> I typed a series of prompts to ChatGPT to get it to write me a story with the following plot:
> Once upon a time there was porcupine. Every day, she baked a loaf of bread. One day the loaf disappeared. Because of that, she had too much butter. Because of that, things got slippery. Until finally she opened the first ever butter theme park.
He mentions elsewhere that generating the images was a lot of work.
So basically he and his friends had an oddball premise for a story, and with some non-trivial amount of labor, he produced a story which was far from the worst thing I've read on HN.
It was actually pretty clever for a kids' story and the illustrations were good. The finished product was better than the prompt. Somehow the process produced a fairy, a plot twist and slabs of butter riding a roller coaster.
Where's the crisis here? A person came up with an idea and used a tool to generate a work product from it. Without that tool he would have needed to hire a professional illustrator and maybe a writer. I bet this took a fair bit of work to do right. But the technology enabled a creative work that wouldn't have occurred otherwise.
I have no doubt there will be tons of crappy spam enabled by ChatGPT too, but frankly this little story wasn't it, it was humorous and I doubt it was a trivial endeavor.
Per authors comments above, it was indeed a trivial endeavor: a few hours to tweak the prompts and a few hours to make the site.
Compare to the most basic children’s book, which would take at least 10 hours to illustrate for a professional (10 picture times one hour per picture).
1. Entire classes of skilled jobs are eliminated, only the most elite writers and artists can make money
2. Value for story creation gets concentrated in the few companies that own and operate the best LLM's and best stable diffusion models
3. Society becomes more fragmented because we are all watching different content
These are just a few I'm able to think of in 2 minutes.
It's a common mistake to assume all technological progress is an unadulterated good. Just look at all the unanticipated negatives that came out of the computer revolution, like every technological revolution before it.
If one considers how inefficient humans are (daily consumption, heating, transport..etc) and how in comparison computers are extremely efficient (once they have been built), you realise where "pure" progress will take us.
Ephemeralization is the term Buckmeister-Fuller used.
It's not the first time that 'entire classes of skilled jobs' have been eliminated. It's the natural side effect of automation and has happened with every generation of new products. Industry automation might have taken millions of jobs away so far to give us better products faster. Tomorrow my job as a usual developer might be gone to these AI tools (though it's a far fetched thought), and I have to be prepared for it, and re-skill/up-skill myself if I ever sense that day is about to arrive.