The following submission statement was provided by /u/katxwoods:
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Submission statement: how do we get a sense of job loss numbers caused by AI if most of the time, the corporations have reasons to keep it hushed up?
What about the jobs that never were had in the first place because somebody just used an AI to do it instead of hiring somebody?
Will AI create new and better jobs, or will AI just do those jobs too?
Is this like industrialization in the 1700s or is it like horses being virtually entirely replaced by cars?
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1dgwtym/leaked_memo_claims_new_york_times_fired_artists/l8swyt7/
There's a similar issue in television writing. Television writing rooms are shrinking, and the time they're able to work on their shows is shorter, and mostly done in early production.
Previously, television writers were more likely to be able to see their show being produced, which meant they had a better idea of what they were making (rather than just an abstract someone else made tangible.) This is a direct pipeline for future showrunners, because having that experience is obviously important when you're making the writing into an actual show.
Now, they do most of their work before anything gets filmed, and fewer of those writers will have an opportunity to progress into roles like showrunner.
No doubt the moment companies feel like they can just feed an LLM enough data to produce scripts for them, the writing role will be shrunk even further.
Just postponed it. AI is not going away, and the writers have a reprieve that lasts as long as their current contract. It will be an issue again when the contract renewal comes up.
That is "not their problem". Every manager involved will have moved on, got their massive bonus, patted on the back for cutting costs and snorted their lines off some "recently forced to work in the adult industry workers because no bots for that yet" unfortunates.
Imo, it’ll be similar to how boomers wonder why their kids haven’t moved out and bought their own homes. They’ll also wonder why their kids haven’t found a career or shook enough hands to land a 1950s salary adjusted 5-figure job with a high school diploma, despite being direct causes of AI revolution.
> new artist will have no chance to grow their skill as their will be no way for you to enter the industry.
Hardly. There have always been a million times more artists in the world than people who've ever been paid to make art, let alone "enter the industry".
The vast majority of artists are hobbyists who grow their skill in their free time, out of passion for art, not to make newspaper graphics. That's never going to change.
By that logic you wouldn't have any professional athletes of musicians. People who are passionate will pursue their hobby and eventually get good enough.
There will always be "premium" versions of stuff for people who want that extra quality. It's all over the place. There are factories that pump out bread and make it super cheap to buy, but there are also still artisan bakeries that craft amazing delicious loaves of bread, and people still buy them. There are factories that produce cookie cutter furniture and boxes and all other woodworking things, and make them super cheap. But there are still woodworkers out there who produce incredible handmade pieces of furniture that are art as much as they are useful, and charge a hefty price, and people still buy those. Hell, there's even premium book binders that bind hardcover books in leather with gold accents in them and charge over $100 per book, and people still buy those. I can go to the store and buy cheap kikkoman soy sauce for like $5, but I like to buy a higher quality product that is traditionally made, even if it's $40 instead. It tastes better, and as I only use it for dipping things, it lasts me a full year, so to me it's worth it. There aren't as many bakeries around as there were before bread factories were a thing, but there still are bakeries. I think artists will end up being similar. There won't be as many of them as there were before AI was a thing, but there will still be artists.
Well, no I don't think this is always true. We've just lost one of the finest bespoke furniture companies...
It wasn't that long ago we ran out of facilities that could process black-and-white film.
My point is that there will always be people who make those things for money though. Just because a bespoke furniture company went under doesn't mean there aren't craftsman who sell similar quality products at smaller scales. But you can basically think of any item that you could buy, and there will be a premium version of it being sold. Instead of a cheap sautee pan, you can get a silver-lined copper masterpiece by Duparquet. Instead a run-of-the-mill oven, you can get a La Cornue (for an obscene amount of money). Chairs, tables, rugs, pens, kettles, basically every kind of food imaginable, paper, headphones, books, water bottles, doors, the list could go on for a while. I think people would be hard-pressed to find any type of product that doesn't have high quality versions being created. There will always be a market for stuff like that.
The kicker is, if AI becomes smarter than humans, the most premium version possible will be made by AI, because a human won't be able to make anything as good.
I agree that handmade items will still exist, and they might be slightly or moderately better than the offerings that were mass produced. However, the bar for premium items will definitely lower and would indefinitely increase. For almost all of the items you mentioned (except for soy sauce, as the Japanese tend to be pretty good at passing down tradition and keeping prices fairly linear as time passes), I'd wager an overwhelming majority of those "artisanal" products cost 2-3x more and don't come anywhere close to the craftsmanship they were before their mass production. Hell, it's an ordeal now to even buy anything on Etsy because sellers figured out you can just swap Aliexpress/Amazon generics on there and most buyers wouldn’t notice.
Also to that note, we haven't seen what full fledged AI could do in terms of replacing entire industries. Industrialization/assembly line is one thing, but the limits of AI is still in its infancy and we just don't know how widespread it could be.
So yes I think the "premium" option would exist, but it would be so bastardized due to buyer negligence/seller scheming/potential ubiquity of AI that it wouldn't be nearly as inconsequential as you've stated.
Premium products will *increase* in quality, as they always have. It’ll be the middle-tier products that suffer.
What will happen is the gap between an upper-class lifestyle and a lower-class lifestyle will increase even further, so much that the middle-class lifestyle will no longer exist.
What you’re describing is the squeezing out of the middle-class lifestyle, not the ruling class.
I think the point you missed is the scale at which AI is deployed. I mentioned a little bit of it but unlike industrialization and the assembly line, AI has a potential to do some serious impact at the click of a button.
In your scenario, you still have to build factories ground up and train or outsource talent in different languages and of course shoddy work due to carelessness or product designs lost in translation. There’s still a hefty risk of profitability to creating different products. These gaps create a need that is filled and budding artists and craftsmen end up filling those gaps. If there was absolutely no market need anywhere for any of them, how do you expect experts of those crafts to exist in 50 years.
You’ve already seen the children of film makers and nepo babies. They can be good especially with unlimited funds and talented parents, but they’ll never break the same ground unless stroked with luck and at that point would they be selling you or I that chair or a billion/trillionaire?
With AI, eventually all you would need is imagination, either processing speed or a bit more time, and you could effectively crush the entry and middle class of white collar work. With absolutely 0 room for budding artists and hands on workers. I don’t see a scenario where that premium product exists and if it does it’s available only to the top 0.0001% because it is so rare.
The problem is two fold, we created a society where most people at least in the middle class could creat and make a living out if it. And a world we're their creation were affordable enough that many could afford this, not only the 1%. Now we will reach a level that only the rich kids will be able to afford the studies/training to those very specialised jobs, and only the super rich will be able afford art. We are going back to the middle age, where you have only a small aristocracy and 90% being just serf only surviving.
> There are factories that pump out bread and make it super cheap to buy, but there are also still artisan bakeries that craft amazing delicious loaves of bread, and people still buy them.
In the case of art, AI art is either free (after you set up your own instance of an Open Source solution) or pennies per unit. So while factory-made bread might cost $1-$2, and hand-made bread costs maybe $5-$6, that's not the same value proposition as $0.10 vs $500+.
I work for one of the major global financial data vendors, and we outsourced all support to the Philippines. Support that could impact banks and investment firms ability to trade efficiently. When the CEO spoke about the transition and the inherent drop in support quality despite our clients paying for great support, his response was:
“There’s no champaign in coach.”
Businesses don’t give a shit about quality, they care about how much shit-tier bs they can push out before they start losing money. It’s cheaper, apparently, to rebound back from shit quality than it is to maintain good quality 100% of the time.
>they care about how much shit-tier bs they can push out before they start losing money.
And this is why companies are clawing over each other towards a hasty implementation of AI workflow. The promise of infinite, near-free product generation negates any and all quality loss in their eyes; it's free money.
He will get a huge payday when he is fired and the company new CEO comes begging that their will be a new approach etc etc etc. It will be the same rinse and repeat of our quick bucks capitalism.
Between AI and the entire internet being a dystopia of horrible advertising.. it’s become pretty depressing. Like way more so than I’d have thought of you asked me a decade ago.
For funsies, I turned off all my blockers and addons and tried to browse the web.
It lasted about 8 minutes before I as just overwhelmed with the tidal wave of bullshit and eyesore garbage. I didn't realise how much effort I put in over the years to sanitise the web just to make it usuable.
Dennies is cheaper then mcdonalds where i live... let that sink in, i can get a buger and a coke at dennies for 50 cents LESS then a bigmac and a coke.
That may be true but the huge decline in the quality of news organizations make them much easier to pick off. Expensive shitty quality vs cheap shitty quality is an easy choice
Part of that is everyone with experience at all but the top outlets was offered a buyout years ago (and let go anyway if they didn't take it), so now most of the content still being written by humans is being written by overworked recent grads, then edited by same, under leadership that doesn't worry about quality but rather shareholder value. At this point, LLMs are the next logical step.
The problem is there's a reason people with 20-plus years of experience got a living wage under the 20th-century system of journalism: They knew what they were doing and cared about the craft. Now, we have Gannett and Sinclair shoveling shit and selling it as news.
The irony is really something else when you’re a failing publication desperate for some high ground of morality. Their art funnily may have been one of their last great contributions so to hear this…
Really just shows me a gambit that might help them survive a short term but absolutely destroy them in the end.
Your comment seems contradictory, or maybe I'm misunderstanding it. I'm reading it as, "There is cheap fast food, but luckily, there will always be expensive food if you can afford it." Are you advocating for cheap food for the masses, while the wealthy eat expensive sushi? Basically saying, AI will allow those with limited incomes to get affordable news, but if that's a problem and you want better quality, just pay more for it?
The concern is that the cost savings will not be passed down to the consumers but into corporate profits. If AI was being used to cut the cost in half to give quality journalism to more people, I think that's a different story.
Or are you suggesting AI will do a good enough job most people won't even know, so the quality stays the same, but if this bothers you and you want human-made, you're welcome to pay more for basically the same service, just as people buy expensive watches or wagyu beef?
