I know that technology has displaced workers in the past, but it seems to be doing so at a faster and faster pace. It makes me rethink my involvement in the creation of software and its ethical implications.
What about women? Yeah, yeah, I know it's uncouth to worry about gendered language. On to the real topic ...
> reducing [a job] to a kitschy "artisan" label
Automation doesn't (only) reduce jobs, it (also) allows people to get meta. They are now free to think about how the job gets done, rather than constrained by time to only do the job the way they did it yesterday. Or, they can do other jobs that they prefer.
I used to live in an apartment without a washing machine, and where the closest laundromat was a 20-minute walk away. I got used to a bucket-and-plunger method for washing my clothes. It was enjoyable in that "I am the salt of the earth" way. When I found a used sink-attachable tiny washing machine on Craigslist, I had a smile on my face the rest of the day.
It's just the speed and the scale that have been following logistic distribution. We're still before the midway point as a global society, but we can certainly see the big speedup as more and more work becomes automated.
If people's work can be automated away as a whole and people somehow become poorer rather than richer, then the benefits of automation are sucked away from them. And here comes the flaws you mention - or the flaw, I think, singular. They happen exactly in this one point.
Many aspects of computer setting of works for printing also show a significant regression in potential quality (prose, musical engraving, &c.), though the right software and proper human tweaking can balance that out—but people seldom actually do as much tweaking as would be done automatically by the experts of old. And as for text presentation on screen… well, that’s just lousy compared to what an expert setter would do. But it does adapt to different media with no or minimal effort required, doing in one second what used to take days, and that’s a rather big deal.
“Unfortunately, the venture was so successful that Magrathea soon became the richest planet of all time and the rest of the Galaxy was reduced to abject poverty. The Magratheans went into hibernation, awaiting an economic recovery that could afford their services once more.“
If he was right, it can be "patched" and made to work with a sufficient level of redistribution to avoid such crises, or left to fail catastrophically without.
The fundamental question is: Why have owners?
It sounds like you might be so squarely in one of those camps, that you see it as a fundamental flaw that people may disagree with you. To me, that sounds even worse!
It doesn't mean that we shouldn't make things more efficient, but economies exist to serve people, not the other way around. That sometimes means bailing some people out, sometimes it means phasing something in, and sometimes it means changing the definition of value.
For example, painting used to be how you'd get a portrait. But photos did that much better. Painting shifted: it became much more abstract, and because photos were cheap and easy, they didn't have the same cachet as a portrait. Not many people hang big photo portraits on their walls they way they might have done with paintings.
I suspect authenticity, or some other thing which the machine cannot replicate, may be valued more in future.
So even though to a casual glance, these images look amazing, if you look closely, you see all the flaws that come with them being generated. Weird artifacts, a lack of symmetry that humans usually add to their creations.
These flaws would not exist (to such a degree) when a professional artist paints the same scene.
But it also dillutes their own ideas. I know of painters painting AI generated stuff and that is likely a new genre but a lot of genuine artwork will lose interest on the market. It is what it is and don’t I love or hate it…
Say you know you want to do a portrait of a woman in armor, you can generate a dozen of those in around a minute on a 3090, look at the generated armors, the faces (usually all sorts of screwed up), and the composition. Its just a way to kickstart the creation process.
People so quickly assume that access to these tools will make everyone an artist, but the raw output is so lacking in a voice and intentionality. If you supply the voice and intentionality through your iterative process and a hybrid visual/text language playing the generator like a violin… you're playing the generator like a violin.
Your artistic skills have been translated to a wholly new set of vocabularies, and it's your eye that is tested most. Can you see/imagine better than the next guy?
Imagine pairing this with bespoke automated clothing output - take a photo of an outfit, verbally describe the changes you want to it ("a little more debonair, dark lapels, 1920's styling"), click a button, preview it as it would look on you in several recent pictures you took, and a week later your tailored suit arrives. Now for sneakers. Hats. Bags. Watches.
