VC money from some Bay Area jerkoffs to an artist living somewhere much cheaper, where it can pay multiple months of their rent for not much work, and maybe even let them have some luxuries and/or financial cushions. Thank fuck that all that money can extend the startup's runway a tiny bit further now instead! Thank fuck those artists won't have to wrestle with the feelings that comes from getting paid better for a few hours of corporate work than for anything they've poured their passion into!

If you're regularly taking on client work, then you have places to play and experiment while still getting what you need to pay your bills, and even if you're just turning the crank to make another piece that fits in with everything else you've made, you're getting a tiny bit better at making art with every drawing you do, and you can bring that back to the time you spend on your crazy personal work. If you take some other job to make ends meet, your rate of progress slows way the hell down. I've seen it happen. Friends who used to draw a lot better than I did twenty years ago now just draw as a hobby, and draw just like they did back then; me and my friends who made it my job have spent the last twenty years drawing, and it shows in our work. Thank fuck that's endangered! Thank fuck we, too, might have a bunch of recurring gigs collapse out from under us! Thank fuck those of us who embrace becoming an AI wrangler for a corporation will be asked to do tons more stuff for the same pay, or less!

How do you propose the artists who are now blissfully freed from the work that pays their bills should pay the rent on their homes and studios, and to pay for their tools and materials, while still spending all their time making art that "breaks the mold, hasn't been made before, and is meaningful to the artist"? How do you propose they should find the time to hone the skills needed to do this? Because doing that is a lot of work.

Artists are the ones now experiencing what the Luddites did. Smashing the looms didn't stop more looms from being built. Also, now the average person can afford fabric because of the technology.

Simply put as we move into a world where most needs can be provided by technology keeping up the 'winner take all' method of capitalism so many subscribe to isn't going to work.

How will we support ourselves until the extremely unlikely event that becomes a reality?

What are you doing to support artists through this shitty transition? Hint: Calling us "luddites" and vaguely waffling about the hoped-for death of capitalism is pretty much the opposite of supporting us.

All I’m saying that it is already a problem that should be better solved, so all the talented artists that as of now can’t sustain themselves from their work can also feed their families.

Capital formation is always and everywhere painful for labor (see: medieval enclosure, the American frontier/genocide, the Great Leap Forward, the triangle trade, and many others). This is obviously really really bad but so far we haven't devised a workable, lasting way to systemically stop the ownership class from doing it to us.

They should connect with the people that aren’t artists and have a similar preference for non-AI art.

Or, they should learn the new tooling of the field, and use it as part of their mix of tooling.

The vast majority of would-be artists have never been able to afford to do it full-time and have needed “real” jobs; it would be astonishing for the narrow fortunate elite that have to think that they are somehow the one group of people in all of human history entitled to have that privilege without being concerned to adapting to change, even though that’s never even been the case in that same elite, which has had to deal with change (whether driven by technology or changing aesthetic preference for media, techniques, subjects, etc.) rather continuously, historically.

Serious question: are you sure that it can be? What you just described as the value proposition of your work is not the delivery of some pretty pixels. You’re selling a service, an experience, a human connection. You’re selling your artistic judgment and your ability to translate back and forth between client’s imperfectly expressed wishes and the visual design space. You’re selling work that is valuable to the buyer _because_ it was made by you.

I completely understand the fear that is gripping a lot of artists. But I’m as of yet unpersuaded by the predictions of doom and gloom. Art is human connection. Once the hype has worn off and we all get inured to generative art, I think we’ll find that people still value and pay for the real thing.

A final thought: algorithms can’t lay graphite on paper or put brushstrokes on canvas. You may consider offering your clients tangible artifacts that only a human can make.

Yes, but the moment you publish one piece the AIs will be able to crank variations on it at the push of button. So artists might think twice about publishing.

Good luck finding the time to enjoy your hobbies when you're poor. You'll have much less time an energy for passions at that stage. You'll probably be flipping burgers at burger king, until that's automated too :)

On the other hand, if all programming was truly able to be created instantly by an AI, the productivity of our entire species would be increased to such a great degree, that being poor would be of little concern, because everything that you would want to buy would be instantly available for a fraction of the price it is today.

Also I kind of agree that in the short term this will suck for artists and illustrators but on the other hand, we recently went on a day trip with some friends and paid an artist to sketch us while we sit together and drink coffee, it was a great experience and I could’ve just used the “sketch” filter on my phone but there would be no “experience” or individuality. No memory that made it special.

What was interesting was, she had a huge queue of people paying about $100 an hour :) she was open for 9 hours.

Good luck to your wife. This is fucking horrible. Being in an industry that Silicon Valley shitheads are ruining sucks.

