The AI PR Industrial Complex | Hacker News Reader

The AI PR Industrial Complex

bigtechnology.com

82 pointstim_sw40 comments

In the last 2 years I've seen companies go from hyping cryptocurrencies to metaverse and now to AI. And each time they announce it as if it's the be all end all and they're going all in with the new tech and it will change everything.

I can't help but sense the desperation the 3rd time around, I think a lot of these companies get swept up in the hype because they don't really have a sense of where they are going.

It's like the growth has ran out or something.

Any time there is a gold rush there are a lot of scammers that will try and prey on people with gold fever. ChatGPT, Midjourney and Copilot already see a ton of use though, and they're the first real "AI" products, so I think it's already proven not to be vaporware.

What is midjourney being used for other than to make amusing reddit pictures and general messing around by laypeople?

Is it being used in an industry and I'm just not aware of it?

Gaming industry is HEAVILY bought into text to image. For concept art, textures, background scenes, filler content, etc. So many use cases.

Same with web design (for filler images, background art, etc), and design in general; basically, anything you'd previously employ a concept artist for, you can now do most of their work with midjourney or similar tools.

https://aituts.com/midjourney-web-design/

https://80.lv/articles/a-shoot-em-up-game-made-with-midjourn...

I think what many people today are calling AI will in the future be thought of as just a very high level programming language.

Just one anecdote but I went to this modern art museum in Seattle last weekend that's small but well regarded: https://www.museumofmuseums.com/

I saw several mixed media pieces there (one was a diorama IIRC), which said some part of the artwork was done with Midjourney.

Loads of places where before you'd just have amateur art / no art.

We used it for department logos, etc. - it makes sense when it's so cheap.

For it to really grow though it needs to be able to be more domain-specific, like being able to generate 2D and 3D animations, spritesheets and isometric sprites, 3D models, normal maps and textures and being able to maintain a consistent style as a context (like ChatGPT).

> For it to really grow though it needs to be able to be more domain-specific, like being able to generate 2D and 3D animations, spritesheets and isometric sprites, 3D models, normal maps and textures and being able to maintain a consistent style as a context (like ChatGPT).

Heavily agreed. Just like how the smartphone revolution ended up in tons of businesses that create things around that ecosystem (from apps for many specific domains to tooling to whatever else), the current "AI" revolution will kick off creation of viable companies that apply the models in functionally practical ways to specific domains (including things you've mentioned like 3D models, textures, and tons more).

At least that's my hypothesis. The only caveat that I can think of is that the currently available "AI" would need to be actually functionally viable for those subdomains. But that's a split responsibility between the state of "AI" itself and the companies making tools for all those specific domains beijg able to actually make a good use of the models.

I'm using it to visualise math.

Interesting. Got any image you can share?

I throw stuff up on;

https://github.com/tudorw/MultiDimensionalTopologicalManifol...

and here's an experiment using it to visualise a 'gestalt dashboard' concept;

https://github.com/tudorw/GestaltVisualisation

drop into https://twitch.tv/m88t #AI Nursery where I demo apps and take requests to try on Kaiber, MidJourney, Blockade Labs, etc

Hey that all looks great. Thank you :)

The game High On Life used Midjourney to create additional environmental art like posters and advertisements.[1]

The twitter account for the remake of System Shock used Midjourney to create an advertisement, and said they'd be continuing to use AI for art and possibly in other areas.[2]

I've seen other random postings from people saying that it's being used especially for generating concept art for games.

[1] https://www.eurogamer.net/high-on-life-contains-ai-art-and-v... [2] https://twitter.com/SystemShockGame/status/16534450087776747...

A coworker and his wife used it to generate the layout, design elements, colour scheme, and stock "photography" for their side project's marketing site.

Comments like this remind me how profoundly isolated HN is from any of the digital arts, or even art at all.

I have friends and family who are suffering complete existential crisis because their lifelong careers - which they have been studying since childhood, then many more years in college - are being erased.