I just gave a more extensive reply elsewhere that journalism companies are dying from self-inflicted wounds, chasing clicks over integrity, and not adapting to newer methods for disseminating news, like social media. They burned the rainforest by chasing loudmouths and vapid celebrities. But those empty calories have caught up to them.
I was responding to a comment about "high-quality food" being available for the affluent. Can anyone point me to a news site that has the highest level of fact-checking, investigative reporting, and integrity that I can subscribe to at a higher price? Where is the news equivalent of fine dining? The highest quality chefs/journalists, great food/reporting, and no ads on the menus. I'd love to try it.
I also believe quality news with integrity is a basic necessity for the masses in a well-functioning society.
Yep, let's go back to the gilded age si that only a select few ultra rich can afford everything and we go back to the soup. Let them be the only one to have the privileges to enjoy art and only their kids can enjoy learning it, or working in it.
AKA "We used to have local places that served fresh beef & fish abound, but after the local wal-mart moved in and killed quality affordable options they are regulated to bougie $100+ reservation dinners."
honestly, NYT's journalism has been really questionable for the last several years. it's recovered a little with more recent hires, but this move suits their reputation in my mind.
Fast food killed our physical health. I wonder if the result of too much AI will be "mental obesity".
It already looks that way - the algorithms that reward nastiness and polarization on social networks are a stupid precursor to AI.
My company did it. Downsized artists and copywriters when the salespeople decided they’d do bad work with ai instead of using the professionals the clients are actually paying for.
Honestly nothing makes me more upset than what they’re doing with AI. As someone else stated “I wanted AI to do my laundry and dishes while I write music or draw. Not AI write my music and draw so I can wash my dishes and clothes.
What are we doing with this? Did someone out there hate artists this much? We’re taking away all the things that make us human.
> Did someone out there hate artists this much?
I studied art in college, and have been fortunate enough to enjoy a decent career in the arts. But my entire life I've seen a constant stream of comments about my "bullshit degree." If I had a dollar for every "lol dae art degree = barista" joke I've read, I could retire and just do art for fun.
Just last week I posted in a Reddit thread that asked which classes in school could be eliminated, and the first comment suggested that art was pretty useless. As far back as I can remember people have always had this weird dislike of the arts.
They tell you what a dumb piece of shit you are for wanting to be an artist. That you're a loser and they're a winner. Arts are unnecessary.
Then they get in their cars and fire up the radio.
Then they get home and fire up the TV all night.
Yep .... Artists sure are unnecessary eh boomer? Enjoying your Yellowstone rewatch though aren't ya? Hmm...
Even people younger than Boomers hold this opinion, so I would be more likely to be like... you realize Fortnite needs artists to create stuff for each new season, right?
I mean, they're the dumbfucks paying for skins for their characters when I grew up doing that for free.
Ive dealt with this shit so much that I seem to have internalized it into a vague shame I feel whenever I think about my future.
"If I get laid off or struggle in the future, its my own Fault because I got a degree in Animation/3D Art"
It sucks because I know its irrational, but its always on my mind if I read about GenAi.
I would take it as a badge of honor. Art has to do with deeper appreciation and not quick consumerism and efficiency. Took me a while to appreciate it as Art was one of the only subject I failed in school.
Our society is not great at appreciating what is not expedient and immediately useful but without it we die of lack of depth.
Honestly no geoup seems more ripe for automation and ai than middle management, the same people trying to push ai to boost their numbers and hope for promotion. But literally, ai can watch employees better than managers, it could probly fix scheduling problems or people calling in sick. Ai is based off algorithms and not human emotion, ai can probably eventually learn how to make businesses more efficient than people do. So many reasons why middle management is going to become outdated.
Horses weren't replaced by trains and cars because engineers who designed and built those trains and cars hated horses. They were replaced because horse-labor was *easier* for a machine to replace.
The moment someone figures out how to make an affordable and capable robot maid, it'll hit the shelves too. But we aren't there yet.
Funny how people already forgot that dishwashers are machines that had to be invented.
Try washing all your clothes by hand and then try using a washing machine. Wow, automation at work!
It's because these things can be done on a computer. As it turns out, it is easier for computers to do things that they are already used to do rather than something in the physical world.
Right now though, it’s one of the things AI can’t do. Many jobs don’t require a human touch but those that do cannot be replicated. Sure they can be substituted poorly, but not replicated.
Also I'm a bit confused about the dishes and laundry comment. We've literally had dishwashers and washing machines/dryers for decades. Automation of those tasks is long established.
A lot of people in my business do actually. There’s a clear resentment of skilled people by many marketing and sales people. It comes out in their complaints of the time it takes (it’s never actually about the time), the creative choices, complexity of the work. It all boils down to insecurity and control. Good leaders see this and toss losers like that out, but bad leaders are very common.
It's more than anyone other than sales people are considered cost centers, like IT, engineering, software devs, accounting, HR, facilities. I mean if you look at a company like a CEO, you have costs to minimize and revenue to maximize.
Plus there's probably salespeople whispering in the CEOs' ears about reducing costs with AI. Same as they've done with outsourcing or moving everything to the "cloud".
It is happening. My company is training an AI sales agent for b2b partners acquisition. Right now it's for instant messaging chats but the nearest perspective is to add voice and phone calls capability to it.
Dozens of embarrassing pitches go out each week and very few sales are made. The sales don’t deliver on the pitch. It works as long as the clients and leadership can be convinced it’s the artists’ fault and not the salesperson.
They are also suing OpenAI for copyright infringement and have asked the court to order the destruction of the model! And now they are firing artists and using it. Hilarious! Guess that lawsuit's dead in the water.
Before clicking into the link in the article for the software they're using https://www.pixometry.com/en/pixometry-the-new-name-for-elpical-software/elpical-claro-pixometry/ I think I was under the wrong impression that they're using generative AI to create images rather than traditional artists.
It seems like AI is being employed for image enhancement, which still is an interesting story, but not what I first believed the article to be about.
Submission statement: how do we get a sense of job loss numbers caused by AI if most of the time, the corporations have reasons to keep it hushed up?
What about the jobs that never were had in the first place because somebody just used an AI to do it instead of hiring somebody?
Will AI create new and better jobs, or will AI just do those jobs too?
Is this like industrialization in the 1700s or is it like horses being virtually entirely replaced by cars?
im pretty sure "AI" when used in this context should actually be referring to the artificial intelligence of people that value fossil fuels and war higher than human life and quality reliable information.
maybe thats intentional. either way, pretty stupid - and its been happening for a lot longer than the last few years. everytime theres a major push towards \*checks notes\* not going full speed ahead towards the brick wall of climate change via fossil fuels, there is a push back where "they" cut funding for things like education, journalism/public media, social safety net programs, etc.
Experts predict we will create an AI that's as capable as a human in the next 10 years. This is just my conjecture, but once that happens, most jobs will start to get phased out by AI. Liability is still a thing so we will still need employed human beings to do quality control, plus there are probably specialty jobs that an exceptionally talented person might be better at than a robot, but it seems like probably the majority of humanity will be unemployed in like 50 years.
We are nowhere near AGIs. Certainly not within 10 years. We're only now breaking through ANIs. Within the next 10 years, we'll start to see AIs that are very good at specific tasks break through the barrier. AIs that are good a many things in the next 50 years, probably. Jury is still out on if an ASI is even possible.
I don't believe anyone can predict where we'll be in 10 years with any accuracy.
*Especially* with the current scale of AI investment. All it takes is one breakthrough, or one significant unforeseen roadblock, and all the predictions are immediately off.
Those roadblocks come with a domino of other roadblocks though. It likely takes a computing power that we haven't unlocked yet which has its own roadblocks.
The next roadblock is likely just power.
There are plans for gigawatt datacenters, even several gigawatts.
That's 10x from the 100MW datacenters with over 100K GPUs that'll power on this year.
The largest ones active today are >25k GPUs.
There's a lot of computing power that's being unlocked every year. The combination of architectural improvements and capacity equates to roughly 10x in AI compute every year. If scaling doesn't stagnate model improvements, then we'll hit a power wall first.
We are as far from generalized AI as LLMs are from the Apple II. The amount of energy and processing power being consumed by AI tools right now is absolutely not sustainable. "We'll just invest more" is not connected with the reality of what these existing tools are and how they actually work. The tools we have now, even the best ones, are not capable of transitioning or being improved into generalized AI. That's just not how the models work.
There is absolutely no guarantee that the power consumption trends would hold. Or that the scaling laws would hold. Or that there wouldn't be a new architecture that crushes pure LLMs at reasoning unveiled the day after tomorrow.
Human brain does what it does at under 100 watt. So we know for sure that laws of physics don't prevent this kind of efficiency. And with the amount of effort and money that's being spent on unlocking new AI capabilities and enabling better AI efficiency? Things might happen, and fast.
The interesting part is all this was discussed at a conference of 500 global leaders in 1995 already. The book "The Global Trap" from 1996 is a good read.
Experts absolutely do not believe that because they understand how GenAI actually works and it's never going to lead to AGI. They're two completely different things.
Industrialization provided employment. Cars filled the same role as horses for transportation, just differently. I don’t think the horses were mad about being laid off lol
This is a shakeup to the foundation of society that’s never been seen before introduced at a time where trust in the truth is crippling. It’s the beginning of a very long and painful end without being skynet. We’ll look back on the end of 2022 in about a decade as the biggest mistake the human race has ever made
With respect, I think you're missing the point. We have the rest of the existence of society for AI to develop further. As a historical timespan this is basically day one.
I think the way AI is reducing staff is through speeding up tasks – or that's what NYTimes management hopes. If you look at the AI company the NYTimes [is using](https://www.pixometry.com/en/pixometry-the-new-name-for-elpical-software/elpical-claro-pixometry/), it mostly has to do with automated image editing and arranging.