A friend works in law, mostly handling workplace discrimination cases His job will be safe for now, but not those of his paralegals and staff who research case law, write drafts, and handle everyday communication with clients and the courts. Many of them have been in it for years and are passionate about helping victims who have been hurt by racism and homophobia. One of his most tenured employees is an elderly black man well past retirement age, who greatly enjoys that he can now help stop the sort of discrimination he experienced when he was young. None of these people will be able to meaningfully contribute to their passion in ten years.

The internet is amazing but now a stranger from halfway across your world can drain your bank account. What doesn't have a negative effect?

But if you're just churning out commercial illustrations, then sure, an AI can do that now, or soon.

I think the best analogy I understand it is as is it is like assembly language or low level programming in general. I certainly do not have the time to program every piece of code I write in asm but having done projects in asm is invaluable as a coder[0], given how much it informs my mental model of how the code I write actually works. That understanding is beyond valuable and is something that puts you a rung above everyone else who just copies things from SO without knowing what they do. I think AI for devs, to the extent that it will evolve, will still be as such. People who primarily find it amazing today I find either 1) use it as a productivity boost for things that need a lot of boiler-plate[1], or 2) are SO-copy-pasters who are just amazed they have to think even less. A LOT of the "AI artist" community are the artist equivalent of the 2nd, honestly, and it's easy to detect AI art because it's generated by people who are not really artists, and in similar fashion either don't know the fundamentals or who only create "good" work by nearly directly copying other art pieces.

Also, to critique your analogy, what you guys are saying is along the lines of "given DAWs, why learn to play an instrument at all?" Except a plain look at any good composer will show they know how to play at least one instrument, even if they don't play all their music on that instrument, there is no doubt knowing how to play clearly makes you a better composer. I mean, can you even imagine a composer who cannot even play piano, or guitar? Sure a composer need not be a virtuoso concert pianist, but they should at the very least be able to play the chords of the very song they've composed. Nothing thus far teaches the human mind deep understanding of something more than doing that thing does. It is so clearly obvious in music and programming and the only reason people keep saying you can be an artist having never learned to draw is because such people simply do not understand art or composition at all.

[0] I'm not really a software developer but a computational scientist, and so I won't say I'm a developer, but still understanding of data structures, algorithms, discrete math in general, and yes asm is invaluable for me.

[1] As someone outside of the dev space, I don't know why you people don't just make better interfaces instead of juggling 9 yamls and 3 environments for every project, or just roll your own interface and reduce the boiler-plate yourself.

Actually, all those people who lost their professions they spent their lifetime working on, they care, rather a lot.

> indeed any session musician will tell you that playing instruments well is not as valued as writing amazing music.

Yes, in 2023 they say this, but I assure you when "session musician" was a common profession, that no one said this.

When I first started in music, if you wanted your piece of music, you had to pay instrumentalists to play it, and this was a valuable professional skill.

> Turns out nobody cares, as long as the music is good.

And the music is not good either.

When did everyone become so sociopathically detached from the welfare of others? It's just horrifying.

This is just the latest chapter in the same book. The solution has almost never been stopping technology but distribution of the benefits to all members of the society. That is unless you want one entity to play winner take all in the end.

Seems like a lot of people are missing this point, and it seems like a lot of people have a chip on their shoulder about being unable to create art, and believing they can express the deep recesses of their feelings and psyche and everything else that makes us human by proxy through AI, and thus completely missing the point of creating art in the first place.

The current fine art market is extremely unmeritorious so I agree that AI art will never make it to the Guggenheim. That isn't a good metric since the human curators will never allow it to happen. The metric will be the industry. Will ai start composing scores for movies? Promotional posters? Art that's sold outside of expensive curated galleries (etsy, ect)?

It's possible that humans will keep their stranglehold on these and I hope that's the case... But I wouldn't bet on it.

Please look up the definition of platitude. It's not very nice.

    Yeah you can mimic the idea but all you get in the end is a JPG or whatever.

    Please look up the definition of platitude. It's not very nice. 

Also FYI its not very nice to psychoanalyze why people disagree with you, especially when its a petty reason.

I imagine we WILL see AI art in a famous gallery for exactly this reason. Except it will be lauded for the imagination of the creator and the tweaks they made, not their drawing ability.

Good counter for "AI will steal our jobs". When competition starts to use AI+human, you got to level up. And since everyone has the same base AIs, the differentiating factor is still human.

Why should artists have to learn fucking Python!? There are so few jobs open to people who don't want to "learn to code", this was one of the last, and that's going too.

> This likely suggests the future of an AI-augmented economy: People become AI wranglers.

So we don't get to create ourselves anymore. No drawing, no making music, no programming even. We just give prompts to AI programs. Which means we are worthless, because any bozo can do this.

I hate this timeline so much. It's like all the worst and most mediocre parts from every SF future, with an extra dose of stupidity and greed on top.

(And I'm a computer programmer.)

And given this dichotomy as choice, I would choose the flames too.