This was the money quote.
I love what I do (which tends to be programming, but I approach it as a craft), and often do things by hand, that others automate, because I love my work, and also the people that use it.
- Joanna Maciejewska (https://x.com/AuthorJMac/status/1773679197631701238)
(On average. Realistically, it's more like a day and a half every two weeks or something).
Chores are terrible life suckers, and I for one subscribe to the notion of eliminating them with technology.
One of those scenarios is available. The other isn't even being worked on in any serious fashion.
And you definitely don't get to tell people that your product is just fine, they are wrong for wanting something else.
The original quote does that as well and I only reversed it to give the perspective of increative people :)
It is being worked on, it's just hard:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pycyMUQwiNs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq1QZB5baNw&t=34s
I'm expecting a minimum of 5-10 years to pass between real-time vision AI getting good enough for level-5 autonomous cars and the same stuff fitting into the power envelope available to this kind of domestic robot.
The thing is, you can get better at these. They are just creative skills that get better with practice (much like coding et.al.). And the skill will let you do things you can't do with AI.
> are fine doing laundry and dishes since they're good at that and we have already automated 99% of it with dishwashers and dryers.
With the minimal amount of sarcasm or ill intent possible: what are you doing with that spare time if not improving skills you clearly want the output of?
There are also those who don’t want to get better at those skills, as those skills are just a temporary medium. For example someone making pottery might be terrible at drawing and creating ideas, so they generate some and then get to working with clay. Essentially, references.
I've lurked through a few AI art boards, and the number of times people will spend dozens if not hundreds of hours iterating through prompts to get a simple anime character just right is mind boggling.
Can AI create references? Certainly. Will they be more detailed than what a potter can create in a similar timeframe? Probably. Will they be accurate to the potter's desire? Probably not.
Eventually, by practice, a person can get better at art.
I've seen (pre-AI) artists spending dozens of hours just on icons, so the idea of artists spending hundreds of hours perfecting every detail of some character doesn't seem surprising, not even when the specific details really can be done by a better method than repeatedly changing the prompt.
Conversely, even when I use an app on my phone for GenAI, it's making images in perhaps 90 seconds, vs. the entire day that my GCSE* art class gave the students to create the final project — even with the need to have multiple attempts or prompt variations, the AI just gets stuff done too fast for me to learn much in the same time period.
One of the huge advances in the last 5 years has been categorization of images, alongside segmentation, in conjunction with reasoning about categories. LLM chatbots and generative images and audios are the simplest and least nuanced uses of transformers, with the least friction between training and deployment of a product. Generative models tend to allow perception as detailed, varied, and nuanced as their output produces, and integration of these software capabilities will happen in new and surprising ways for many years to come.
TLDR; what they can create, they can see - advanced image models enable advanced computer vision.
It's not an instruction manual on what parts of the human experience are not yet fully captured by AI.
It's a condemnation on the entire purpose of AI as actualized in our economy, re: it's presumed lofty sci-fi-inspired aspirations (giving humans more creative liberty and freedom) versus how it's actually being operationalized (replacing their creative liberty and freedom).
Embodied AI will only accelerate that trend.
It is a rather bleak outlook for humanity when you consider a future where we don’t do the chores or creative endeavors.
To remove mind-numbing activities, you would remove mind-stimulating activities?
If you let this out of the bag, I do not think there would be any end to this application.
On the other hand, doing your taxes wrong is a thing. You can enumerate the possible mistakes. They're codified in law[0]. And these mistake have big stakes.
Generative AI is "safer" than an AI to do a specific task that has consequences.
[0] Yes, yes, I know, there's wiggle room here too and that's why we have courts
It is nice to have the boring things automated - be it proofreading, generating mundane pieces of code, and stuff. The sad part
In programming (at least, for now), I feel that it is a net positive for my happiness - less stuff spent hunting simple omissions, checking StackOverflow, or checking (not always so complete) documentation of changes between version 0.4 and 0.5 of some library.
Yet, in other fields, it may be different. I am not a translator, but I did something for fun a few times (e.g. https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2019/10/the-statues-by-jacek-kaczma...). Now, with proper prompting, one can get very far (e.g. https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2023/05/genesis-az-by-gpt). For the first time, it gets me some existential chills, as it is taking away the joy of a linguistic puzzle of matching content, mood, atmosphere, and rhymes. It used to be an intellectual challenge only a real human being could do.
At some points, event sparks of genius in breakthrough scientific discoveries will be more like solving a crossword rather than something WE can add to the culture.
She used to draw on paper, then a Wacom, now she only ever doodles on her iPad. She designed our wedding clothes with Dall-E + Adobe AI + illustrating in PS/Illustrator.
I used to write code painstakingly in a text editor, then a rudimentary language-aware text editor, and then an IDE, and then an IDE with integrated LLMs. I ask my Mistral to find bugs and to tell me how to work with obscure systems.
