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Comment by ren_engineer | Hacker News Reader

turns out math and blue collar labor is much harder to automate than "creative" tasks. Watching people who thump their chest about being progressive and supporting science turn into luddites due to having to face the harsh reality that their skills aren't that special is funny honestly.

Are they going to follow the luddites and call for people to storm data centers and smash the GPUs?

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Properly creative work still isn't automated. The current generation of systems can only generate content within the codomain (semantic space) they were trained on; they're interpolating and need more work to extrapolate.

Most creative work companies need can likely be substantially automated either now or soon.

Most creative work individuals want will take much longer to automate. Things like movies, where even humans can't robustly figure out which ideas will work, will take more human discretion.

who know how it will progress, but I can see the ability to churn out "MVP movies" where AI actors and voice actors are used and scenes are generated. There is already stuff to create sequences of images that create videos based on prompts

Hollywood studios are already using game engines like Unreal to create virtual sets in real-time. I could see some sort of hobbyist pipeline being created that will get a decent starting point made.

Workflow would be like this:

>use GPT to generate scenes and ideas

>GPT then used to create multiple different scripts, human chooses the best for each scene

>AI voice synthesizer used to do the dialogue

>Stable diffusion or equivalent used to create multiple 3D models for characters, finishing touches by human

>models then used by game engine to act out the scene, not sure how much of this can be done via AI

>live action stuff can use deep fake technology with any random person being deep faked to look like the AI generated unique character

I can see some crazy animated/CGI movies being produced much cheaper than traditional Hollywood style used now. We could see indie projects with the look of much bigger budget projects thanks to automation. It will level the playing field somewhat and allow people with better ideas to flourish, rather than just people with connections to get funding from studios.

"We could see indie projects with the look of much bigger budget projects thanks to automation"

Or we could see creative work drown in massive numbers of half automated generic garbage. But to be honest, most of the movies today seem to be generic and it is very hard already, to find the gold nuggets.

So yes, there is also great potential, but I am less confident that it will level the field and rather make true artists stay niche.

There is a decent argument that the current generation of AI isn't creative but merely automating the "tedious part". Midjourney can create an amazing image if I ask it to make a bunny made from multicolored glass, with volumetric lighting, octane render, 8k. But wasn't the creative act here the idea to make a bunny out of glass and shine a cool light on it, rather than the execution of that idea?

The problem of course is that for the most part, the current creative community (whether paid or unpaid) is much more about execution and craftsmanship than creativity. Ideas are a some a dozen, and having exceptionally great ideas mostly matter for the top 2%. The rest is mostly shining in execution, which AI is rapidly attacking right now

I'm already bored by AI art. At first you think, who thought of that? When? What techniques did they use? How long did it take to master them? Then you realize it's just a bunch of matrices in a GPU. On top of that it doesn't mean anything, there's no other person on the other side of the image to relate to.

Depends, I find that the need to see more in a work is a fairly minority and insider opinion. The majority of people buying art go by visuals first, then their personal response, and finally talking/status points. Relating to the artist is something art-school kids do, but they forget that few outside of their niche have the same focus or interest.

Personally I like the way it has removed much of the need for a professional artist, I much prefer having decorations made (or generated) by myself friends and family; it now feels like buying art was something done to surpass the quality possible from a hobbyist, rather than an actual desire to support artistic professions.

But the effect of this is that art will no longer be a viable profession and as a consequence art education will no longer be viable and that even of those who bother to learn the skills somehow they will not get the chance to practice those skills. Skills take practice and commission work with no expectation to be exquisite, just good enough, provided opportunities to practice. The only people who will be able to get an art education are those born into enough wealth to never have to work.

Contrast, automation of driving, where there is a hard cap on skill. After a certain number of hours of driving you are not going to get any better at driving.

The pivot of AI form automating tedious work to automating creative work is simply tragic. I consider it one of the major forks in the road between a future utopia and a future dystopia.

I do not think the tech will get any further than it did for self driving cars. It will still be 80% there with the quintessential last 20% out of reach. But it has the potential to do lasting damage.

Automating tedious jobs runs the risk of sudden large scale unemployment if done abruptly but this can be solved by slowly and deliberately visibly phasing in the tech over a few decades.

Automating creative jobs runs the risk of creating barriers to entry and destroying the pipeline to mastery. The jobs eliminated will be the junior levels everywhere. And with no more juniors coming in eventually you will have no more seniors in any of the fields. And their job will likely not be automated.

Think of the demographic crisis China is in, but this time just in terms of skilled workers.

Also, all of those juniors are paying taxes part of which go to pay for pensions. Will the AIs pay taxes?

I see no particular societal need for people to be formally trained in art production. At least not any more than there is value in horse-riding or kendo. A small number of people able to attempt mastery professionally does nothing for the overwhelming majority of people. In fact it might be better for art to entirely leave the commercial domain, leave nothing but amateur works and hobbyists. If an occupation dies due to having insufficient value to sustain against an automated approach was it really valuable in the first place? While the idea that artists will simply be unemployed instead of finding other work is amusing; the reality is that its more likely that they will find work in some other form, that is now many times more productive due to automation.

That was not my point. I agree that maybe art should not be commercial at all. That maybe there should be only amateurs and hobbyists. And I agree that people will just find work in some other form.

My point was that the skill pipeline will be nuked. Amateurs and hobbyists will not have sufficient time and resources to reach the same skill level and eventually there will not be enough amateurs and hobbyists to teach others in a sustainable way and keep the craft going forward. The existence of formal training is important because it provides structure, continuity and certain knowledge is only highlighted in a formal setting. Hobbyists too benefit from networking with professionals.

To move away from art to a different creative field, imagine how the software ecosystem would look if there were only hobbyists and AIs(in the service of corporations creating all of the commercial software). It might be a hobbyist FLOSS utopia but certain knowledge would simply be inaccessible. Say you are a hobbyist and have a tricky question solved by some obscure but commonly thought algorithm, who are you going to ask? The AIs have no reason to spend time on StackOverflow. If an AI can write all software, I see no particular societal need for people to be formally trained in software engineering, yet I think humanity would be worse off by having lost this knowledge.

AIs will be appliances not tools. Like appliances, they will serve their purpose but unlike tools they will not elevate the user in any way. Any skill, knowledge or capability an AI has will be sealed within the black box of AI. This goes against one of the defining features of the human species, the ability to transmit knowledge by encoding it.

A question for when you are finished reveling in their misery: what is the upside of this purported development?

I wouldn't be surprised if AI researchers are targets for murder in the cyberpunk future we are flung into.

Moreover, math is NOT hard for AI. Anytime the LLM detects a numerical math problem, it should be smart enough to go to a calculator and enter the numbers and give you the answer. This is not hard to implement and I'm sure someone has already done this.

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