I’m sure some people would be more ok to work a shitty job with the hope that they might make it as an artist.
Now that it’s becoming more and more obvious they will not be an artist that’s better than AI, what do they have left to hope for ?
I made a twitter thread[1] with weird metal cybertrucks using Midjourney a couple days ago. I personally enjoyed the process and do not have the talent nor the time to do that without generative AI. There are people who do have that talent, but honestly I doubt anyone else would've put in the time.
I think you might have it a little backwards. For most people, the fun part is "making a movie", not "watching hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage picking between 10 different shots". That's the drudgery, and that's the part generative AI can eliminate.
I think you might have it a little backwards. For most people, the fun part is "making a movie", not "watching hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage picking between 10 different shots". That's the drudgery, and that's the part generative AI can eliminate.
No, that's the craft, and solving problems where the continuity doesn't line up, or production had to drop shots, or the story as shot and written sucks in some way, is where the art comes in.
The drudgery is things like ingesting all the material, sorting it into bins, lining up slate cues, dealing with timecode errors, rendering schedules, working your way through long lists of deliverables and so on. You have literally confused the logistics part with the creative act.
But many of those things involve a lot of drudgery, and the drudgery is what these "AI" solutions are best at. If you want to go above and beyond and craft the perfect shot, that opportunity would still be available to you. Why would it not?
When we invented machines that make clothes, did that reduce the number of jobs in the clothing industry? When we got better and better at it, did that make fashion worse? No. If you want a machine made suit for $50, you can find one. If you want a handmade suit for $5000, you can find one.
Tech like this expands opportunities, it does not eliminate them. If and when it gets to the point where Sora is better at making videos than a human in every conceivable dimension, then we can have this discussion and bemoan our loss. But we're not even close to that point.
And with your suit example, you're looking at it from the point of view of consumer choice (which is great) without really looking at the question of of how people in the clothing/textile industry are affected. It's difficult to find longitudinal data at the global level, but we can look at the impact of previous innovations (from outsourcing to manufacturing technology) on the US clothing market; employment there has fallen by nearly 90% over 30 years: https://www.statista.com/statistics/242729/number-of-employe...
The usual response to observations like this is 'well who wants to work in the clothing industry, those people are now free to do other things, great opportunity for people in other parts of the world etc.', but the the constant drive to lower prices by cutting labor costs or quality has big negative externalities. Lots of people that used to make a living thanks to their skill with a sewing machine, at least in the US, are no longer able to monetize that and had to switch to something else; chances they were less skilled at that other thing (or they'd have been doing it instead) and so suffered an economic loss while that transition was forced upon them.
Luddism is never the answer.
Scratch that; luddism is the answer for people who don't actually care about humanity as a whole (but frequently pretend they do) and just want their hobby or their job or their neighborhood to stay the same and for everyone else to stop ruining things. But for the rest of the world, increasing technological efficiency means more people get more things for less. This is good actually.
I see these AI models as lowering the barrier to entry, while giving more power to the users that choose to explore that direction.
Meanwhile with AI, given the same model and inputs - including a prompt which may include the names of specific artists "in the style of x" - one can reproduce mathematically equivalent results, regardless of the person using it. If one can perfectly replicate the work by simply replicating the tools, then the human using the tool adds nothing of unique personal value to the end result. Even if one were to concede that AI generated content were art, it still wouldn't be the art of the user, it would be the art of the model.
You asked an AI to make something for you. Thats not really making it yourself. Its like hiring someone to create something for you.
Disclaimer: This post was generated using an llm guided by a human who couldn't be bothered explaining why you're wrong.
The feeling is mutual.
Impressive that you can dismiss an entire genre of art as trivial mindlessness
I'm merely pointing out why it's stupid.
Also I take issue with your argument about 'none of the jobs we do now' existing through most of history. Farming, construction, fighting, bookkeeping, cooking, transport, security are all jobs that have been around as long as people have lived in settlements.
Sure, you could point to the long history of nomadic hunting and gathering prior to that, but that's like expanding your argument back to the origin of cellular life or forward to the heat death of the universe in order to make your interlocutor's arguments look insignificant on a cosmic scale. It's not a helpful contribution to addressing the real challenges of the present.
For every one musician that's able to pay the bills, there's 1000 equally talented musicians that can't even get noticed.
For what it’s worth, I think we’re going to see a slide in quality. Maybe there will be a niche for some. But, I think companies will settle for 70% quality if it means eliminating 100% of a full-time position.
This sounds nice, but having worked with many artists in the past a lot of them do it because they're good at it, it's enjoyable enough, and it pays their bills so they can eat.
Telling them, "You're now free to make the art you really wanted to make!" doesn't bring much comfort when you're taking away their ability to put food on the table.
The issue is that those jobs that got automated to "become a craft again" have mostly vanished, except for high-end stuff. Some examples: shoe making, artisan furniture, tailors, watchmakers. Unless you are the best of the best these are hobbies now not something you make money from.
Nowadays most people make money in bleak half-automated jobs (e.g. construction, factory workers) or in white collar jobs sitting in front of a computer in some cubicle doing some mind numbing task for a megacorp.