Even if you have other means to financially support yourself, a deep core pillar of your identity, the skills and work you take pride in, how you found meaning in life both in decades past and anticipated decades to come, no longer matters. In a very total and all-encompassing way. Being made as trivial and meaningless as waves in the ocean.

And people are celebrating it, and reveling the existential despair of others, with a level of barbaric sadism I had expected from this community but also expected them to be smart enough to always keep the mask over their sociopathy.

I expect that one of the generative image companies will be purchased by Getty Images or Adobe or Canva. Think of all the blogposts and social media graphics and advertising that uses boring, ill-fitting stock imagery. Companies want to replace that with 'their' IP, which is this case will be contextually-generated AI images.

If I remember correctly, the first real AI product happened 44 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macsyma#Commercialization

Exactly. Unlike the metaverse and cryptocurrency people want to use AI tools. If only to make them more productive so they can take up a second job to afford to live.

Techno-optimism tells us "everything will be fixed with this new, disruptive approach!"

Meanwhile, the solutions to our problems today basically mirror the ones we've been using for centuries.

It's like in the face of all this insane tech profit people decided that it's better to be impatient and extractive rather than patient and foundational. You see it in all the ventures going "I started a startup for the express purpose of justifying its sale to someone much larger". When it ends up being a relatively pointless innovation whose sole purpose is to be a VC money sponge.

> Meanwhile, the solutions to our problems today basically mirror the ones we've been using for centuries.

What exactly does this mean?

You don't need an automated energy hog HVAC system when passive cooling and good insulation have been successfully used for millenia. You don't need an automated vertical hydroponic warehouse or huge expensive carbon-sucking fans when simple land management strategies result in healthy productive topsoils that are strong carbon sinks. These are microcosmic examples of a macrocosmic concern.

In general, successful technologies of the past, up until about the time we started converting fossil fuels to energy at industrial scales, were about decreasing human energy requirements by taking advantage of existing and mostly passive physical phenomena. Then a precise notion of "capital" came into focus and less than 100 years later the profit motive demanded extractivist methods of unconstrained "growth". This approach ends up re-calibrating the accounting qua "efficiency" from energetic to monetary, which introduced significant disconnects between what can be called "sustainable" growth in the physical vs fiscal contexts.

Yes, it does feel like growth across the sector has diminished. Especially for VCs, there's very few 1000x opportunities left.

‘Take IBM, for example. Just this week its CEO Arvind Krishna said his company would pause hiring for back-office roles that AI might replace, suggesting AI could take over as many as 7,800 positions.’

In 10 years, IBM has gone from announcing curing cancer with AI to announcing the elimination of some roles with AI. I can’t wait for what they announce in another 10 years!

ML/AI has been over-hyped before diffusion models and ChatGPT. I remember in 2017 hearing AI buzzwords and seeing AI hackathon projects alongside VR and crypto, and apparently it's been going on to some extent since the early 2010s. But seeing LLMs show genuine intelligence and general reasoning has definitely pushed the hype exponentially further.

Although, because LLMs actually work, the companies that are doing it are getting the attention, not the ones just blithering about it.

Unlike the metaverse and crypto.

When I played around with VR and crypto I remember thinking "this is cool!".

When I play around with things like GPT-4, and LLaVA i think "this is insane".

Yeah, people focusing on the weaknesses of current llm tech are missing the point. This is an optimistic phase in tech history.

Big question: will AI last longer than spiral croissants? I vote Yes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAbPaWosphk

Yesterday morning, I saw a line of 15 people waiting to get into a bakeshop that apparently has them. LLMs take a little more time & investment than spiral croissants.

unrelated, but spiral Kougn-Amann's have been a thing for a while now. The supposed best-in-the-world croissant bakery also sells them [1].

Would highly recommend both the croissants and Kouign-Amanns.

[1] https://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g187147-d14788...

I bought one of those and asked the clerk how to pronounce it. It was very noisy but I think she said either koog-a-MAH or KOOG-a-mah. How do you say it?

Queen-umm-ahn

ahn as in 'Oliver Kahn'

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