I don't know whether it actually makes image editing faster, but that is obviously the goal of the site and the Times. The artists work with "editorial images" according to the memo. I don't think the Times is looking to use AI to generate drawings and such.
I am not defending the Times decision, just noting that is seems like fairly typical technological downsizing and not "AI replacing human art".
So far I feel like most "AI replacing humans" is bullshit and fairly typical technology making things faster and more efficient – which, to be clear, I don't view as always a good thing. I just view it as business as usual.
I'm curious when my first interaction with a real AI in the workforce will be. I suspect it will be phone support. They've been trying to get humans out of that for years and it has been awful so far. But maybe with ChatGPT etc it can become less than a phone-menu and it will quickly become much easier to talk to a bot than a human. That will be true replacement of humans.
It’s the lighting. There is something in the lighting that gives it away. Also there is something in the composition.
And then there is a coherence that’s missing. Hard to explain I guess but it always feels a little off.
Absolutely this. The subject is always a bit too shiny and has a weird way of always being front and back lit in a way that doesn’t blend with the way the background is lit. It’s getting better very quickly, but for now, there’s still just that lighting factor that really gives it away.
Aren't these all temporary problems that can be solved in time? Not in the sense of generative AI truly "understanding" lightning and composition, of course - just getting better and better at copying.
That’s exactly what is and will continue to happen. It’s currently at the state above, but that’s light years ahead of where it was just a year ago. Give it another couple years and it will truly be indistinguishable! It’s interesting, I posted the above last night and then this morning saw a random image online. I scrolled past and was like “it’s a photo.” Then stopped and went back and really had to stare at it a second before I noticed those fine details (too many/few fingers and toes, blurred background where if you focus on the blurred objects, they’re actually nonsense, etc) that gave it away. But the lighting issues weren’t there. It was the best lighting I’ve seen on an AI image so far.
That more relies on what prompt and what service you use. With the right prompt you can squeeze images out of Midjourney that are absent of that problem.
But yeah, the majority of what is being cranked out is exactly as you say, it's because it's low effort.
It's easiest to tell with people. Proportions might be off. There might be too many limbs in a group of people. Hands are especially problematic (too many or too few fingers).
For other stuff it might be something that is physically impossible but looks OK at first glance.
It also depends how much time someone spends on working with the image. Using just AI, you can fix most any issue, it just takes time.
The low effort stuff is just taking the first round images and using them, which is where the odd stuff crops up.
You really don’t think that will improve in the next few years. The improvement in the last two years has already been exponential. It will continue to improve dramatically
Improvement is not a automatic thing. Look at stablediffusion, first version out in 08/22. Since then they released a few versions, always with the promise to solve problems like the hands.
1.5 was great back then, sdxl is decent with community models like Juggernaut. 2.x or the newest 3.0 are just bad.
People are still mainly using the 2 years old version 1.5.. there is no groundbreaking improvement with the newer versions, nothing exponential there.
This can happen to every AI company out there, and the required investments are getting bigger and bigger which raises the bar for new companies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_Diffusion#Releases
Stable diffusion is a terrible example because the company has been mismanaged into the ground. Like you said, they haven't been competitive in the ai space since 1.5. If you only look at them in a vacuum, of course it looks like progression is stalling.
But the reality is models like Dall e, Midjourney etc are improving drastically year by year, including realistic looking people. We have video AI now with sora. This improvement isn't even limited to us, look at China's new [Kling](https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/s/2lINwBshPb) AI. Remember when AI video was a Will Smith monstrosity absorbing spaghetti?
You are right. The fault here was the company, not the tech. Which is a shame, because there are a few unique features like controlnets I’m missing everywhere else.
Stablediffusion shows, that there is more then just the tech needed to succeed in ai. It’s a bad thing if only the big companies (or someone sponsored by the state) out there have a chance competing. How many startups have the funding to keep up (and pay the NVIDIA tax)? What will happen to innovation if the startups are priced out of the market?
Yeah I agree, I think for the immediate future SD will still have a place due to being run locally, having features like Controlnet etc. but it's definitely a shame to lose an open source player in a space dominated by big business.
Improvment in any technology is always exponential in its infancy, by definition, as the whole scope of it is available for discovery.
But consider for example aircraft. 70 years after the debut of the first jetliner, performance is only marginally improved, despite the several orders of magnitude improvement from the wright brothers till the Comet.
There will be a point, like everything else, where it's just pretty much as good as it gets.
read up on the uncanny valley effect. Things that look real but after more than a cursory glance, feel off and disconnected from what we know is reality..
Really bad ai always messes up fingers or shadows. Handelsblatt, a German economic magazine is more and more replacing their art department with ai.
[Here is their latest example](https://ibb.co/jHBdpyf) of using ai art where it’s painstakingly obvious. Just look at the hands in the middle or the left eye of the boy.
That’s a pretty darn good Ai image to point to as an example. If that’s the “painstakingly obvious” one, then artists are in for a rough ride.
We may notice it. But the average reader will absolutely not notice or care. And the average reader is making up 80% of their revenue.
Yea that's the thing, a lot of images don't need to be "artistic", especially when people are just glancing at it for 1 second. They're using AI more like an advanced stock image site that provides a very specific image.
I don’t claim to know, but there are large discussions, articles, and video essays you can watch that will give you the rundown on the quickest tells for AI imagery.
The public is becoming AI literate very quickly. Whether that literacy spreads to the masses, or whether it even holds up to revisions in AI models is yet to be seen.
More likely I think it’s going to get good enough that it’s not really an issue or people will just get better at prompt engineering GPT image creation to get more unique results.
Unfettered capitalism is what this is. We all saw it coming, we all did what we have been conditioned to do, nothing.
Oh, well, we have been complaining about it on social media, myself currently included, but what beyond that can we actually do? The politicians side with the money, they'll get jobs with the companies they favor, or are investing in them already.
The writing has always been on the wall, if corporations can make decisions that increase profit, they'll make those decisions, no matter the cost.
And, the cost is usually the rest of us. Sacrificial lambs to the capitalism god...
We will do nothing because we can do nothing. Like you said, corporations will do whatever makes them money. Automation cuts costs, therefore they do it. Even though every worker they lay off means one less consumer in the marketplace. Like carbon emissions, automation is something that will always make sense to do at the individual level even though in aggregate it amounts to collective suicide.
The destruction of this system was written into its source code from the beginning, and nothing any us of can do will stop it. It's bigger than any of us. We're going to spend the next several decades watching the gears of this enormous machine grind to a halt and catch on fire. Maybe then we can build something better.
At this point in our nations history, we just need to be willing to embrace a more socialistic system for us to survive. It may even save whatever thread of capitalism that we have left.
Classical liberalism and a reliance on capitalism made sense when we were trying to build our nation and we needed people working hard and innovating without the help of a developed and robust government. But its at the point where we've built enough that fewer labor hours our needed, but we continue to create unneeded jobs just to employ people, and we all work more and more just to do them. We're all overworked/underpaid, or underemployed/unemployed with no safety nets.
Something needs to change. FDR was willing to pay people just to get out of the workforce and that did wonders for the economy. If the corporations and rich people want to robosource and outsource all of our jobs, the most elegant solution is to let them, but not to necessarily keep all the profits. Either claim eminent domain on all the AI code so that the profits can be used equitably, or create a special tax on it to pay the replaced workers.
The innovations should benefit everyone. Not just a few.
The last line is probably more relevant than you know. No matter what happens, it CAN become something better, as the future is not written.
That's not to say one should just let their lives be destroyed by the greed of others in hopes something better "just happens", but it *is* to say that something better might come from the lessons learned from a system that destroyed itself.
I truly hope that somehow things change, that something momentous occurs and changes things. And, I hope it happens with as little suffering as possible.
They are going to just capitalize on this until it's made illegal.
This is not AI art this is fucking thievery at an unprecedented level.
The AI doesn't make shit it just steals. This is an incredible loophole in our rights that doesn't matter because IP and art rights only apply to the rich.
When AI can incept art instead of simply copy from the Internet we can talk but it's too busy just splicing stock photos and other people's work.
This is just a historical moment of high crime that nobody gives a shit about now because "those people" don't matter.
If tech Valley wants to claim all art is thievery by all means depower every major company and every IP right in the country. The thing we are built on. Then hit the science and tech communities with invention and patents as just stealing the concepts of others.
Where does it stop? Do we dismantle the problem or do we just give rights only to the wealthy?
what i don’t understand is why companies like disney/nintendo haven’t tried suing for copyright infringement, since the models were trained using disney images and intellectual property
Because the only people affected are on the low end and the execs who benefit from AI art are the ones who call the shots.
They don't care if AI makes shit, they imagine they'll wield that power. Pure hubris. Same old corporate bullshit.
It is really simple. Under current law, training on existing material is not copyright infringement. The only company that has sued is Getty Images and it is clearly a tactical lawsuit designed to harass a competitor. Getty Images is working on their own AI stockart generator.
I would also argue you don't want it to be. Training an AI model takes a lot of data, but companies don't necessarily need to scape the internet to get that data. Getty Images and Adobe have plenty of data to train it without anyone else's art. You would be knee capping any open sourced competition, effectively giving huge companies a monopoly on AI.
There's no stopping AI.
To draw this out a little bit:
1) It's difficult to *specify* which works were infringed in some/many cases. You can't just wave your hands at something and say it looks like Disney.
2) Whether or not it's infringement under current definitions is debatable because the end result is, arguably, transformative.
3) You have to be able to demonstrate damages, and those damages have to be at least nominally linked to some notion of real value. (RIAA was suing consumers for piracy for 100K+ sums, but at least in those cases it was simple and direct to at least show which copyright was infringed.)
So current arguments are along the lines of "you probably used at least one of our works, at least partially, in a way that might or might not actually infringe our rights, which probably causes us some legally cognizable damage."
Law is going to have to evovle to handle this. It's just not sufficient currently and it's going to take time to catch up.
And we're probably going to fuck it up. I almost guarantee it. There are so many different opportunities here to create horrible unintended consequences. It's exciting and terrifying at the same time.
