Comment by mherdeg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mherdeg | Hacker News Reader

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As a non-artist whose compensation is, so far, unaffected by ML-generated images, I'm more interested in the effects the technology has on people.

Over the past 150 years it became possible to compute cube roots in milliseconds, instead of minutes. Slide rules became obsolete, and the things we learn to do do arithmetic changed.

Over the past 20 years, the way we look up arbitrary facts changed. We learned to construct Web search engine queries and we learned to evaluate the quality of results. Other library skills are still relevant, but certain kinds of rote memorization become obsolete.

Now people are rapidly learning a new "prompt language" which uses English words but combines them in a way which is for now something like computer programming (given an input string, compile it to an output image). Will "prompt languages" for text / image / video generation systems turn into a full-fledged, non-English language that you can learn?

What will be the social effects of people learning and using this language to communicate?

I think it will be interesting, but not result in total annihilation of the existing field. As a general counterexample, TV did not kill radio despite it having more dimensions for creativity. Radio changed, but it did not die, and was quite comfortable for many decades after.

Coallescing on prompt languages is probably unlikely, if only because part of the thing that defines a language is that a community has rules, both opaque and explicit, about what is acceptable in the language and what is not, and there's no effort to standardize inputs.

sign makers were put out of business en masse at a certain point, and there were quite a few, and it is high-skill, high-commitment work. Some kinds of print arts related to magazines for example, were next.

There is a chapter in the Stanford AI Index (2021) that opens with "The rise of AI will inevitable raise questions of how much these technologies will impact business, labor and the economy in general .. "

there are winners and losers here, not just interesting questions. In the 1930s America there was mass unemployment among many skilled "workers" .. can't imagine the 1990s ex-Soviet economies.. I dont think these questions are neutral or innocent.

And vintage sign making is now highly valued (whether hand-painted or digitally produced simulcra)

We tend to value scarcity. Things that resemble AI art will become passé and anything that is difficult/impossible for AI to produce will become highly regarded. I'm very curious to see how this shift in popular and/or high-brow taste will play out.

thousands of small companies sustain and employ humans, reliably now as sign makers? I live in a metropolitan area, sign makers were reliably found and nearby in my living memory. There are very few now, mainly as corporate franchises with catalog contents. How is the value of scarcity you refer to, being circulated in terms of reliable income and stability for humans living now? How plural are the products in modern markets

You're entirely right. I was talking about cultural value.

Things are really going to suck for working artists who can't adjust. That's not cool and I should have acknowledged it.

This assumes adjustment is even possible. Prior history suggests "adjust" is a euphemism for pivoting to unfulfilling lower wage work. If that seems like hyperbole to you I highly recommend taking some time out to research the before/after effects of globalization on rural factory towns in North America or the impact of high intensity corporate agriculture on family farms. If you want the tl;dr, just look up a graph of farmer suicides over time.

I mean, that has mostly been supplanted by graphic design as a field, which is still making signs, just not necessarily literally handmaking signs out of outdated technologies like neon tubes. And now also helping design websites and other such new technologies.

> In the 1930s America there was mass unemployment

Sure, but these are temporary disruptions. Now it's true that the pace of change feels immensely faster than ever before, and I believe that's an observable fact. But we adapt. The incentives to do so are, sometimes, life or death. When faced with that kind of situation, some small % will sink into depression, perhaps never to climb out. I'm sure that some online magazine (which surely used to be known for its print version, but is no longer...) will write an extremely long piece full of anecdotes about the plight of the artist whose livelihood was destroyed by the evil AI.

But I assert that it will always be a tiny percentage of the whole, because the vast majority of people like to eat food and live in houses. Many of them will look at these new tools and make amazing new things. Many will go do other things. That's life, man.

I had to think twice about this reply .. I believe that from a psychological, character development point of view, what you say is reasonable.. adjust to change and apply new skills in new ways.

