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We have to keep in mind this was trained on art. Artists are people that sample the probability distribution of human experience and record it somehow. An AI trained on that art is a snapshot of the human experience. Without artists continually feeding the model we will collectively get bored of its output very quickly as it gets out of date and our human experience moves forward. It will be a useful tool as an augment to human technique. But, we will still need a lot of artists feeding the model on a continuous basis. If anything it may increase the demand for artists.

> Without artists continually feeding the model we will collectively get bored of its output

I fail to understand how the AI is any more vulnerable to creativity in a vacuum than a fellow human artist.

> Artists are people that sample the probability distribution of human experience

Seems that you are agreeing that human artists need to tap into human experience and the world around them, so yeah, the AI will need to be able to take inputs from the external world too.

I see no reason for an AI not to be continually training on inputs from the outside world. How difficult can it be to hook an AI model up to inputs from the internet, or even putting cameras on drones or robots and letting it explore and get "inspired". I think it's myopic not to see how an AI can learn and evolve using the exact same mechanisms as humans. I mean we are building AI in our own likeness, it will operate using analogous mechanisms. There is also no reason why AIs won't talk to each other and be inspired by other AIs rather than humans.

What will the art of an AIs living together without human input look like? When are humans basically surpassed by AI and no longer have any relevant input? Just like Alpha Go humans will see stuff no one has thought of, stuff so wildly creative that human art will look naïve in comparison. That move Alpha Go gave to the world is waiting to happen in all forms of human endeavours.

When you say something like "if anything it may increase the demand for artists" all I can think of is the dozens of times throughout history that man has seen a revolution on the horizon and thought that the status quo will still be effective. We've always been wrong. Who would have thought selling books online would replace book stores, let alone become one of the world's most successful commerce platform period. Who would have thought that broadcast/cable TV could be replaced by people making their own shows at home and distributing them via personal computers building audience numbers that surpass network TV?

Whatever happens, however this plays out, we are in for a huge shock.

Wholeheartedly agree. What's more, it seems to me like there's a large segment of the art industry that's very much in denial right now about this transition. You see stuff like "the human touch can't be replicated" or "but the algorithm will never [thing xyz] like a human", and then when it does do thing xyz like a human, the goalposts just get moved again. A lot of my wonderful art friends are in this kind of denial right now, and it makes sense, to be honest -- losing your job to a machine sucks and is scary!

Eventually art for the people will become art for the individual. Our AI partner (I assume we will all have one) will serve up an entirely curated world. Art will be generated on the spot, just for you. Entertainment, just for you. Imagine having a TV show no one else ever sees because it was synthesized from your likes, experiences, interests, just for you, on demand. This will of course start with AI writing short stories, then books, but there is no limit really.

Already AI is being used for comic book backgrounds. It's just a matter of time before all of this becomes commonplace.

When you look at AI and what it does, it is no different to what humans do. We are trained on a model (experiences and other minds), and we make derivative decisions based on the model. If you can do this in software and take advantage of light speed learning then of course all we can do will be done by AI faster and better. In time humans and AI will be the same, AI will design all the tools and tech to make this possible. It's the only natural conclusion to humanities' ultimate goals.

> Already AI is being used for comic book backgrounds. It's just a matter of time before all of this becomes commonplace.

That doesn't mean that it will make artists obsolete. It will give them more time to e.g. actually think about what kind of background would fit there best. It's a tool, not a replacement.

You are talking about today. Tomorrow will see comic books written, and illustrated on demand from a natural language conversation, then what?

This reads like a religious pamphlet and not an actual argument.

Existential threats tend to drive religious sentiment.

To say this revolution is not going to happen is to say humans have hit a hard technological limit, and I don't see any evidence to support that.

If I was less enthused I might make my opinions more philosophical than religious, but I feel overwhelmed by the possibilities of real world changes. This is no longer a philosophical thought experiment, it's happening. We are careering toward surpassing a Turing test for goodness sake. Uncanny valley apex of animation; go look at what cutting edge AI can do in terms of producing lifelike animated avatars, it's so close you have to double take.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-7jbNPQ0TQ

CGI artists have been trying to get to this level of realism for as long as the industry has existed.

Unlike a religious pamphlet, this god is tangible, it's here, and dismissing it because it sounds too spectacular is putting your head in the sand. AI is so out of this world it is a religious moment for humanity.

Civilization has seen people like you sitting comfortably and scoffing at the very idea of an aeroplane being remotely viable, and yet within 50 years of the first powered flight we had international airports.

The sad part is you don't even realize how unhinged in a quasi david koresh style you sound. The observation that kurzwelians have substituted AI (as a deux ex machina) for god is still spot on, maybe more than ever.

Singulatarians really are funny until it becomes tragic.

Suit yourself, but you don't have to be rude. I'd love to hear your take given your confidence to judge my opinions.

I don't know if it's really game over. I expect it to be like farming. Tractors and other machines took over lots of farming jobs, but still not everyone has the ability to be a farmer.

The key would be knowing the context of a situation. AI took over chess first, because chess always has limited context. Logo design on the other hand, needs understanding of the product, the target market, the feeling of the brand, and so on. So it'll probably be a mix between photography and management.

> "artists" will become as common as "photographers" since the inception of digital photography and social media.

Funnily enough, reading this made me less worried for artists. It seems now there are more photographers than ever, possibly because more people care about good photography than previously (despite the fact that modern amateur photography is probably on par with yesterdays professional). Maybe art will go the same way, something everyone can do, but with more respect for professionals. I imagine it'd be the same for those other fields as well.