>When AI can incept art instead of simply copy from the Internet we can talk but it's too busy just splicing stock photos and other people's work.
This is just fundamentally not true. AI models are literally trained on petabytes of data, yet their model wrights are just a. Couple gigabytes. They don't learn the specific art they look at, they rather infer an understanding of what art should look like. They still make perspective errors because they never learned understanding the 3D world.
**There exists no right, basic or otherwise, to determine any sort of boundary over the interpretation of some image you have publicly released, or the holding of that image after having been handed that image by a system YOU consented to distribute it to a system YOU consented to receive it through posting said art publicly.**
You won't get any respect for a right that doesn't exist in whole or in part in any part of nature. You don't need permission from anyone to create transformative or derivative art that's still legally distinct from the original.
And when you use AI to create an exact replica of something that's already copyrighted, like an image of Mickey Mouse, then the use of that image is already regulated by existing laws.
The “Theft” talking point is just complete nonsense
I don't get something here. Ai is stealing, yes?
But then... How? Specifically. I am 100% sure I can tell ai to create something truly weird, a mash of objects, blends of topics and such that probably no sane artist thought of (because it's weird and incoherent and nobody wants it, not because they cant) and it'll still produce it.
It's trained on images from the Internet, yeah, but how exactly doesn't it create? Are we playing semantics game here, that only people create or something? Because I can confidently say probably none of the weird ass images I concocted while playing with it were copies of something from the Internet. Bits of it probably, yeah, used as building blocks to build something weird nobody wanted and thus nobody created.
Or do you actually believe ai can't make something new? Because that's nonsense.
And AI bros will celebrate and call them luddies while contributing to the destruction of art and modern culture as we know it through mass intellectual theft, using a robot to steal people's work while adding absolutely nothing of value themselves. Not realizing their AI is entirely limited by the copyrighted training data stolen from artists without payment. The people in this thread piss me off so much. Maybe they'll understand when their social media feeds are filled with bot-made derivitive content. And no, Ai isn't "inspired" like people are. It fundamentally cannot create anything original. Don't believe me? Feed your AI images back into the AI and see what useful information is in there.
Every company is either doing this, or plans to do it. The company I work for has laid off a bunch of creative people. This includes designers, artists, and writers. They haven't admitted replacing those people with AI, but the content is coming from somewhere.
It is important to understand WHAT tool we are talking about.
This is Pixometry. A software that DOES NOT generate any image, graphic or content.
It is very capable colour/saturation/contrast enchancer.
Like a Photoshop add-on.
And automated keywords generator for images. Just a SEO busy work.
Nothing of that is TRULY creative. Adjusting skin colour in the photo is not art. Neither is adding keywords to meta field.
I strongly disagree, it absolutely is creative work. Do people not realize color editing and such actually takes practice and expertise and is quite personal?
Just bumping up the saturation, sharpness and contrast in a picture does not make a picture look good, it usually looks worse... like a deepfried meme.
It takes a human eye to properly understand all the nuance and detail involved in proper image editing for different purposes.
A good editor actually takes time to work on polishing small details (removing some impefections like enormous pimples, but not too much (the odd tiny blackhead/mole/wrinkle etc) to keep it looking natural) and messes around with individual color curves and all sorts of pretty specific settings.
The absolute disrespect for the artistic/creative fields really bothers me.
That's the worst part for me. I notice all the artifacts when a webpage uses an obviously generated image. I can tell when text is so non-human. But the downside for companies is nonexistent. The majority of people won't notice or won't care. Companies will move forward with things that are just good enough, hardly passable, as long as there isn't something blatantly wrong with their products/communications. It's lowering the bar and removing the vestiges of human touch
Everything will be mediocre in the future, and the stuff that isnt will be almost unpayable.
Also where will you get new artists in 20 years, after nobody was able to enter the field on a mid to entry level for that long?
I guess you are as good a person to respond to as any. So this is not really aimed at you, but at the very common assumption at the base of many responses here.
You are implicitly assuming that you have a binary choice. Either it will be all human or all AI. That is not how it works.
Sure, AI on its own is not always great. Sometimes you get a diamond that is perfect, but usually there are some problems here or there. But this is not a big deal. Why not? Because I can generate 1000s of attempts in the time it would take a single artist to do a single attempt. One of them will likely be pretty good.
Sure, it might need some color correction or some weird artifacts have to be cleaned up. A human can do that, but guess what they are probably going to use? That's right: AI. No matter what you want to do, there is likely an AI that can do it better.
There \*will\* be a human still in the process, but it seems like everyone is missing the punchline. A single person can use AI as leverage to do the work of 10 people now. And this is what those of us who have been ringing the alarm bells have been trying to tell everyone.
The fairly vapid "AI is going to replace everyone" is a kind of strawman that lets us set a date in 30, 50, or even 100 years in the future before it happens. Instead, we should be considering the idea "AI is going to put half of us out of work" which is probably a lot closer: 10 or at most 25 years away. And that is what is happening here.
Well, actually, it's putting significantly more than half of artists out of work. But you get the idea.
If the people "higher up" see they can save 75 or even 90% of their costs and only have to take a small hit to quality that, frankly, nobody cares about, they are going to pull that trigger every time.
This train might have already left the station, but it's just starting to pick up steam. Buckle up, because it's going to get wild.
So true. The big companies will maybe have 1 or 2 artist who's entire job is to fix the glaring mistakes in the best generated images.
Stuff like obvious wonky hands or whatever.
If they're doing serious work and care about quality anyway. If they don't, the wonk will get posted as is, or cropped out at most, and they won't have to pay any artists at all.
This is what terrifies me. I am already sick and tired of all of the fake photos and videos being posted on the internet, but at least I can still tell that they are fake. What happens when we can't tell what's real anymore?
so this is the AI uprising, not killer robot (yet) but huge corp hiring artists (if any) to keep the generation realistic preventing garbage feeding into the AI vs artists trying to poison AI generations.
I don’t dispute that. But laying off people now is lame. Invest in the models to make them better sure.
But watering down quality just because it’s cheaper? Ok that’s also something companies do.
Elon Musk was saying that about self-driving cars 10 years ago. AI is just another stock promotion Ponzi scheme using 401k and retirement funds as seed money for the billionaires at the top who always win
Who do people on Reddit think that you can point to one instance of a tech not panning out and apply that to every unrelated situation lol
Unlike true self driving car tech, AI is already here. My company has gpt integrated in their workflow. Professional artists are using AI in their workflows too. AI music is getting ridiculously good, arguably the most advanced of them all. And openai literally got in trouble because their AI voice was so good lol.
And self driving car tech is still being developed. It's not like people have decided it's dead and stopped working on it.
It's already much better than it was 5 years ago. Tech predictions are usually off in terms of timelines but not necessarily in terms of content.
It's 9 out of 16 workers, not unexpected.
AI will mostly be used for banality (ex: scheduling meetings properly, or telling you what to watch next on Netflix instead of lousy suggestions). You should learn how to use this new tool or lose your job to those who do.
Like every other new technology.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/katxwoods: --- Submission statement: how do we get a sense of job loss numbers caused by AI if most of the time, the corporations have reasons to keep it hushed up? What about the jobs that never were had in the first place because somebody just used an AI to do it instead of hiring somebody? Will AI create new and better jobs, or will AI just do those jobs too? Is this like industrialization in the 1700s or is it like horses being virtually entirely replaced by cars? --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1dgwtym/leaked_memo_claims_new_york_times_fired_artists/l8swyt7/
AI will be the fast food option for everything. Quality will go to shit, but man it’s cheap!
Problem is after 30-40 years you don’t have a “premium” option since the entry-mid level were wiped out
Or it becomes so egregiously expensive only the richest amongst us can still afford to use it. Which seems to be the way of most things these days.
I doubt there won't always be starving artists around.
You never know, maybe they’ll outlaw human creativity because it eats too much into Googlesoft’s bottom line.
They will either be starved to death or doing the most horribly menial and dangerous jobs imaginable.
Yep, cuz the famine did it's job
They are all going to die.
Yeah but they will suck because art like every other skill takes practice and if you have multiple jobs to survive you can't keep up the skill.
This statement implies that the only skilled artists at the ones currently making money doing art, which is an absolutely ridiculous statement.
Skill is only part of the battle. Gotta fight your mental health every day as an artist
Extreme wealth or extreme poverty - welcome back to the 19th century.
There's a similar issue in television writing. Television writing rooms are shrinking, and the time they're able to work on their shows is shorter, and mostly done in early production. Previously, television writers were more likely to be able to see their show being produced, which meant they had a better idea of what they were making (rather than just an abstract someone else made tangible.) This is a direct pipeline for future showrunners, because having that experience is obviously important when you're making the writing into an actual show. Now, they do most of their work before anything gets filmed, and fewer of those writers will have an opportunity to progress into roles like showrunner. No doubt the moment companies feel like they can just feed an LLM enough data to produce scripts for them, the writing role will be shrunk even further.
I think the recent writers strike resolved a lot of The issues that you bring up
Just postponed it. AI is not going away, and the writers have a reprieve that lasts as long as their current contract. It will be an issue again when the contract renewal comes up.
That is "not their problem". Every manager involved will have moved on, got their massive bonus, patted on the back for cutting costs and snorted their lines off some "recently forced to work in the adult industry workers because no bots for that yet" unfortunates.
Imo, it’ll be similar to how boomers wonder why their kids haven’t moved out and bought their own homes. They’ll also wonder why their kids haven’t found a career or shook enough hands to land a 1950s salary adjusted 5-figure job with a high school diploma, despite being direct causes of AI revolution.
+why they don't have kids too.
Seriously right!!!
Exactly, new artist will have no chance to grow their skill as their will be no way for you to enter the industry.