I'm usually hyped about technological advancement, but very bleak about AI. I think it will just bring more sublte propaganda for state actors, more subtle advertising for megacorps, the dieing of creative jobs like graphic artists or actors is just a sad sideeffect (these will still exist, but only as high end -- we will always have real AAA actors, but the days of extras on movie sets are counted -- lots of the Hollywood protests were because studios started doing contracts for noname actors that stated that the studio will regain rights of the actor's digital likeness)
> Nowadays most people make money in bleak half-automated jobs (e.g. construction, factory workers) or in white collar jobs sitting in front of a computer in some cubicle doing some mind numbing task for a megacorp.
And all the while they enjoy abundance of shoes, furniture, clothes and watches with value/price ratio absurdly high by standards of most of human history.
The craft is an activity, kind of an art by itself. Many find it enjoyable.
The destination is the journey, dude!
(edit to give some body to my comment above:
Hosting a great dinner party is hard work and requires coordination between food, decor, seasonality, people attending, etc. It is akin to a director coordinating the parts of a film. So I do think hosting a good dinner party can count as artistic expression.
I don't know the parent comment's intended reading, but I was reacting to the idea that typing a Sora prompt makes someone a good artist. If the parent means instead that AI allows people to coordinate multiple media in a broader expression that was not possible otherwise, then I fully agree.
)
I didn't say "AI art makes you a great artist" I said it helps you make great art
Tools allow people to express themselves at a higher aesthetic level without needing the extreme technical skills.
GenAI is a tool that lets creators of one medium expand to other mediums without much effort. Like having transcripts auto-generated for a visual podcast, just in the other direction. Low budget (or amateur) poems/songs can turn into short videos; or replace generic album art with better quality generic album art.
The draw will be the primary medium, the rest will just be an extra bonus.
I've updated my comment to explain my view, which I think closely aligns with yours.
When cameras were harder to use, you had national geographic taking you all over the world to photograph different locations because only you and a handful of people knew how to take a picture properly. Now you just hire a local person with a camera to go take the picture you want since it’s much easier to use a camera.
You had people doing photography for ads, now stock photography will do for most brands.
You had people buy high school portraits, I am not sure if people buy those anymore, but a picture of what you looked like in high school is worth a lot less when you can take a selfie every other day.
I don't see it as a negative per se, the thing is most people won't have the decency to keep all that shit for themselves and, say, share just the best 1% they produce. They will flood their social networks and the rest of us will have to sweep through the crap for our daily dose of internet memes.
My point is that I am an aspiring artist, who is waiting tables and I invest all my spare cash and time to get better at my craft and hopefully allow my craft to support me financially.
Any hope of financial benefit coming from my craft is quickly taken away by Dall-e. This has nothing to do with how much I enjoy my art.
Most “good” art isn’t just what you see, it’s also the story behind it. Why was it made? What is the story of the artist? What does it make you feel?
AI might allow more people to tell some of those stories they may have lacked the raw skills to tell before. And for those who have the skills, they can make exactly what they envision, without being limited by some of the randomness in the AI. I think there will always be a place for that, and at the top of the market, that’s what people want.
Blockbuster movies depend to a large extent on the pedigree and abilities of their cast. For the big studios, these models are therefore quite useless apart from bringing dead actors alive again. If publishing material created from living actors without isn't illegal already, in a few years it will be.
This might actually save the movie industry and force it to improve the quality of its output. There will be a huge indy scene of movie makers using models that can only compete via the content of the movies they produce. The realism of the characters won't matter because everyone can have those now. The current big studios will be forced to make very good use of human actors to compete with them though, and become innovative again.
Now with such AI tools, you can write scripts, create art work, crate footage, record voice overs and dialogues. All of this means less need for labor - creative that will not only cause huge employment in the sector but also lead to protests, it already happened last year in Hollywood, it's going to get louder and louder unless we put regulations to prevent job disruptions.
I like going to theater or opera. Even for famous pieces, the performance will be slightly different and unique every time. Imperfect, but with changing and nevertheless accomplished actors, singers, musicians, and dancers. Many people feel the same and that's why they watch live performances of singers, bands, and DJs.
Yesterday I asked a local llm to write a python script to have a several multimodal llms rank 50,000 images generated by a stable diffusion model. I then used those images to train a new checkpoint for the model and can now repeat the process ad infinitum.
In the olden days of 2020 I would have had to hire 5000 people each working for a day to do the same.
Are we though? People still do plenty of things out of interest or hobby, despite it being fully automatable?
e.g. blacksmithing or making certain homemade things?
While these are non digital things, why can't we apply the same thing here?
Some people still hand write assembly out of the novelety and interest of it. Despite there being better tools or arguably better ways of writing code.
But I agree, there's going to be a "war" around this and if could go wrong, if we are not careful.
There is no moat. This will all be commonplace for everyone soon, including with a rich open source community.
OpenAI won't let you do nudity or pop culture, but you can bet your uncle that models better than "Sora" will be doing this in just a few months.
> We are giving the enjoyable parts of life to a computer. And we are left with the drudgery.
No. This means that the tens of thousands of people working in entertainment building other people's visions can now be their own writers, actors, and directors.
This is a collapse of the Hollywood studio system and the beginnings of a Cambrian explosion of individual creators.
An AI capable of this would likely also be able to e.g. flip burgers and bring us to Fully Automated Luxury Communism.