However, there are different "lenses" through which one might examine large topics, and one lense might be that of personal challenge, adjustment and endeavor; but another lense is closer to The Economist Magazine, where factual snippets of market behavior, participants and results are traded every day, every week, every year. Any college educated person ought to be able to say, there have been real, serious and long-standing economic changes where thousands and millions of capable, good-enough people, had serious, years-long hard times up to and including starvation, war, and abundant death. Those without personal experience of that, or a close relative or similar imprinting, may not really consider this real. I had to learn it from books myself based on where I grew up. Others reading these words, know it very well.

Hand-craft preservation is a thing, I have heard.. so there is certainly a broad spectrum between "no more blacksmiths downtown" to "I send my print jobs via phone for pickup near the metro at an automated kiosk". It is said that nobody has a right to a job. However, The Economist Magazine exists for a reason, and things are not normal where I live.. Welcome to the New Not-Normal, as Jerry Brown said..

> I had to think twice about this reply

Good :)

> The Economist Magazine, where factual snippets

I have nothing special for or against the mag, but I will point out that economists are famously known for disagreeing on huge things once you get beyond the law of supply and demand. Not every discipline of study has whole alternative schools of thought the way they do. Economists are closer to philosophists than most philosophists.

I really love economics! But I have no illusions at all that they serve up one and only one version of the truth like physicists. :D

> real, serious and long-standing economic changes

Ok, 100's of counterpoints: https://www.humanprogress.org/datasets/ (but check out the articles also, lots of great stuff on there.)

> starvation, war, and abundant death

Yeah, there's lots of that. Pre-panbdemic all the trends were in the right direction. This too shall pass.

Things aren't that abnormal in my area, and it's getting even better daily.

you link to a Cato Institute website

"founded in 1977 by Ed Crane, Murray Rothbard, and Charles Koch, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Koch Industries."

some of these people have funded climate denial on behalf of the Oil and Gas Industry Lobby.. they have the largest wealth in history to defend, at the cost of Climate Change.

> It is said that nobody has a right to a job.

Arguably, that's basically directly saying that nobody has a right to life.

You either ensure the basic resources necessary to live are free, or you want everyone to get a job. The alternative is saying - "some people die from lack of work, get over it".

> But we adapt. The incentives to do so are, sometimes, life or death...

> But I assert that it will always be a tiny percentage of the whole

US/Uk life expectancy is falling, and more people are in precarious work than ever before.

You can't just wish away these problens and pretend they don't exist

You are aware that disruption has been the human condition for 1000's of years, yes?

Why do you posit that life expectancy will continue to fall? Not sure it's rational to expect an extended reversal of the trends which have been on the increase prior to the past 2 years. Look at the charts and the analyses.

Precarious work? You may need to explain that one.

> You are aware that disruption has been the human condition for 1000's of years, yes?

So what? Slavery and The Plague and Cancer was part of the human condition too.

And its wrong - technological disruption only appreared recently. For ten thousand years my ancestors lived nomadic lives on the eurasian plains, their lives were disrupted when a gun and a steam engine were invented few hundred years ago.

And now we don't die anymore because of simple infection or other preventable diseases. Many if not all of the things that keep us fed, warm and healthy today are only because we endured technological disruption.

So which is it, 'human condition includes disruption, there is nothing wrong with human conditions and therefore there is nothing wrong with disruption

or

'human condition sucks and the only way to fix it is with disruption'?

Are you just making it up as you go along? Do you feel the need to justify disruption at any cost?

There is no need to be angry. No, I'm not making it up as I go, I'm saying that the human condition in the long term significantly benefits from technological disruption, even if that's not always true in the short-term. I'm not justifying anything either, I'm just telling you what happened.

Now, we cannot suppress technological disruption either, we can regulate and channel it, but you won't be getting your pastoral society back in which everything stays as is for a few thousand years . I think that's good, you Kay think that's bad, but it just is.

I am not angry, and I am not even saying you are wrong.

I am just pointing out that the post by halr9000 and your post both try to put disruption on the pedestal, but the arguments are mutually exclusive, and in fact they profess opposite values.

I got a confused, through both posts were made by the same person, hence 'making it up as you go along', sorry about that.

I think the much more likely outcome is further research on making the prompts smarter and more human like.

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