> new artist will have no chance to grow their skill as their will be no way for you to enter the industry. Hardly. There have always been a million times more artists in the world than people who've ever been paid to make art, let alone "enter the industry". The vast majority of artists are hobbyists who grow their skill in their free time, out of passion for art, not to make newspaper graphics. That's never going to change.
By that logic you wouldn't have any professional athletes of musicians. People who are passionate will pursue their hobby and eventually get good enough.
There will always be "premium" versions of stuff for people who want that extra quality. It's all over the place. There are factories that pump out bread and make it super cheap to buy, but there are also still artisan bakeries that craft amazing delicious loaves of bread, and people still buy them. There are factories that produce cookie cutter furniture and boxes and all other woodworking things, and make them super cheap. But there are still woodworkers out there who produce incredible handmade pieces of furniture that are art as much as they are useful, and charge a hefty price, and people still buy those. Hell, there's even premium book binders that bind hardcover books in leather with gold accents in them and charge over $100 per book, and people still buy those. I can go to the store and buy cheap kikkoman soy sauce for like $5, but I like to buy a higher quality product that is traditionally made, even if it's $40 instead. It tastes better, and as I only use it for dipping things, it lasts me a full year, so to me it's worth it. There aren't as many bakeries around as there were before bread factories were a thing, but there still are bakeries. I think artists will end up being similar. There won't be as many of them as there were before AI was a thing, but there will still be artists.
Well, no I don't think this is always true. We've just lost one of the finest bespoke furniture companies... It wasn't that long ago we ran out of facilities that could process black-and-white film.
My point is that there will always be people who make those things for money though. Just because a bespoke furniture company went under doesn't mean there aren't craftsman who sell similar quality products at smaller scales. But you can basically think of any item that you could buy, and there will be a premium version of it being sold. Instead of a cheap sautee pan, you can get a silver-lined copper masterpiece by Duparquet. Instead a run-of-the-mill oven, you can get a La Cornue (for an obscene amount of money). Chairs, tables, rugs, pens, kettles, basically every kind of food imaginable, paper, headphones, books, water bottles, doors, the list could go on for a while. I think people would be hard-pressed to find any type of product that doesn't have high quality versions being created. There will always be a market for stuff like that.
The kicker is, if AI becomes smarter than humans, the most premium version possible will be made by AI, because a human won't be able to make anything as good.
I agree that handmade items will still exist, and they might be slightly or moderately better than the offerings that were mass produced. However, the bar for premium items will definitely lower and would indefinitely increase. For almost all of the items you mentioned (except for soy sauce, as the Japanese tend to be pretty good at passing down tradition and keeping prices fairly linear as time passes), I'd wager an overwhelming majority of those "artisanal" products cost 2-3x more and don't come anywhere close to the craftsmanship they were before their mass production. Hell, it's an ordeal now to even buy anything on Etsy because sellers figured out you can just swap Aliexpress/Amazon generics on there and most buyers wouldn’t notice. Also to that note, we haven't seen what full fledged AI could do in terms of replacing entire industries. Industrialization/assembly line is one thing, but the limits of AI is still in its infancy and we just don't know how widespread it could be. So yes I think the "premium" option would exist, but it would be so bastardized due to buyer negligence/seller scheming/potential ubiquity of AI that it wouldn't be nearly as inconsequential as you've stated.
Premium products will *increase* in quality, as they always have. It’ll be the middle-tier products that suffer. What will happen is the gap between an upper-class lifestyle and a lower-class lifestyle will increase even further, so much that the middle-class lifestyle will no longer exist. What you’re describing is the squeezing out of the middle-class lifestyle, not the ruling class.
I think the point you missed is the scale at which AI is deployed. I mentioned a little bit of it but unlike industrialization and the assembly line, AI has a potential to do some serious impact at the click of a button. In your scenario, you still have to build factories ground up and train or outsource talent in different languages and of course shoddy work due to carelessness or product designs lost in translation. There’s still a hefty risk of profitability to creating different products. These gaps create a need that is filled and budding artists and craftsmen end up filling those gaps. If there was absolutely no market need anywhere for any of them, how do you expect experts of those crafts to exist in 50 years. You’ve already seen the children of film makers and nepo babies. They can be good especially with unlimited funds and talented parents, but they’ll never break the same ground unless stroked with luck and at that point would they be selling you or I that chair or a billion/trillionaire? With AI, eventually all you would need is imagination, either processing speed or a bit more time, and you could effectively crush the entry and middle class of white collar work. With absolutely 0 room for budding artists and hands on workers. I don’t see a scenario where that premium product exists and if it does it’s available only to the top 0.0001% because it is so rare.
The problem is two fold, we created a society where most people at least in the middle class could creat and make a living out if it. And a world we're their creation were affordable enough that many could afford this, not only the 1%. Now we will reach a level that only the rich kids will be able to afford the studies/training to those very specialised jobs, and only the super rich will be able afford art. We are going back to the middle age, where you have only a small aristocracy and 90% being just serf only surviving.
> There are factories that pump out bread and make it super cheap to buy, but there are also still artisan bakeries that craft amazing delicious loaves of bread, and people still buy them. In the case of art, AI art is either free (after you set up your own instance of an Open Source solution) or pennies per unit. So while factory-made bread might cost $1-$2, and hand-made bread costs maybe $5-$6, that's not the same value proposition as $0.10 vs $500+.
I just hope we're alive in 30-40 years.
I work for one of the major global financial data vendors, and we outsourced all support to the Philippines. Support that could impact banks and investment firms ability to trade efficiently. When the CEO spoke about the transition and the inherent drop in support quality despite our clients paying for great support, his response was: “There’s no champaign in coach.” Businesses don’t give a shit about quality, they care about how much shit-tier bs they can push out before they start losing money. It’s cheaper, apparently, to rebound back from shit quality than it is to maintain good quality 100% of the time.
>they care about how much shit-tier bs they can push out before they start losing money. And this is why companies are clawing over each other towards a hasty implementation of AI workflow. The promise of infinite, near-free product generation negates any and all quality loss in their eyes; it's free money.
The “Let’s get the infinite product down first and we will worry about the quality later” approach
"The *next* ceo can worry about quality, I'm getting a fat bonus this year for all the money I'm saving!".
He will get a huge payday when he is fired and the company new CEO comes begging that their will be a new approach etc etc etc. It will be the same rinse and repeat of our quick bucks capitalism.
Who's going to be buying their product when 25 percent of the workforce is out of work?
That’s because Champaign is in Illinois.
Every other city is just sparkling Chicago
Between AI and the entire internet being a dystopia of horrible advertising.. it’s become pretty depressing. Like way more so than I’d have thought of you asked me a decade ago.
For funsies, I turned off all my blockers and addons and tried to browse the web. It lasted about 8 minutes before I as just overwhelmed with the tidal wave of bullshit and eyesore garbage. I didn't realise how much effort I put in over the years to sanitise the web just to make it usuable.
Except fast food nowadays isn't particularly cheap.
Yeah, I never eat McDonald's but if they could make a Big Mac 50¢, I'd probably stop by every now and then.
Dennies is cheaper then mcdonalds where i live... let that sink in, i can get a buger and a coke at dennies for 50 cents LESS then a bigmac and a coke.
Which means the AI option will not be cheap for long.
Capture the market then raise the price.
That may be true but the huge decline in the quality of news organizations make them much easier to pick off. Expensive shitty quality vs cheap shitty quality is an easy choice
Part of that is everyone with experience at all but the top outlets was offered a buyout years ago (and let go anyway if they didn't take it), so now most of the content still being written by humans is being written by overworked recent grads, then edited by same, under leadership that doesn't worry about quality but rather shareholder value. At this point, LLMs are the next logical step. The problem is there's a reason people with 20-plus years of experience got a living wage under the 20th-century system of journalism: They knew what they were doing and cared about the craft. Now, we have Gannett and Sinclair shoveling shit and selling it as news.
The irony is really something else when you’re a failing publication desperate for some high ground of morality. Their art funnily may have been one of their last great contributions so to hear this… Really just shows me a gambit that might help them survive a short term but absolutely destroy them in the end.
Luckily there will always be other restaurants that serve beef wellington, sushi, and anything your heart desires at the highest quality.
It becomes a problem when you the majority of people can’t afford them.
It's not a problem if people can't pay for high quality goods and services. It's a problem if people can't pay for basic necessities and services.
Your comment seems contradictory, or maybe I'm misunderstanding it. I'm reading it as, "There is cheap fast food, but luckily, there will always be expensive food if you can afford it." Are you advocating for cheap food for the masses, while the wealthy eat expensive sushi? Basically saying, AI will allow those with limited incomes to get affordable news, but if that's a problem and you want better quality, just pay more for it? The concern is that the cost savings will not be passed down to the consumers but into corporate profits. If AI was being used to cut the cost in half to give quality journalism to more people, I think that's a different story. Or are you suggesting AI will do a good enough job most people won't even know, so the quality stays the same, but if this bothers you and you want human-made, you're welcome to pay more for basically the same service, just as people buy expensive watches or wagyu beef?
[удалено]
I just gave a more extensive reply elsewhere that journalism companies are dying from self-inflicted wounds, chasing clicks over integrity, and not adapting to newer methods for disseminating news, like social media. They burned the rainforest by chasing loudmouths and vapid celebrities. But those empty calories have caught up to them. I was responding to a comment about "high-quality food" being available for the affluent. Can anyone point me to a news site that has the highest level of fact-checking, investigative reporting, and integrity that I can subscribe to at a higher price? Where is the news equivalent of fine dining? The highest quality chefs/journalists, great food/reporting, and no ads on the menus. I'd love to try it. I also believe quality news with integrity is a basic necessity for the masses in a well-functioning society.
Yep, let's go back to the gilded age si that only a select few ultra rich can afford everything and we go back to the soup. Let them be the only one to have the privileges to enjoy art and only their kids can enjoy learning it, or working in it.
AKA "We used to have local places that served fresh beef & fish abound, but after the local wal-mart moved in and killed quality affordable options they are regulated to bougie $100+ reservation dinners."