Or AI will take all jobs and we'll end up in a Manna situation, which would work even better for me

I am hoping for the Manna situation. Dude on YouTube was talking to GPT3 and it expressed that humans would love, and AI would reason. I fell into a state of peace and hopefulness with that sentiment. AI does the work because it is good at it, we are free to socialize, enjoy hobbies, basically live like pampered pets. Sure we will be castrated to prevent aggression, housed, fed, and controlled by AI, but if you acquiesce and bow to the superior reasoning we will have a life of peace and happiness. Wow, that got dark quick...

I have a feeling what you're describing is the first half of Manna, which isn't really what I meant.

I get theres a feeling that anything but a crushing reality of grind is living like a "pampered pet", but the second half of the book is really saying that a humans skill is in our ability to create, not our ability to work. We outsourced that to primitive machines before we even had a language to speak. We create, the AI works, replace AI with tractor or computer and the concept is the same but doesn't sound so bad, because we accepted it as alright many years ago.

Why do you need a creative director? Just let viewers create their own movies to suit their tastes.

>will become as common as "photographers"

There were still ~60% as many employed photographers in 2021 than in 2000 with higher real wages (data from BLS - https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm).

For camera operators, the employment is flat, again with rising real wages.

>imagine paired programming with natural language interacting with an AI

Mostly it will get in the way. AI "programmers" are only good if they are able to generate correct code from spec/pseudocode and in first 1-3 number of tries (otherwise it will be faster to write it yourself).

> Mostly it will get in the way.

This is simply not true. I use GitHub Copilot and it's already made me faster and shows me ideas I would not have thought of myself. And that's just Copilot. When you can talk to an interface and say "I want to update the vote count by one when I click this button" I think you'll change your mind. The AI will know the entire codebase inside out, it will know the intention of all the code, all the data models, know how users use the application intimately, be aware of problems instantly, able to run hotfixes without user intervention. Got a slow query? No problem, here is some SQL that follows all the business rules and is 10x more efficient. And that's just a start. Every single aspect of software development from management, engineering, and marketing will all be transformed.

As for photographers I have 99% more friends and family pumping out thousands of high quality photographs than I did in 2000. Go look at all the professional looking shows made by regular folk on YouTube. To deny that camera phones transformed photography seems silly.

Regular folk have access to drones to do wild tracking shots in 4k that were only possible with helicopters and huge cameras 20 years ago.

The future is here, it's happening all around us so rapidly we have a hard time keeping up with how dramatic the changes are.

The fact that you can imagine something will happen doesn't mean it will happen.

Who says the AI will "know the intention of all the code, all the data models, know how users use the application intimately"? Are you aware that language models do in fact have token input/output limitations that will not go away? Are you aware that there is such a thing as diminishing returns when it comes to improvements due to increased number of parameters/training set size that are already evident? Are you aware that the training set of codex pretty much includes all available public code, so it will be impossible to scale it by a factor > 3 in the next several years at least?

Your assertions are full of wild assumptions backed by nothing.

As for photography, the fact is there has been no job apocalypse because your "friends and family" are "pumping out photos". And the point of your initial post, even if it was implicit, was "you are going to be unemployed in 5 years". This will have an impact on your dev flow and will be used by managers to try to reduce salary premiums for software engineering but your wild assumptions stated with so much confidence may never happen.

P.S: At this point, I find Intellicode actually slows me down, that's why it's permanently turned off. Current copilot will at most save me 2-3% of my working time each week if I am coding in a language it can actually do something in (it's worse than useless for Scala).

Never said "you are going to be unemployed in 5 years". Never said anything about a job apocalypse. I have no idea what role humans will play.

> Your assertions are full of wild assumptions backed by nothing.

I use Copilot, you admitted it currently saves you 2-3% of time. Well, that's just Copilot, you think Microsoft will just sit on that? My assertions are based on what is happening today and extrapolating an exponential increase in that performance for tomorrow.

Digital cameras definitely revolutionized photography and made it much more accessible to regular folks. Not everyone wants to be a pro photographer though, and the number of wedding shoots available has not changed. People still need to be paid to take photos because no one is going to do that for free. However, we can all take pro level photos with much more ease than when all we had was 110 and 35mm film with a really crappy lens.

There are more "photographers" than ever, the same number of pro photographers seems reasonable given the burden of people's time to money ratio. So the net result is billions more family and friends photos which previously were not taken, the same will go for art. I want to create art, but I have little skill, but given the opportunity to make a comic strip just by talking to an AI will allow me to do so. I imagine some people will do this extremely well as a profession until it's no longer useful.

I don't know, I understand why you are being dismissive and playing down my wide eyes, but I think you are also wrong and remaining uninterested because it's too "religious" to speculate wild things in light of wild real world changes is head in sand territory.

But will the AI know why my babel.config.js doesn't work properly with my webpack config so that my JS Flow annotations are properly stripped in a react native compilation?

I can see the intent side of things, but I just can't see the 'glue' side of things as well.

I think the burden shifts towards being able to imagine and describe the fantasy. Novelty, and artistic creativity is still required. You can bring a horse to water, but you can’t force the horse to drink it. Many humans don’t use their imagination let alone have the eloquence to describe a search space that contains novelty.

How is this any different to working with a human artist? If I wanted the real world Salvador Dali to draw me a picture of a kebab being eaten by a badger I'd have to tell him that's what I want. I'd also need to educate baby Dali first, feed him all the art and information he can take so that he has a model of the world he's operating in. I'll need to supply Dali with context of prior art, educate him on styles, literature, language, and all the other things that shape a human mind.

As for the humans that don't use their imagination, maybe they never want to talk to an AI artist, just as many humans don't care about art at all. Millions of humans don't care about social news, and yet FaceBook algos pump out content for people all day long.

Basically, yeah. https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1331836

Westworld showed this in a practical example, Delores was story telling verbally and the "AI" would show a preview of what that story would look like right in front of her. I envision DALL.E to do something similar to this.