In my experience the vast majority of people are excited about GPT including artists.
You don't understand the difficulties and problems that people in the profession face, which I think is also why so many developers are convinced they can replace/"disrupt" other people's jobs with software.
I'm not saying I know that's going to continue forever, but it might. If the cost to produce software goes down, the demand for software will increase. That's what has always happened, but maybe this time is different.
Everyone always thinks this time is different though, it's good to be skeptical of thoughts like that.
My take is that if you stay on the cutting edge and get good at using all kinds of tools with max productivity, you'll probably end up as the tractor driver rather than as an unemployed ox.
When that's possible, the world will be very different. Right at this moment, AI is still useless for unskilled workers trying to write software, it's just a productivity multiplier for skilled engineers.
Do you want to listen to a 10 brand new songs by 10 brand new artists using generative AI, or do you want to listen to 10 brand new Taylor Swift songs (that were created with the help of generative AI)?
While some people will be able to leverage this to good effect, I fear the established have much more to gain in this new world…
Depends on the software, and how much mediocrity the end user is willing to put up with.
A trivial prompt can spit out a web page with functioning JavaScript for a mediocre-but-playable version of Pong.
This may not be of interest to us, but our standards are not necessarily shared by normal people: in the wild, I've seen websites where the thumbnails were all loaded as full-sized images and merely displayed smaller, bottles on supermarket shelves whose labels had easily visible pixelation and JPEG artefacts.
Infamously, there's a lot of stuff done in Excel that really shouldn't be. Some genes had to be renamed because scientists kept using Excel, and Excel kept interpreting the gene's names as dates.
I get SMSes whose sender ID has obviously involved someone somewhere trying to record phone numbers as floats.
Even in places with high standards, the UI of the Calculator app on iOS still gets confused if I tap buttons too fast (before animations finish playing?).
Here’s a recent article from the seattle times: https://www.seattletimes.com/pacific-nw-magazine/as-tech-job...
For people with eternal youthful energy, good health, no family, and a single-mindedness toward work in life.
On the second point, I actually think my salary is inflated and we'd be in the dark ages if I took that for a reason to hamper technology. Not only am I not just a developer of software but also a consumer, so I benefit directly, but more importantly so does everyone else. If everyone operated on that logic I'd still pay 20 bucks for a potato and a hundred for a hammer.
Let's be real the entire point of software is to replace labor. The software industry has done it to many sectors of the economy and called it progress. Which it is. We have no right to start complaining now.
Eventually we need to stop and think about how capitalism is winner take all, or we're all in for a very bad time.
It's not a code writer though, that's not its sole trained task. Why do you think it's going to have a drastically harder time doing the fuzzier higher level work? Human preference and subjective work has a wider acceptance of solutions.
I can have it write abstracts and works of fiction and songs. It wrote a great kids song about bumlollies and their terrible flavour, explained syncitial nuclear aggregates to a lay audience as a jaunty pirate and created ember templates in our custom framework. Have you tried it with any architecture questions?
> Let's be real the entire point of software is to replace labor. The software industry has done it to many sectors of the economy and called it progress. Which it is. We have no right to start complaining now.
It's totally fine IMO to have the views that it's big and scary for me and also good for humanity.
Writing generic code that are more or less stackoverflow copy/paste ?
The interesting parts are coming up with the logic &c. not typing the code imho
As an example, I wont code at work anymore, I chatgpt all day. Just like that, overnight. And my productivity went 10x - though i was already 10x more productive than you.> What should have taken 1 week takes 1 day, sometimes less (it's new software im working on).
I would only code if I was doing great software, that is, for myself, we dont do that at work.
It's gonna build tension silently and then release: capital will be massively reallocated - that moment will be tsunami. Talk to your representative.
Huge numbers were left unemployed with industrial automation in the US and left unemployable. The technical term is structural unemployment. All it means is you cant retrain 10,000 factory workers to be front end developers, and that even If they find a job its often not as well paid.
The two greatest myths of modern capitalism are that free markets are good for everyone (they're not) and that automation doesnt lead to unemployment. Any reasonable assessment of the data will show both of these to be clearly false.
An important effect is the speed of change - it _might_ be possible to train the next generation such as those who would have been factory workers become front end developers, but it's an entirely different challenge to take actual factory workers and train them for another job. That is to say, even if in the long run automation doesn't lead to unemployment, the short term effect may be quite different.
It sounds more like you're just seriously underestimating the direction GitHub Copilot is headed.
By my estimation it seems probable that we'll end up in the near future with some Jira integration that has an "auto fix" button on tickets. Possibly PMs or managers will be empowered to replace a large chunk of work that is currently done by people like me... and these things are only the beginning!
If you were thinking of something more severe then I'm curious what you're referring to? Otherwise I'm not sure what your point is.
It’s not hard to see where this is heading. And the goal is to automate away everything so we humans can just kick our feet up.
What's the problem if the new "source code" is all prompts written in natural language and the classical code is just a build artifact?
Most clothes people wear are garbage compared to bespoke clothes. Most industrial food is garbage compared to what a chef might make. And yet.
https://www.reddit.com/r/blender/comments/121lhfq/i_lost_eve...