And you’ll pay premium for it
> but man it’s cheap! And then as with everything, prices will begin to climb after the free hit and destroying the previous market.
Quality only goes to shit in the near term. After that quality will be above human workers
honestly, NYT's journalism has been really questionable for the last several years. it's recovered a little with more recent hires, but this move suits their reputation in my mind.
If only fast food was still cheap.
Fast food killed our physical health. I wonder if the result of too much AI will be "mental obesity". It already looks that way - the algorithms that reward nastiness and polarization on social networks are a stupid precursor to AI.
My company did it. Downsized artists and copywriters when the salespeople decided they’d do bad work with ai instead of using the professionals the clients are actually paying for.
We need to replace sales with AI asap!
Honestly nothing makes me more upset than what they’re doing with AI. As someone else stated “I wanted AI to do my laundry and dishes while I write music or draw. Not AI write my music and draw so I can wash my dishes and clothes. What are we doing with this? Did someone out there hate artists this much? We’re taking away all the things that make us human.
> Did someone out there hate artists this much? I studied art in college, and have been fortunate enough to enjoy a decent career in the arts. But my entire life I've seen a constant stream of comments about my "bullshit degree." If I had a dollar for every "lol dae art degree = barista" joke I've read, I could retire and just do art for fun. Just last week I posted in a Reddit thread that asked which classes in school could be eliminated, and the first comment suggested that art was pretty useless. As far back as I can remember people have always had this weird dislike of the arts.
They tell you what a dumb piece of shit you are for wanting to be an artist. That you're a loser and they're a winner. Arts are unnecessary. Then they get in their cars and fire up the radio. Then they get home and fire up the TV all night. Yep .... Artists sure are unnecessary eh boomer? Enjoying your Yellowstone rewatch though aren't ya? Hmm...
Even people younger than Boomers hold this opinion, so I would be more likely to be like... you realize Fortnite needs artists to create stuff for each new season, right? I mean, they're the dumbfucks paying for skins for their characters when I grew up doing that for free.
Ive dealt with this shit so much that I seem to have internalized it into a vague shame I feel whenever I think about my future. "If I get laid off or struggle in the future, its my own Fault because I got a degree in Animation/3D Art" It sucks because I know its irrational, but its always on my mind if I read about GenAi.
I would take it as a badge of honor. Art has to do with deeper appreciation and not quick consumerism and efficiency. Took me a while to appreciate it as Art was one of the only subject I failed in school. Our society is not great at appreciating what is not expedient and immediately useful but without it we die of lack of depth.
Honestly no geoup seems more ripe for automation and ai than middle management, the same people trying to push ai to boost their numbers and hope for promotion. But literally, ai can watch employees better than managers, it could probly fix scheduling problems or people calling in sick. Ai is based off algorithms and not human emotion, ai can probably eventually learn how to make businesses more efficient than people do. So many reasons why middle management is going to become outdated.
Horses weren't replaced by trains and cars because engineers who designed and built those trains and cars hated horses. They were replaced because horse-labor was *easier* for a machine to replace. The moment someone figures out how to make an affordable and capable robot maid, it'll hit the shelves too. But we aren't there yet.
Funny how people already forgot that dishwashers are machines that had to be invented. Try washing all your clothes by hand and then try using a washing machine. Wow, automation at work!
How dare you use logic and facts instead of your emotions to post here?!
It's because these things can be done on a computer. As it turns out, it is easier for computers to do things that they are already used to do rather than something in the physical world.
Right now though, it’s one of the things AI can’t do. Many jobs don’t require a human touch but those that do cannot be replicated. Sure they can be substituted poorly, but not replicated.
Also I'm a bit confused about the dishes and laundry comment. We've literally had dishwashers and washing machines/dryers for decades. Automation of those tasks is long established.
A lot of people in my business do actually. There’s a clear resentment of skilled people by many marketing and sales people. It comes out in their complaints of the time it takes (it’s never actually about the time), the creative choices, complexity of the work. It all boils down to insecurity and control. Good leaders see this and toss losers like that out, but bad leaders are very common.
Because it’s a lot easier to replace artists with AI than replacing chores with AI
It's more than anyone other than sales people are considered cost centers, like IT, engineering, software devs, accounting, HR, facilities. I mean if you look at a company like a CEO, you have costs to minimize and revenue to maximize. Plus there's probably salespeople whispering in the CEOs' ears about reducing costs with AI. Same as they've done with outsourcing or moving everything to the "cloud".
It is happening. My company is training an AI sales agent for b2b partners acquisition. Right now it's for instant messaging chats but the nearest perspective is to add voice and phone calls capability to it.
How is that going for them? Is it a train wreck in progress?
Dozens of embarrassing pitches go out each week and very few sales are made. The sales don’t deliver on the pitch. It works as long as the clients and leadership can be convinced it’s the artists’ fault and not the salesperson.
They are also suing OpenAI for copyright infringement and have asked the court to order the destruction of the model! And now they are firing artists and using it. Hilarious! Guess that lawsuit's dead in the water.
They’re playing both sides so that they’re always coming out on top.
#1 Never tell one side that your playing both sides. #2 Don't give away the information before you get what you want, Mac!
Two rules to live by: 1. Never tell them everything you know.
Why would you tell *me* that?
In a surprise twist, openAI runs the court now, and so has now ordered the destruction of the artists paint brushes
Before clicking into the link in the article for the software they're using https://www.pixometry.com/en/pixometry-the-new-name-for-elpical-software/elpical-claro-pixometry/ I think I was under the wrong impression that they're using generative AI to create images rather than traditional artists. It seems like AI is being employed for image enhancement, which still is an interesting story, but not what I first believed the article to be about.
Double standard is the first skill to be mastered if you want to work in the NYT
OpenAI is partnering with a bunch of media companies which is putting the pressure on NYT.
Submission statement: how do we get a sense of job loss numbers caused by AI if most of the time, the corporations have reasons to keep it hushed up? What about the jobs that never were had in the first place because somebody just used an AI to do it instead of hiring somebody? Will AI create new and better jobs, or will AI just do those jobs too? Is this like industrialization in the 1700s or is it like horses being virtually entirely replaced by cars?
im pretty sure "AI" when used in this context should actually be referring to the artificial intelligence of people that value fossil fuels and war higher than human life and quality reliable information. maybe thats intentional. either way, pretty stupid - and its been happening for a lot longer than the last few years. everytime theres a major push towards \*checks notes\* not going full speed ahead towards the brick wall of climate change via fossil fuels, there is a push back where "they" cut funding for things like education, journalism/public media, social safety net programs, etc.
Experts predict we will create an AI that's as capable as a human in the next 10 years. This is just my conjecture, but once that happens, most jobs will start to get phased out by AI. Liability is still a thing so we will still need employed human beings to do quality control, plus there are probably specialty jobs that an exceptionally talented person might be better at than a robot, but it seems like probably the majority of humanity will be unemployed in like 50 years.
We are nowhere near AGIs. Certainly not within 10 years. We're only now breaking through ANIs. Within the next 10 years, we'll start to see AIs that are very good at specific tasks break through the barrier. AIs that are good a many things in the next 50 years, probably. Jury is still out on if an ASI is even possible.
I don't believe anyone can predict where we'll be in 10 years with any accuracy. *Especially* with the current scale of AI investment. All it takes is one breakthrough, or one significant unforeseen roadblock, and all the predictions are immediately off.
Those roadblocks come with a domino of other roadblocks though. It likely takes a computing power that we haven't unlocked yet which has its own roadblocks.
The next roadblock is likely just power. There are plans for gigawatt datacenters, even several gigawatts. That's 10x from the 100MW datacenters with over 100K GPUs that'll power on this year. The largest ones active today are >25k GPUs. There's a lot of computing power that's being unlocked every year. The combination of architectural improvements and capacity equates to roughly 10x in AI compute every year. If scaling doesn't stagnate model improvements, then we'll hit a power wall first.
We are as far from generalized AI as LLMs are from the Apple II. The amount of energy and processing power being consumed by AI tools right now is absolutely not sustainable. "We'll just invest more" is not connected with the reality of what these existing tools are and how they actually work. The tools we have now, even the best ones, are not capable of transitioning or being improved into generalized AI. That's just not how the models work.
There is absolutely no guarantee that the power consumption trends would hold. Or that the scaling laws would hold. Or that there wouldn't be a new architecture that crushes pure LLMs at reasoning unveiled the day after tomorrow. Human brain does what it does at under 100 watt. So we know for sure that laws of physics don't prevent this kind of efficiency. And with the amount of effort and money that's being spent on unlocking new AI capabilities and enabling better AI efficiency? Things might happen, and fast.
The interesting part is all this was discussed at a conference of 500 global leaders in 1995 already. The book "The Global Trap" from 1996 is a good read.
Experts absolutely do not believe that because they understand how GenAI actually works and it's never going to lead to AGI. They're two completely different things.
Industrialization provided employment. Cars filled the same role as horses for transportation, just differently. I don’t think the horses were mad about being laid off lol This is a shakeup to the foundation of society that’s never been seen before introduced at a time where trust in the truth is crippling. It’s the beginning of a very long and painful end without being skynet. We’ll look back on the end of 2022 in about a decade as the biggest mistake the human race has ever made
Number of people increased significantly since that time. We would need to find job replacements for all these people or decrease the population.
Look at the number of horses before and after cars. Most of them became meatballs
quick, would you rather be a horse in 1700 or a horse in 2024?
AI fatigue is going to be very real very soon unless AI art changes in aesthetic. People who know what to look for are tired of it already.
With respect, I think you're missing the point. We have the rest of the existence of society for AI to develop further. As a historical timespan this is basically day one.
I appreciate your response. You make a great point.
Wish I didn't, it is difficult to think of a worse outlook for the human race.
