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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

I am a contrarian by nature. Wearing my investor hat, I continue to be unimpressed with AI tools, including the latest image generation enhancements. I do find stable diffusion interesting, but I don't see the disruption. Similarly, I don't see the disruption from Github Copilot considering I run a company full of highly paid and extremely skilled developers and not one of them uses copilot.

How often have you wanted to hire a conceptual artist? I have never done so in my life. While I have visited many art museums and appreciated it, this has not affected my commercial endeavors.

I think if I was a creative writer or professional artist, the current generation of AI tools could be useful for inspiration. But the bar for quality is just so, so high in the creative industries, I am not concerned that AI will replace them.

It's September 2022 - where is my self driving car?

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I think you're viewing this the wrong way entirely. Don't view AI as something unique, it's just a class of algorithms. View it in the same way that as the anti-lock brakes on your car. Did anti-lock braking systems entirely remove your need to operate the brakes? No. But its net effect was to massively reduce the number and severity of crashes.

All that these algorithms are going to do is slightly bump up the productivity of some people. But that's amazing. Productivity is basically the free money tool. If people are more productive, they get richer for doing less, and the single best thing we can do to improve people's lives is make them richer. Poor people? Make them richer and they'll be happier and healthier. Rich people? Make them richer and tax the hell out of them, make the world better for everyone. Productivity is the best tool we have for making some people richer without making others poorer.

I’m going to partially agree and partially disagree with you.

Agree that Stable Diffusion seems a bit over hyped. It is very cool! I am definitely going to play with it. I’m not sure really how much it’s going to change the world - there will be some neat apps and it may put a certain class of concept artist out of business (note I am not saying it will eliminate them - there will always always always be human artists creating wonderful art. But as a business model / way of earning a living, that might change).

I am going to disagree with you on GitHub Copilot. It has radically changed the way I do software engineering on my personal projects and it has increased the efficiency of the engineers at my company by at least 10%, maybe more. You should check it out. It eliminates an entire class of puzzle solving, and the least efficient kind (“how do I drop a column by condition in a pandas dataframe again?”). Simple answer via Google, but maybe 3-5 minutes of reading. 10 seconds via Copilot.

> It's September 2022 - where is my self driving car?

Nearly impossible because logic doesn’t work in the real world like it does to make pictures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

https://metarationality.com/rationalism

I can think of two good businesses you could build with SD right now. Neither of them are text to image models or necessarily "art", both involve using it to visualize other kinds of sensing by transforming them to image embeddings.

Moravec's paradox is actually an observation only relevant to 80's state of robotics and AI. I don't think it holds true, and low-level stuff does absolutely not cost more than high-level stuff. What holds full self driving back is the vast amount of rare edge cases that can't be dealt with by current methods. (largely because the system is only trained on available data and doesn't understand first principles)

> I think if I was a creative writer or professional artist, the current generation of AI tools could be useful for inspiration. But the bar for quality is just so, so high in the creative industries, I am not concerned that AI will replace them.

I don't think AI will replace professional artists, but instead supplement them. Creation of Photoshop, Wacom tablets, 3d modelling and animation tools didn't put professional artists out of their jobs, it gave them new tools to create even better stuff in less time, and I think this is what's happening here too.

What affect will it have on kids? Every kid can now just stick figure draw into painting or else ask Siri "draw me a picture of Trogdor holding up a sword" etc... I can imagine that having some kind of large influence on creativity (not sure negative or positive)

I suspect negative, it steals the reward of effort

We're using it for marketing images - e.g. blog post thumbnails.

How successful are you at investing?

Just gotta install open pilot.

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