The 20th century was about mass production to ensure everyone could have things: food, clothing, transport, entertainment. The 21st century may turn to expression: allowing each person to express themselves however they want in their goods and services. Or just following along to buy whatever your favorite tastemakers recommend. However involved you want to be!
The world is about to get a lot weirder and more interesting.
I would agree that this is like 20th century mass production. To be clear, I don't necessarily think that mass production is a good thing either. In fact, it has been probably the most detrimental thing to our environment that humans have ever done.
Mobile, Indy, and Retro are all very popular, just look at what people are playing on Twitch.
And maybe the number of places paying for art will grow by a factor of 8.
The flaws in AI generated art were 100x as obvious in systems like this only a few years ago. In 5 years I doubt anyone will be able to tell the difference between AI and human art.
When the photograph displaced most portrait painters, we invented a new type of artist - the photographer. I hope we’ll see the same thing here - artists who specialise in using stable diffusion (and friends) to make new art in a new way. This blog post is like one of the world’s first photographers saying “hey look how the photo changes when I move the subject relative to a light source!”. I can’t wait to see what results we get with deep expertise (and better algorithms).
How long before we have filmmakers using AI to cast, direct and shoot their films?
The mulchers, as Bruce Sterling calls them, have a fresh meat problem. They've consumed all the words, and all the pictures, and we already know that feeding them their own mulch gives worse results.
We're not at the scale limit for data but we know where it is. It's not clear that refinements to the mulching process will create mulch good enough to tell apart from creation. It might. But it might not.
I'm not so sure about this. While some scenes are still obviously using CGI, I think a lot of CGI in movies now passes unnoticed, even entirely digital characters.
We certainly notice when those characters do things humans can't do, of course, and when budget or schedule or both result in things being pushed out too early, but how would we know when digital characters look natural on-screen? We wouldn't!
You generate the image in 30 minutes (maybe less if you get the process down to a science), then wait around for a few weeks to keep up the illusion that you're actually doing the drawing by hand, and send it off to your satisfied client. You could be charging hundreds of dollars for your "artistic services," and have dozens of clients going on simultaneously.
That makes the process a little less simple, but still easier than doing the real work
Manual labor still exists, but it’s a vastly smaller percentage of overall jobs. Productivity and automation seem like the same thing on the surface. However, the argument for a long tail of creators in an ever more wealth society breaks down when AI can start writing niche romance novels not just barely coherent news articles etc.
In theory we might have ever more new types of jobs, but automation isn’t just getting better it’s also getting faster.
Further, when you automate one portion of the work you still need the human brain to strategize and orchestrate at a higher level. Job opportunities have only increased as a result of this, not decreased.
However, much more positions in machine learning and data science.
Software _is_ eating the world. The only viable survival strategy is learning to code. I don't believe that not everyone can learn to code. I teach people to code, and I have yet to meet one that couldn't learn, assuming some general intelligence (about the same that you need to learn a foreign language).
I haven't gotten around to faffing about with Python and Tensorflow or whatever yet.
As software eats the world, the value of people who can talk to computers will increase. Even if it takes fewer programmers to make a website, there will be more jobs for programmers to automate concept art production pipelines. You may not be writing javascript or python in fifteen years (I bet you will) but there will be code to tell the automation services what to do.
The interesting question is the general population becoming more tech savvy? Will this change in work encourage more students to learn how to code (whatever that looks like in twenty years)? Or will the demand for coders rise without a corresponding increase in supply?
Technology has always enabled the creation of jobs faster than it displaces workers though. Sure, horse manure shovelers lamented the automobile, but people who became mechanics and petrol pump attendants didn't. The same will likely be true for artists - this will suck for them, but the proliferation of easily generated art assets will likely enable the creation of entirely new jobs we haven't considered yet.
If the highly ethical are avoiding involvement the advances will be left to the greedy and oppressive.
The ratio of people the printing press helped to those it hurt approaches 1.
Yes, and isn't it wonderful?
Ideally machines will do all of our work as soon as possible.