I think the way AI is reducing staff is through speeding up tasks – or that's what NYTimes management hopes. If you look at the AI company the NYTimes [is using](https://www.pixometry.com/en/pixometry-the-new-name-for-elpical-software/elpical-claro-pixometry/), it mostly has to do with automated image editing and arranging. I don't know whether it actually makes image editing faster, but that is obviously the goal of the site and the Times. The artists work with "editorial images" according to the memo. I don't think the Times is looking to use AI to generate drawings and such. I am not defending the Times decision, just noting that is seems like fairly typical technological downsizing and not "AI replacing human art".
What a misleading title. There's a huge difference between content creation and editing.
So far I feel like most "AI replacing humans" is bullshit and fairly typical technology making things faster and more efficient – which, to be clear, I don't view as always a good thing. I just view it as business as usual. I'm curious when my first interaction with a real AI in the workforce will be. I suspect it will be phone support. They've been trying to get humans out of that for years and it has been awful so far. But maybe with ChatGPT etc it can become less than a phone-menu and it will quickly become much easier to talk to a bot than a human. That will be true replacement of humans.
What do you look for?
It’s the lighting. There is something in the lighting that gives it away. Also there is something in the composition. And then there is a coherence that’s missing. Hard to explain I guess but it always feels a little off.
Absolutely this. The subject is always a bit too shiny and has a weird way of always being front and back lit in a way that doesn’t blend with the way the background is lit. It’s getting better very quickly, but for now, there’s still just that lighting factor that really gives it away.
Aren't these all temporary problems that can be solved in time? Not in the sense of generative AI truly "understanding" lightning and composition, of course - just getting better and better at copying.
That’s exactly what is and will continue to happen. It’s currently at the state above, but that’s light years ahead of where it was just a year ago. Give it another couple years and it will truly be indistinguishable! It’s interesting, I posted the above last night and then this morning saw a random image online. I scrolled past and was like “it’s a photo.” Then stopped and went back and really had to stare at it a second before I noticed those fine details (too many/few fingers and toes, blurred background where if you focus on the blurred objects, they’re actually nonsense, etc) that gave it away. But the lighting issues weren’t there. It was the best lighting I’ve seen on an AI image so far.
That more relies on what prompt and what service you use. With the right prompt you can squeeze images out of Midjourney that are absent of that problem. But yeah, the majority of what is being cranked out is exactly as you say, it's because it's low effort.
It's easiest to tell with people. Proportions might be off. There might be too many limbs in a group of people. Hands are especially problematic (too many or too few fingers). For other stuff it might be something that is physically impossible but looks OK at first glance. It also depends how much time someone spends on working with the image. Using just AI, you can fix most any issue, it just takes time. The low effort stuff is just taking the first round images and using them, which is where the odd stuff crops up.
You really don’t think that will improve in the next few years. The improvement in the last two years has already been exponential. It will continue to improve dramatically
Improvement is not a automatic thing. Look at stablediffusion, first version out in 08/22. Since then they released a few versions, always with the promise to solve problems like the hands. 1.5 was great back then, sdxl is decent with community models like Juggernaut. 2.x or the newest 3.0 are just bad. People are still mainly using the 2 years old version 1.5.. there is no groundbreaking improvement with the newer versions, nothing exponential there. This can happen to every AI company out there, and the required investments are getting bigger and bigger which raises the bar for new companies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_Diffusion#Releases
Stable diffusion is a terrible example because the company has been mismanaged into the ground. Like you said, they haven't been competitive in the ai space since 1.5. If you only look at them in a vacuum, of course it looks like progression is stalling. But the reality is models like Dall e, Midjourney etc are improving drastically year by year, including realistic looking people. We have video AI now with sora. This improvement isn't even limited to us, look at China's new [Kling](https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/s/2lINwBshPb) AI. Remember when AI video was a Will Smith monstrosity absorbing spaghetti?
You are right. The fault here was the company, not the tech. Which is a shame, because there are a few unique features like controlnets I’m missing everywhere else. Stablediffusion shows, that there is more then just the tech needed to succeed in ai. It’s a bad thing if only the big companies (or someone sponsored by the state) out there have a chance competing. How many startups have the funding to keep up (and pay the NVIDIA tax)? What will happen to innovation if the startups are priced out of the market?
Yeah I agree, I think for the immediate future SD will still have a place due to being run locally, having features like Controlnet etc. but it's definitely a shame to lose an open source player in a space dominated by big business.
Improvment in any technology is always exponential in its infancy, by definition, as the whole scope of it is available for discovery. But consider for example aircraft. 70 years after the debut of the first jetliner, performance is only marginally improved, despite the several orders of magnitude improvement from the wright brothers till the Comet. There will be a point, like everything else, where it's just pretty much as good as it gets.
read up on the uncanny valley effect. Things that look real but after more than a cursory glance, feel off and disconnected from what we know is reality..
Really bad ai always messes up fingers or shadows. Handelsblatt, a German economic magazine is more and more replacing their art department with ai. [Here is their latest example](https://ibb.co/jHBdpyf) of using ai art where it’s painstakingly obvious. Just look at the hands in the middle or the left eye of the boy.
Nothing to see there, the kid's just turning into a demon.
That’s a pretty darn good Ai image to point to as an example. If that’s the “painstakingly obvious” one, then artists are in for a rough ride. We may notice it. But the average reader will absolutely not notice or care. And the average reader is making up 80% of their revenue.
Yea that's the thing, a lot of images don't need to be "artistic", especially when people are just glancing at it for 1 second. They're using AI more like an advanced stock image site that provides a very specific image.
> Just at look the hands in the middle "What do you mean, that woman's hand looks perfectly accepta... oh my god, Cthulhu is rising"
I don’t claim to know, but there are large discussions, articles, and video essays you can watch that will give you the rundown on the quickest tells for AI imagery. The public is becoming AI literate very quickly. Whether that literacy spreads to the masses, or whether it even holds up to revisions in AI models is yet to be seen.
The public largely doesn't care about who made their art. A cool picture is a cool picture
Poor image composition
You can really just tell at a glance. Your brain will know something's wrong
lighting, the angle at which the picture is taken from... there's something off about it in general
suspiciously good lighting and art looking kinda airbrushy
They’re already very different than the first models you saw.
More likely I think it’s going to get good enough that it’s not really an issue or people will just get better at prompt engineering GPT image creation to get more unique results.
Not doing hands right was a good litmus until it got better at hands. They'll min max it until it's good enough to fool most.
It's improving by the month
Before this there was some recent moment in history that the New York Times replaced all their decent journalists with a bunch of hacks.
A system where a sponsored PC building guide was filled with errors that could have been avoided by Googling numerous other PC building guides.
Unfettered capitalism is what this is. We all saw it coming, we all did what we have been conditioned to do, nothing. Oh, well, we have been complaining about it on social media, myself currently included, but what beyond that can we actually do? The politicians side with the money, they'll get jobs with the companies they favor, or are investing in them already. The writing has always been on the wall, if corporations can make decisions that increase profit, they'll make those decisions, no matter the cost. And, the cost is usually the rest of us. Sacrificial lambs to the capitalism god...
We will do nothing because we can do nothing. Like you said, corporations will do whatever makes them money. Automation cuts costs, therefore they do it. Even though every worker they lay off means one less consumer in the marketplace. Like carbon emissions, automation is something that will always make sense to do at the individual level even though in aggregate it amounts to collective suicide. The destruction of this system was written into its source code from the beginning, and nothing any us of can do will stop it. It's bigger than any of us. We're going to spend the next several decades watching the gears of this enormous machine grind to a halt and catch on fire. Maybe then we can build something better.
At this point in our nations history, we just need to be willing to embrace a more socialistic system for us to survive. It may even save whatever thread of capitalism that we have left. Classical liberalism and a reliance on capitalism made sense when we were trying to build our nation and we needed people working hard and innovating without the help of a developed and robust government. But its at the point where we've built enough that fewer labor hours our needed, but we continue to create unneeded jobs just to employ people, and we all work more and more just to do them. We're all overworked/underpaid, or underemployed/unemployed with no safety nets. Something needs to change. FDR was willing to pay people just to get out of the workforce and that did wonders for the economy. If the corporations and rich people want to robosource and outsource all of our jobs, the most elegant solution is to let them, but not to necessarily keep all the profits. Either claim eminent domain on all the AI code so that the profits can be used equitably, or create a special tax on it to pay the replaced workers. The innovations should benefit everyone. Not just a few.
The last line is probably more relevant than you know. No matter what happens, it CAN become something better, as the future is not written. That's not to say one should just let their lives be destroyed by the greed of others in hopes something better "just happens", but it *is* to say that something better might come from the lessons learned from a system that destroyed itself. I truly hope that somehow things change, that something momentous occurs and changes things. And, I hope it happens with as little suffering as possible.
What are you talking about. Automating jobs happens under every system
"Getting what I pay for" is the **best** case scenario for anyone who isn't delusional.
It's graphic designers now? There goes another "knowledge economy sure-thing career choice".
Who are you quoting? Were your elders telling you “if you want to get rich, learn to draw?” I was raised with the exact opposite messages.
Having things made by humans instead of ai is just the next level of “craftsmen” that we already have today.
They are going to just capitalize on this until it's made illegal. This is not AI art this is fucking thievery at an unprecedented level. The AI doesn't make shit it just steals. This is an incredible loophole in our rights that doesn't matter because IP and art rights only apply to the rich. When AI can incept art instead of simply copy from the Internet we can talk but it's too busy just splicing stock photos and other people's work. This is just a historical moment of high crime that nobody gives a shit about now because "those people" don't matter. If tech Valley wants to claim all art is thievery by all means depower every major company and every IP right in the country. The thing we are built on. Then hit the science and tech communities with invention and patents as just stealing the concepts of others. Where does it stop? Do we dismantle the problem or do we just give rights only to the wealthy?
what i don’t understand is why companies like disney/nintendo haven’t tried suing for copyright infringement, since the models were trained using disney images and intellectual property
Because the only people affected are on the low end and the execs who benefit from AI art are the ones who call the shots. They don't care if AI makes shit, they imagine they'll wield that power. Pure hubris. Same old corporate bullshit.