Edit; I see it was discussed indeed on HN yesterday. I have already seen tons more of these in my circles and not only 3d/artists.
The more I think about this trend, the more I think it might be good.
Bootcamp devs are no longer good enough for junior roles since a GPT could replace them. Digital media people who learnt via YouTube and have no real talent are no longer skilled enough. Writers who can only churn out mediocre blog spam are now jobless.
This seems like it might be a net benefit.
Before sometime hits merge, they need to understand if the code meets all requirements, and it doesn't really matter who or what wrote the code in the PR.
The demand for engineers, and therefore junior engineers, will be reduced. That is the goal.
I make 6 figures, never took any of these classes (though I did write my own OS, and compiler). Why do you want people to waste time and money? Perhaps it’s time to split out those classes into some degree that’s more relevant to that work?
Also, I don't have a CS degree and that's not what I advocate for. I advocate for developers who spend years honing their skills and learning fundamentals of the craft.
I have also written a compiler and my own language as well as an operating system, and its usefulness has come up exactly once in near 15 years in the industry, and that was a very niche topic. Explain why, exactly, you need to know compilers and operating systems to write any modern day app.
When you openly state that you dislike these types of programmers, and want to essentially purge them? Hopefully AI destroys your specific job and you can’t find work again.
The relevant comparison is with junior artists in the age of Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, ControlNet, BlenderGPT, etc. They're facing the same uncertainty as software devs, at the same time, so there isn't much insight to be gained here just yet.
Your assumption that this raises the bar for human 3D artists is correct today, but it won't be long before human 3D artists are seen as much slower and less competent than AI artists, and there will be no going back.
irrelevant.
my whole world view changed when I read https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.12712.pdf
now pair that with a larger memory, backtracking/revising and on-the-fly weight adjustment (aka, real-time "learning") and I think it might be game over.
add goals and motivations and maybe a vision system? game over for meat bags.
These advances are not only possible, they're inevitable. It's just too tantalising to leave alone.
there is such thing as verifiable software.
Only some software is possible to verify, and there are many properties that it's impossible to verify because the software isn't the only thing that exists in the universe. No amount of mathematical proof on an ideal RAM machine will anticipate rowhammer.
And: just because something's theoretically possible, that doesn't mean an AI system would automatically pick up the ability to do it. Verifiable software in practice is still way behind what we currently know to be possible.
you can infer algorithm failure rate depending on other input factors as an input. Say you found algorithm will fails every 10e15 years of continues run, you can accept such algorithm as reliable.
You're assuming we've solved physics, and that it would be tractable to model all of that. We haven't, and it probably won't be.
That is of course, until GPT-6 surpasses them.
Why should someone hire someone experienced when they could just cruise on patchwork solutions made by inexperienced contributors using an AI model until the next gen of an AI model is released?
Can the experienced person really outpace the model development in terms of innovation? Is it worth trying to innovate in a niche?
My experience in the software industry (20 years now) showed me that the best ones were the ones who got into it out of genuine interest. They tended to write software as a hobby.
There was no shortage of CS grads who couldn't be nearly as productive.
The self-taught ones, or the ones with genuine interest who also completed a degree program were the best.
I wouldn't discriminate against "boot camp coders" or people who learn things from YouTube.
There's a lot of people who live in a different world where an expensive college/university education is not an option.
You have a beach, and you want a jetty, just grease pencil approximately where you want it and go Hey thats a jetty build it. and if its not quite right, generate me 50 different versions and ill pick the best.
My predication: in the next 5~10 years, most artists won't be "prompt engineers". Instead they'll focus on fix small details on AI-generated art.
It's still kinda sad tho, because it's usually the most tedious and boring part of the process. Now AI is taking the fun part and leaving the unfun part to humans.
I hope that these task-specific implementations of AI can reduce the tedium in these fields, like the way PCs did. Certainly, this advancement is leading to the ability for practically anyone to program a computer, in the general sense. Things will shift, but there will be opportunities to exploit those abilities for personal gain.
I think many people hear and see these complaints and think that people are being luddites or being afraid of losing their job. People should be looking at it for what it is - someone complaining that their entire job is changing into something they no longer enjoy.
Text was paralleled first. Then sound was paralleled next. And now image is being paralleled. It will be on level with highest percentile of human ability just as text and sound were before it. Game devs and comic artists are already replacing texture and background artists with AI generated images, just as they used AI to create hundreds of thousands of lines of fluff dialogue before then.
And that matters to who, and why, exactly?
Once enough of the economy is automated, there's hardly a reason for it to keep humans in the loop. It can just run in a circle, serving itself. Humans, meanwhile, will just have to barter for scraps amongst themselves.
After an initial injection of capital, yes they can.
If that job will even be available. The other day my sister sent me a photo of a little food delivery robot she spotted on the streets[0], and mind you, we're not living in Silicon Valley, but in Poland.
--
[0] - https://www.deliverycouple.com/ - based on the markings on that robot, its these people.
He offered the explanation that so much of their time is consumed with nit picking through purely aesthetic decisions that AI would not be capable of the artistic reasoning required to produce work that could even get to the "pass or reject" stage.