These tools are really wonderful for doing things. They're not perfect and don't replace humans. But at every stage I recall most people opposing this stuff. And at every stage I recall enjoying the new tool. So I can only assume that the opposition to LLMs is the same as the opposition to search engines back in the day: "Real knowledge isn't about just looking up stuff. You only really grok something if you read the manual. There's lots of bits that relate to each other that you have to know".
Art can. Sometimes it's after you're dead though. There's a reason the term "starving artist" exists
A work hammer (the tool) doesn't profit, but the company that makes and sells it en mass (Like Stanley inc. or Craftsman) does.
There is also the looming risk that current creators may well turn towards corrupting their work specifically to hinder the corrupt idea theft currently occurring with Ai profiteers.
Do art for the sake of art on your own time. But expecting companies to not embrace AI to do their jobs is foolish just like it's foolish to think corporate programmers will be a thing at some point in the future.
This viewpoint is what fucked up the world.
There are tremendous benefits to making art something anyone can get for dirt cheap.
All that has disappeared is every shirt being tailored, custom, and expensive.
To amplify my OP, there are certain intangibles regarding cultural artifacts which are strictly non-utilitarian. Culture is expression & is a product of the human psyche (of a coherent civilization). And past will affect the future. Culture minimally is a social tonic, maximally informs societal character.
The germinal question in context of 'high culture' (arts and letters) is whether the omission of the 'bar to entry' that requires acquisition of skill, dedication, and 'a development of a vocabulary' (etc) will have a degenerative long term effect on high culture, given that cultural development is generational and progressive, and the process of becoming an artist is a filter.
But that shirt would last you decades with good maintenance, because it was a quality product that was made to be repaired by other craftspeople throughout it's service life (or even just yourself!). Now we have can have hundreds of shirts for that same money but all of them suck, are made cheaply, fall apart after a couple of years if we're lucky, and are made by people who can't afford to buy them in a country we've never seen. How is this an improvement in literally any way, apart from it makes fast fashion companies shitloads of money? It's worse for the people making the clothes, wearing the clothes, and selling the clothes. It's worse for the environment because now we're making and destroying millions of articles of clothing, not to mention shipping it here and there and everywhere. And, for all that, we still have people who don't have enough fucking clothing.
> with good maintenance
So modernity has eliminated my need to spend time looking after clothes? That is a big win. Not having to put time into repair and maintenance is a huge improvement. It has eliminated my need to be careful with my clothes? That is also a huge win.
My grandmother used to spend hours at a time repairing socks. It is a huge win that nobody knows how to do that anymore, as time has value.
> Now we have can have hundreds of shirts for that same money
Even if we accept the decades of life for an old shirt, you only need tens of shirts to match its lifetime, so this is an order of magnitude reduction in cost.
> are made by people who can't afford to buy them in a country we've never seen
So? Plenty of employees cannot afford what their employer produces. And it is a step up from where they were before. We freed up more capable people in our own country to do more productive things than made clothing.
You are right on the environmental part.
> And, for all that, we still have people who don't have enough fucking clothing.
Where would that be? Even the poorer African countries are chaffing at how much clothing is being dumped there.
So the main loser is the environment. As a customer, I am otherwise a tremendous winner. And when AI takes over most mundane art, like animating instructional videos or making logos, I will also be a tremendous winner.
So as long as whatever shit that's burning the world benefits you in your life time, irrespective of the state of it when it's time for you to hand it over to your children, you're good with it.
Got it. I mean that makes sense, who needs a long-term stable biosphere when there's money to be made. Jesus Christ...
With the possible exception of Wikipedia illustrations, I wasn't aware we had a meaningful shortage of any of those things. On the contrary, there are more great video games and movies (and books, and TV shows, etc., etc.) already available than I could ever hope to get through in my lifetime.
GenAI in anything resembling its current form can only dilute these markets with worthless slop and make it harder for consumers to find actual worthwhile media made by and for humans. This problem will be compounded if it also makes creative careers less viable for humans.
As someone who has a very specific taste in video games, I beg to differ. If you happen to exist in the space targeted by AAA or if you don't have strong preferences for what you get out of an indie game the status quo is fine, but it's been a while since I've found a game I hadn't played before that scratches the itch.
Automation allows what's popular to become extremely cheap and what's niche to become possible.
In some hypothetical future world where GenAI content really is as novel and worthwhile as content made by humans, this will be a different conversation. Until then, I doubt it's going to satisfy even the tiny minority of people who literally want to play the same game, watch the same movie, read the same book, etc. over and over again until they die. But it certainly has the potential to severely damage the overall quality of the media landscape in the way I described, because people who care about money more than quality are in the driver's seat.
We have several lifetimes’ supply of good art in practically every medium already, even relatively new ones. Recording and mechanical reproduction have already enormously devalued creative talent and left us with a glut.
