China's Video Game AI Art Crisis: 40x Productivity Spike, 70% Job Loss
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Examples:
A single factory worker replaced dozens of blacksmiths.
A single mechanic replaced dozens of farriers and groomsmen.
We went from 80% people employed directly in agriculture to 1%. Only a very small portion of the 79% no longer working on farms are now building the giant tractors etc that make the few remaining farmers so much more efficient.
A lot of true believers in the infinite abundance of free market capitalism are going to have a rude awakening when they too are left to die in the trenches like dogs.
But you might be right.
Tough so far I have mixed feelings, just today chatGPT had issues writing a simple 10 line bash or fish function.
Two random examples by searching algolia for a minute (entire posts, not just single comments)
And typically when high IQ people are wrong as rare as it is, they're really really wrong
I think we would need a firmer accounting of what percent of the decline is due to economic slowdown vs AI
I'd like to think this is similar to how Silicon Valley recruiters (the good ones, at least) have a strong pulse on the market and can share trends well in advance of them making it into any mainstream publications like WSJ or NYTimes.
Real AGI is the time to panic, because that forms an event horizon we can't see beyond. There may well be no place at all for humans in a post AGI world.
But LLMs are still a long way from AGI. I don't expect to see AGI in my lifetime, despite the blistering pace of advancement.
I cannot see how, even after these stories, you cannot see how this is a problem and how this is not vastly different (horse drivers went to car drivers, farmers became factory workers etc; there is no such switch now) than the previous examples. We are limited by the amount of very clever people as the rest can be replaced (we need some robots but that’s coming).
When we reach AGI, then even the 130+ iq peeps like you and me can start the worrying. But that doesn’t mean there is a present danger.
If a machine is more competent and costs less than a human worker, what is a business to do? Not use robots to assemble cars? Not use AI to do mechanizable routine work?
But why do you think this time is different?
Can the AI's boss get a promotion for growing a team of AI bots?
Can AI sit in meeting and give a sense of validation to the boss decisions?
What kind of boss in an office job replaces his workers with an AI?
It’s perhaps more useful in my field than most (software) since the output is often highly structured text. But using it daily, it doesn’t even make me 2x more productive. A big deal, yes. Going to take my job, no. Going to lower salaries and reduce demand? Doubtful.
We’ve lived through massive disruptions already, computers and the internet are some examples. It wasn’t cause for panic.
Sure maybe not next year (although…) but your taxis, ubers, buses and serving beers might be the only jobs left for you and me. I am worried for my kids, not for me. But this is now within reach, while it seemed very far off last year. Deniers won’t save anything.
What on earth are you doing that you see 10x speed up? That implies you spend more than 90% of your day writing code. That’s not even possible if you have no meetings and no teammates. I call bullshit. I’ll be generous and say you are exaggerating for effect rather than intending to lie about it. But either way its beyond what’s possible.
Unless you don’t have retirement savings. But your not likely to be worse off, your pension doesn’t get automated away.
I’ve been using AI through copilot and ChatGPT for a year now. It’s great, it’s helpful, it’s worth the money. It’s not replacing me. It doesn’t let a junior dev do my job. It doesn’t make me so productive that the company will cut back on their engineering team. We’re still hiring.
NED LUDD DID NOTHING WRONG
No, seriously, the Luddites weren't angry because tech would put them out of business. They were angry because they hadn't gotten to buy looms for themselves yet. The Luddites were the prototype of a union, and smashing machines was a tactic used to get business owners to the table for labor negotiations. One that was responded to with propaganda and the force of law.
Let's consider two possible worlds:
- The one in which artists have a fancy new tool to play with to produce better art
- The one in which publishers fire all artists so they can use the tool for themselves
So far we appear to be hurtling down the second path. I can point to artists that are using art generators as tools to improve their work, but almost all of the hype and discourse surrounding generative AI has been "finally we can fire all the artists and just have the art make itself." I think this is a wrong-headed move long-term[0], but so long as business people believe artists to be replaceable, they will be replaced.
Furthermore, this has wealth-concentrating effects. Directly, this is a transfer of wealth from regular artists to the few that get to stick around to bang on the machine when it breaks. Indirectly, this is a transfer of wealth away from both artists and publishers to the companies who are making the AI art generators. In the past few years, AI research has gone from open scientific collaboration to extremely closed-off data siphoning operations. OpenAI in particular reorganized itself into a "capped profit corporation" after Elon Musk stopped writing checks, and started closing things off in the name of safety[1].
The time to panic is right now, even if AGI is decades or centuries off, so that precedents are established as to who owns and benefits from that technology. Let me explain by analogy: did Richard Stallman know and understand in the 1980s that proprietary software would lead to a handful of tech companies owning everything and renting it back out to you on subscription? No. But he did understand very well and very early on that proprietary software was an abusive relationship. Likewise, I can see that the relationship we are already moving into with AI is similarly abusive, even if we don't have AGI yet. A world in which AGI displaces humans entirely is a terribly unjust, illiberal world that does not deserve to exist. We either ride into the Singularity along with AGI, or we do not build AGI at all.