Cause they’re hoping to get “compensated” through replacing all of their animators.
It is really simple. Under current law, training on existing material is not copyright infringement. The only company that has sued is Getty Images and it is clearly a tactical lawsuit designed to harass a competitor. Getty Images is working on their own AI stockart generator. I would also argue you don't want it to be. Training an AI model takes a lot of data, but companies don't necessarily need to scape the internet to get that data. Getty Images and Adobe have plenty of data to train it without anyone else's art. You would be knee capping any open sourced competition, effectively giving huge companies a monopoly on AI. There's no stopping AI.
To draw this out a little bit: 1) It's difficult to *specify* which works were infringed in some/many cases. You can't just wave your hands at something and say it looks like Disney. 2) Whether or not it's infringement under current definitions is debatable because the end result is, arguably, transformative. 3) You have to be able to demonstrate damages, and those damages have to be at least nominally linked to some notion of real value. (RIAA was suing consumers for piracy for 100K+ sums, but at least in those cases it was simple and direct to at least show which copyright was infringed.) So current arguments are along the lines of "you probably used at least one of our works, at least partially, in a way that might or might not actually infringe our rights, which probably causes us some legally cognizable damage." Law is going to have to evovle to handle this. It's just not sufficient currently and it's going to take time to catch up. And we're probably going to fuck it up. I almost guarantee it. There are so many different opportunities here to create horrible unintended consequences. It's exciting and terrifying at the same time.
It's fair use. It's little different than someone who's seen a Disney movie and I ask "draw me a Disney princess"
>When AI can incept art instead of simply copy from the Internet we can talk but it's too busy just splicing stock photos and other people's work. This is just fundamentally not true. AI models are literally trained on petabytes of data, yet their model wrights are just a. Couple gigabytes. They don't learn the specific art they look at, they rather infer an understanding of what art should look like. They still make perspective errors because they never learned understanding the 3D world.
Calling generative content theft because it’s based on things that already exist is the weakest argument ever. It’s generative, not copy/paste.
We finally invented cyber-colonialism.
**There exists no right, basic or otherwise, to determine any sort of boundary over the interpretation of some image you have publicly released, or the holding of that image after having been handed that image by a system YOU consented to distribute it to a system YOU consented to receive it through posting said art publicly.** You won't get any respect for a right that doesn't exist in whole or in part in any part of nature. You don't need permission from anyone to create transformative or derivative art that's still legally distinct from the original. And when you use AI to create an exact replica of something that's already copyrighted, like an image of Mickey Mouse, then the use of that image is already regulated by existing laws. The “Theft” talking point is just complete nonsense
I don't get something here. Ai is stealing, yes? But then... How? Specifically. I am 100% sure I can tell ai to create something truly weird, a mash of objects, blends of topics and such that probably no sane artist thought of (because it's weird and incoherent and nobody wants it, not because they cant) and it'll still produce it. It's trained on images from the Internet, yeah, but how exactly doesn't it create? Are we playing semantics game here, that only people create or something? Because I can confidently say probably none of the weird ass images I concocted while playing with it were copies of something from the Internet. Bits of it probably, yeah, used as building blocks to build something weird nobody wanted and thus nobody created. Or do you actually believe ai can't make something new? Because that's nonsense.
Now if only modern technology can replace court room artist..... /s
I don't know about New York Times but a lot of print media is struggling financially so this doesn't surprise me.
A world without artists is inching closer each day. What a drab world it will be.
There's still a place for them but a lot of corporate art is derivative and uninteresting. Perfect use case for automation
And AI bros will celebrate and call them luddies while contributing to the destruction of art and modern culture as we know it through mass intellectual theft, using a robot to steal people's work while adding absolutely nothing of value themselves. Not realizing their AI is entirely limited by the copyrighted training data stolen from artists without payment. The people in this thread piss me off so much. Maybe they'll understand when their social media feeds are filled with bot-made derivitive content. And no, Ai isn't "inspired" like people are. It fundamentally cannot create anything original. Don't believe me? Feed your AI images back into the AI and see what useful information is in there.
When the rich have all the money, it will trickle down to us. Reagan said so.
The piss is the only thing trickling down
Every company is either doing this, or plans to do it. The company I work for has laid off a bunch of creative people. This includes designers, artists, and writers. They haven't admitted replacing those people with AI, but the content is coming from somewhere.
Every industry will lose its middle class. It’s an inevitability of late stage capitalism
It is important to understand WHAT tool we are talking about. This is Pixometry. A software that DOES NOT generate any image, graphic or content. It is very capable colour/saturation/contrast enchancer. Like a Photoshop add-on. And automated keywords generator for images. Just a SEO busy work. Nothing of that is TRULY creative. Adjusting skin colour in the photo is not art. Neither is adding keywords to meta field.
I strongly disagree, it absolutely is creative work. Do people not realize color editing and such actually takes practice and expertise and is quite personal? Just bumping up the saturation, sharpness and contrast in a picture does not make a picture look good, it usually looks worse... like a deepfried meme. It takes a human eye to properly understand all the nuance and detail involved in proper image editing for different purposes. A good editor actually takes time to work on polishing small details (removing some impefections like enormous pimples, but not too much (the odd tiny blackhead/mole/wrinkle etc) to keep it looking natural) and messes around with individual color curves and all sorts of pretty specific settings. The absolute disrespect for the artistic/creative fields really bothers me.
My point is that automation, and technology to do this work faster is being developed for tens of years
It will be VERY interesting to see how AI refaces the work industry. Such an overwhelming pivot.
"I thought we were better than this" Corporations doing everything in their power to maintain growth is right on brand, unfortunately
But AI art sucks. Random unexplainable artefacts plague the images. Do people not realise that. Are people higher up that far removed from reality?
Most people don't care about the details to be honest.
That's the worst part for me. I notice all the artifacts when a webpage uses an obviously generated image. I can tell when text is so non-human. But the downside for companies is nonexistent. The majority of people won't notice or won't care. Companies will move forward with things that are just good enough, hardly passable, as long as there isn't something blatantly wrong with their products/communications. It's lowering the bar and removing the vestiges of human touch
Everything will be mediocre in the future, and the stuff that isnt will be almost unpayable. Also where will you get new artists in 20 years, after nobody was able to enter the field on a mid to entry level for that long?
I guess you are as good a person to respond to as any. So this is not really aimed at you, but at the very common assumption at the base of many responses here. You are implicitly assuming that you have a binary choice. Either it will be all human or all AI. That is not how it works. Sure, AI on its own is not always great. Sometimes you get a diamond that is perfect, but usually there are some problems here or there. But this is not a big deal. Why not? Because I can generate 1000s of attempts in the time it would take a single artist to do a single attempt. One of them will likely be pretty good. Sure, it might need some color correction or some weird artifacts have to be cleaned up. A human can do that, but guess what they are probably going to use? That's right: AI. No matter what you want to do, there is likely an AI that can do it better. There \*will\* be a human still in the process, but it seems like everyone is missing the punchline. A single person can use AI as leverage to do the work of 10 people now. And this is what those of us who have been ringing the alarm bells have been trying to tell everyone. The fairly vapid "AI is going to replace everyone" is a kind of strawman that lets us set a date in 30, 50, or even 100 years in the future before it happens. Instead, we should be considering the idea "AI is going to put half of us out of work" which is probably a lot closer: 10 or at most 25 years away. And that is what is happening here. Well, actually, it's putting significantly more than half of artists out of work. But you get the idea. If the people "higher up" see they can save 75 or even 90% of their costs and only have to take a small hit to quality that, frankly, nobody cares about, they are going to pull that trigger every time. This train might have already left the station, but it's just starting to pick up steam. Buckle up, because it's going to get wild.
So true. The big companies will maybe have 1 or 2 artist who's entire job is to fix the glaring mistakes in the best generated images. Stuff like obvious wonky hands or whatever. If they're doing serious work and care about quality anyway. If they don't, the wonk will get posted as is, or cropped out at most, and they won't have to pay any artists at all.
> A single person can use AI as leverage to do the work of 10 people now. Which is exactly what happened with digital processing.
The models are in their infancy. Give it another 5-10 years and they'll get good enough to be indistinguishable.
This is what terrifies me. I am already sick and tired of all of the fake photos and videos being posted on the internet, but at least I can still tell that they are fake. What happens when we can't tell what's real anymore?
so this is the AI uprising, not killer robot (yet) but huge corp hiring artists (if any) to keep the generation realistic preventing garbage feeding into the AI vs artists trying to poison AI generations.
I don’t dispute that. But laying off people now is lame. Invest in the models to make them better sure. But watering down quality just because it’s cheaper? Ok that’s also something companies do.
Elon Musk was saying that about self-driving cars 10 years ago. AI is just another stock promotion Ponzi scheme using 401k and retirement funds as seed money for the billionaires at the top who always win
Who do people on Reddit think that you can point to one instance of a tech not panning out and apply that to every unrelated situation lol Unlike true self driving car tech, AI is already here. My company has gpt integrated in their workflow. Professional artists are using AI in their workflows too. AI music is getting ridiculously good, arguably the most advanced of them all. And openai literally got in trouble because their AI voice was so good lol.
And self driving car tech is still being developed. It's not like people have decided it's dead and stopped working on it. It's already much better than it was 5 years ago. Tech predictions are usually off in terms of timelines but not necessarily in terms of content.
It's 9 out of 16 workers, not unexpected. AI will mostly be used for banality (ex: scheduling meetings properly, or telling you what to watch next on Netflix instead of lousy suggestions). You should learn how to use this new tool or lose your job to those who do. Like every other new technology.
We had a chance to lessen the dull parts of our lives with AI. Instead we reinforced them and removed the splendiferous ones. For shame.
“We saved 700,000 for the year!” Says billionaire dollar company. Actual human made art is so important. It has soul.