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Comment by Thorentis | Hacker News Reader

It just raises the bar so that 3D artists who are only capable of reproducing the same boring things they saw in YouTube tutorials are no longer considered proficient.

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.

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This isn't how it will play out though. At first chess AIs got enough to beat unskilled players. They they were good enough to beat intermediate players. Then they challenged the grandmasters. Today no human, no matter how long they practise or how hard they train will ever get close to beating an AI at chess.

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.

Chess is fundamentally a different kind of problem. You can prove things about chess in the general case, but it's mathematically impossible to prove things about computer programs in the general case.

>Chess is fundamentally a different kind of problem.

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.

> but it's mathematically impossible to prove things about computer programs in the general case.

there is such thing as verifiable software.

True, but you are verifying that the code meets some formal criteria, not that it actually does what you want.

formal criteria defines what you want.

Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you verify the wrong properties, will the right answer come out?

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.

> No amount of mathematical proof on an ideal RAM machine will anticipate rowhammer.

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.

> depending on other input factors

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's the best approach we can use.

There's no mathematical proof for the correctness of graphic design, either, but that won't stop cheap AI-generated garbage from taking over the role of making commodity images and putting a lot of people out of work.

I'm curious about graphic design and if AI can do it to a passable standard. Generating fiction photographs, paintings, illustrations seems more flexible than constrained and balanced proper graphic design. I am sure AI can mash together templates and icons. Less sure about producing a solution to a client brief with a timely and timeless design.

I do freelance Graphic design. The whole conceptual thinking/visual communication aspect of it seems unlikely to be touched by these tools any time soon... But the commodity work that puts food on a lot of people's tables is likely toast. It's not like it will replace graphic designers, it just takes over the everyday jobs that drive most of the demand for their services and we all know what a drastically reduced demand does to a market.

This will not be true if ai produced works can’t be copyrighted.

Copyrights are one of the foundations of business. As much as the HN crowd hates them, they aren’t going anywhere. You’re literally wasting electrons.

How do you get senior people when juniors no longer have careers?

Junior software developers will still have careers, they'll just have to learn a slightly different skillset that involves more reviewing of code, like a senior developer already does.

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.

They will be reviewing the unit test written by TestGPT for the code written by CodeGPT.

Until ReviewGPT takes over.

But we’ve automated away their job, why were they hired to exist learn the skills?

The demand for engineers, and therefore junior engineers, will be reduced. That is the goal.

From the real education with courses on compilers, operating systems and databases, not 3 month bootcamps on HTML and JavaScript.

How many compilers, operating systems, and databases have you written?

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?

I don't need to write a complex software system to utilise my knowledge about it.

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.

Spending years honing skills does not mean wasting time. In fact most self studies do it out of passion, which means a lifetime of honing skills.

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.

There will still be junior devs. My comment was only referring to particular types of junior devs. In short, the barrier to entry foe being a junior dev will be higher, and require more CS knowledge, perhaps even more hardware knowledge. No more of this "I made a todo list in react in 2 weeks and am now ready to be a software engineer" rubbish.

There has been general hate towards self taught and code bootcamp grads. Some are in the field only for the money, but many others simply lacked the resources to attend a 4 year university.

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.

In the same way that junior artists still exist despite us having moved from MS Paint to Photoshop!

No, that would be comparing to software developers moving from Notepad.exe to proper code editors and IDEs.

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.

I don't really care how or where someone learned something, so long as they learned it well and can apply it.

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.

It is good when people lose their jobs, actually!

That wasn't my point. It is bad that they will lose their jobs. But that doesn't mean we should keep those jobs around.

No, but perhaps we should take some responsibility and provide people with alternatives before destroying their lives.

>It just raises the bar so that 3D artists who are only capable of reproducing the same boring things they saw in YouTube tutorials are no longer considered proficient.

That is of course, until GPT-6 surpasses them.

The change of pace isn't regarded in these what-ifs usually:

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?

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