[0] While AI art is startlingly good at drawing novel images in response to prompts, fine control and consistency of those images requires manual intervention and fine-tuning. Effective prompt writing also requires an intricate knowledge of artistic history and terminology. Furthermore, there's a whole capability of art generators called inpainting that is criminally underused because you need to have basic art knowledge in order to use it effectively.
[1] To be clear, AI does have safety risks that are playing themselves out right now. The problem is that those risks have been used to justify turning everything into the worst kind of abusive SaaS.
Richard Stallman is a bit out there, to put it gently.
AGI will happen no matter what we do. I think is unavoidable. I don’t think any amount of caution or regulation will prevent it, it will just happen in another country. But it’s still worth trying when it makes sense. It’s too early right now. There may well be no room for humans in such a world, nobody knows yet, but I also don’t think we can escape our fate. It may be that all biological intelligent life that builds technological civilization also inevitably makes themselves obsolete through that same innovation.
Focusing on AI as the thing to fix for people losing jobs is just stupid. The thing to fix is the unjust society with no safety net that you guys have created in the USA. Start there. Start today.
Because change is upon us and will not stop. We turn the wheel and the wheel turns us.
You're not wrong, but HN lionizes this guy so much that the few things he got right are worth leveraging for rhetorical effect.
>Focusing on AI as the thing to fix for people losing jobs is just stupid. The thing to fix is the unjust society with no safety net that you guys have created in the USA.
The USA absolutely does need a working social safety net, but other countries are not guaranteed to be better. The original article was talking about China, so I must mention that China's welfare program is arguably worse. For example, they don't have internal freedom of movement. In China, when you lose your job, you have to go back to the town you were born in.
But regardless of that, I think you missed why I was talking about transfers of wealth. The problem is that if we restrict AI to a technological priesthood of a few companies, the size or strength of the safety net won't matter. AI companies will be big enough to do to the world economy what Samsung did to South Korea. Tax the robots to give welfare to the structurally unemployed? Sure, that's fine, until OpenAI gets tired of paying confiscatory taxes on GPT-12 and starts overthrowing governments[0].
The underlying problem is economic centralization. Countries that get all their revenue from one thing (e.g. petrochemicals and fossil fuels) either turn into dictatorships or are overthrown by them. This is because economic enfranchisement - i.e. having a large labor force that is paid and educated well - is a backstop for democracy and against dictatorship. Currently, the ownership model that Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI are pursuing is extremely centralized, with everyone just calling into their servers and paying them in order to make the magic happen. The model weights are trade secret, and increasingly so is the training methodology and model architecture. These are not benevolent companies creating the future, these are dictators that haven't realized the extent of their power yet.
Sure, yes, artists won't be replaced long term. But they will have new bosses, worse than the old ones: the companies that own the AI they need to operate effectively. Sort of like how every artist needs to pay a troll toll to Adobe, or to Amazon, or to Apple today. Modern tech companies operate as quasi-governments, without any of the democratic accountability or constitutional protections that actual governments can provide. I see no reason why AI - general, superintelligent, or otherwise - will be any different. It'll just be worse. Unless we have distributed ownership of the underlying software and models to ensure that structural unemployment does not turn into economic disenfranchisement.
Just like science still unable to get rid of flat earthers.
The truth is we don't know. People that will lose their jobs may find other jobs or not. Maybe it's harder to reinvent oneself now. Maybe a lot of people will truly suffer because of AI.
I find very hard to know with certainty what will happen, who will remain unharmed, and who will struggle but make it through, but change is coming.
Having less work is great, if we completely overhaul our economy so that not working is a viable way of life.
That isn't the case anymore. The only jobs that will remain will be skilled blue collar jobs and for how long is anyone's guess until we start getting robots with limbic dexterity and power systems to rival man.
They have no scruples about laying off a ton of their workforce.
Wait until non union entertainment industry jobs get a hold of this AI stuff.
It's over and it is coming.
I have seen these comments and this excuse (among others) as well. The thing that amuses me, before that amusement turns to some sort of cosmic existential horror dread, is the lack of critical thinking and general reasoning skills on display.
The argument that AI is not replacing anyone yet is a strange one, because it implies that the outcome is inevitable (and at least unfortunate, presumably) but you shouldn't worry about it. You know, because it hasn't happened yet. But it will. So stop talking about it.
I don't know, I just find that strange. (and seeing this pattern all over the place increasingly frequently is deeply concerning but that's a real-talk so I better stop).
There's a race to the bottom in the video game industry to farm content to "best cost countries". Most man-hours aren't spent on engineering problems but on gameplay and asset generation.
The Chinese industry is even more brutal in terms of the race to the bottom. Purchasing power is much lower than in the west and there's barely any export opportunities, so the only way to make money is to crank out "good enough" games by having the same engine run with different assets.
This reminds me of the countless dress up games I worked on during the Flash-era.
And you know what, a hand full of those dress up games made us more money then all our other games combined ...
Which is a shame. I'd really like to see more done in procedural generation and reactive content. Just read about a mod for CyberPunk where killing certain characters can effect the stockmarket. It would be cool to see all the NPCs become agents. It also means that after say 40 hour already your game world would become unique and unlike any other.
My husband and I coded it, and our kids had a blast creating the artwork in stable diffusion.
We then animated the avatars using another AI based on the vidoes of the faces our kids made. We created a whole game fairly easily.
Other prediction: Theoretically anyone with a semi-interesting TTRPG campaign could just feed in their weekly adventure into the program and have a comic book generated from the results. We could end up with a Soundcloud style situation but instead of songs there's 100,000 new comic books being generated a day. From there, it's not a stretch to say the same is going to happen to movies, because once you've got the comics (which are essentially storyboards) and the technology gets perfected for video, it's probably not a lot of effort to feed the comics into the AI and have it generate the movie.
Will be interesting to see how the quality vs quantity dynamic plays out. Either we'll start consuming more content from local creatives and indie studios or there will be so much dross to sift through we'll happily pay globo corps more money for the highest quality stuff. It'll probably be somewhere in the middle. At the minute, I'm about 8 episodes into Critical Role's 2nd Campaign and questioning why I even still have Netflix when I can access entertainment like this for free on Youtube.
I give it 5-20 years before it becomes boring and predictable, like most corporate art already is.
I know many people think art is some connection between the creator and viewer, but for the vast majority of people its really not. It's a way to kill time or boredom. There is a reason the same stories with slight twists are the only the ones that sell over and over.
It is not clear what happens when the fallbacks are more manual work that currently does not pay a lot.
A big part of that pyramid is mass produced "good enough" output that was already squeezed before AI. That part will be almost entirely replaced with generative AI operated by a relatively tiny group. And with "will" I mean right now. The top of the pyramid will be semi-safe but production methods will still drastically change.
I'm not convinced of the "we'll just create new jobs" narrative. From land to factory to office. What would be the next step in this cycle? I'm talking a billion people, not 3 super AI coders overseeing things.
Imagine being a script writer - taking other people's ideas and creating a script - in the face of GPT.
Imagine being a D&D campaign writer. Technical writer. Tier 1 support.
Any job that involves the previously tedious work of transforming ideas into writing or images.
I'm not as familiar with the typical illustrator's workflow, but wouldn't something be similar? Could you use GPT to quickly create some different kinds of ideas to see what you like and then use that as the starting point to finish off the work?
In both cases aren't there copyright concerns you'd have to address? How do you know GPT isn't using copyrighted material?
Which means you can reduce the time spent by that same amount. Or to flip it, one person can do the work of 3-4 people. You'd still want an editor, but you've always wanted an editor.
> How do you know GPT isn't using copyrighted material?
It quite obviously does use copyrighted material, but it's a dirty secret of these industries that so do their people. GPT and Dall-e will probably hide it better, but it's something the industry already has playbooks around.
Well, I could theoretically see it creating more "reviewer" jobs as the sheer volume of creative input increases (see the recent Clarkesworld incident). But that would rely on companies being willing to pay for more human reviewers instead of investing in the automation of reviews (or folding).
AI will take every single job away until there's only a small sliver of "owners" who will eventually sell to fewer and fewer consumers.
Oh sorry yes downvote me. I forgot. I am on Hackernews, were we blindly run after all technological progress even if it's detrimental to real life society.
Imagine e.g. whole food providing world consists of only few coorps, run by few individuals that run a bot army to plant and harvest crops.. and they reap all the profits, while everyone else is unemployed: Isn't that a problem of the system? Shouldn't at least at that point everybody agree that pure free market capitalism needs to stop here and we should communize food creation?
And now for everything else: Why shouldn't we favor all technical progress and gets us rid of "stupid" jobs.. there is so much more from caring for others, doing science, doing (human) art.. yes everyone needs a purpose, but there is enough to be done (like imagine Star Trek utopia). The problem is just, this won't get paid well or not paid at all, while few people own the essentials forever and can reap profits..
We should reconsider our wealth and power systems.. in the end some Star Trek utopia where noone is forced tio do something he doesn't want to but can pursue his purpose should be great, or why not?
Society doesn't adapt quickly. There will be blood on the streets way more likely than a utopian society growing out of nowhere.
With that said... Forty times! ... Seventy percent?! ... This seemed a bit extreme, so I had a look through the source article[0] to try and find out what these claims and figures (40x, 70%) were based on.
The 40x productivity spike is drawn from a professional illustrator's claim that without AI tools, an illustrator could draw one piece in a day, but "with the help of AI, they could make 40 a day for their bosses to choose from." (quoted from article, not direct quote from the illustrator)
The 70% job loss is similarly based on a single individual's claim. They reckon that illustrator jobs (listings?) dropped by 70%, with no indication of how they arrived at that figure. Furthermore, although they are assigning blame to the AI tools, they think that "regulatory pressures and a slowing economy" are the primary causes.
To be clear, I'm not saying that either of these people are doing anything wrong. The reporting could be a little more critical, but this is not unexpected these days. The readers could be a little more critical as well...
[0] https://restofworld.org/2023/ai-image-china-video-game-layof...