Harming the value of artistic talent and skill even further, to get us more of something we’re already drowning in, isn’t really an improvement.
Industrialization is fun isn’t it?
You can be passionate about this advancement without placing profits first.
> Imagine how many more video games and movies can be made...
Again, you can do this with passion and without placing profit first
> There are tremendous benefits to making art something anyone can get for dirt cheap
I disagree strongly here. Art has value in large part because most people cannot produce it. I like stories, but not everyone has a good story to tell. When the story is AI-generated, there isn't a consciousness behind it to give it the passion required for good stories.
Given the riots inspired by this machinery, I don't believe this is possible.
(Arguably also communism, but there was a lot going on back then).
> I disagree strongly here. Art has value in large part because most people cannot produce it. I like stories, but not everyone has a good story to tell. When the story is AI-generated, there isn't a consciousness behind it to give it the passion required for good stories.
I'm not sure either way on this. Possibly a simultaneous agree-and-disagree?
I agree that art may be a "peacock's tail" where the difficulty is the point, and making it cheap makes it cease to be art. In this case, some hypothetical AI which everyone agrees is totally conscious and also that it creates works of exquisite and sublime wonder, still won't be "art".
But the other view of art is that it may also be simply "nice stuff"; if so, then the ability to discern good art from bad art is sufficient, even if you regard an LLM as little more than "fancy autocomplete" — it doesn't need consciousness* of its own, the consciousness of the user is sufficient.
I suspect there's a lot of people in both groups.
* by whichever of the many meanings you intend for that
But I think that telling people to do a good job "on their own time," kinda sums up the zeitgeist of today's tech industry.
https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Cavalier.png
https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Chat.png
https://littlegreenviper.com/art/DragonRider.png
https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Dragonstar.png
https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Elric.png
https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Fugitive.png
https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Gym.png
https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Island.png
https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Olympus.png
https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Seer.png
https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Sentinels.png
https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Skeletor.png
https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Tarsus.png
https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Tigress.png
As someone else has mentioned, just because weavers were/are passionate about what they do, that doesn't mean people shouldn't have been allowed to invent the loom + mass production techniques for clothing. Everyone on the planet has benefited mightily from this, and there are other similar examples.
Maybe there are restrictions that should be enforced to prevent this in some cases, or curtail it to some degree. There's likely not a one size fits all rule, and a lot of it is determined as net-good or net-bad in hindsight.
And yes, even a hobbiest has the right to make money off their work.
I won't comment on any of the potential legal differences between AI being trained on an artists work without their knowledge versus Jacquard studying hand-made clothmaking techniques. It's certainly something that needs careful consideration.
Go to North Korea if you want a country with little capitalism.
The obsession that everything must go in a financial box or be relegated to the increasingly diminished "free time" available to oneself is a cancer that is destroying our society.
Things that are profitable =/= things that have value to people. They often coincide but it is not a direct correlation. Tons of things that make absolutely unethical amounts of profit have zero value to society. Conversely some of the most valuable things in human experience have zero monetization, in practice or theory.
Money is not everything.
What's your TC?
How do we know this?
Law hasn't even evolved either. What if in the future people bring special tradecraft to companies that they don't want leaking elsewhere? who knows. the door is still open.
No one becomes an artist except because of passion for the work. It sure as hell isn’t for the money. That’s not so universally true in Silicon Valley, and I’m guessing you’re one of those people who views their job mostly as a means to fund the rest of their lifestyle.
I don't think corporate programmers are obsolete. How will a sophisticated AI programmer in the future be any different than a human programmer in an outsourcing firm?
I do, constantly. In large swaths of software engineering, RAM and other resources are still scarce enough to require careful consideration in their use.
Companies can and will do whatever they want.
However, on the level of the individual, I see no reason why profit-seeking should overrule my passion. I don't code to make money, I code because I love doing it. I make money to allow myself to engage in an activity I find rewarding, I don't engage in that activity to make money.
If that activity is no longer rewarding, there is no amount of money that can compensate for that.
Perhaps you're right, and that the future has no place for people like me. We'll see. Regardless, though, I'm not going to participate (either as a dev or as a customer) with processes that dehumanize people to such a degree.
I am retired. I didn't want to be retired, but I was told that I'm too old (I was 55, when I retired in 2017) to be playing at programmer; that it's a young man's game, and I should just go and carve decoy ducks in my garage or something.
Fortunately, I had enough set aside, that I was able to just accept that no one wants to play in my sandbox, and work on my own. The scope is more humble, but I am absolutely thrilled with the work that I do, and so are the folks that benefit from it (I tend to write stuff for people that can't afford the kind of stuff I write).
Money isn't everything, but I suspect a lot of folks don't realize that, until it's way too late.
Maybe you were ready to retire anyway so this doesn't matter -- but you shouldn't believe what you were told on this matter. There are tons of software engineering positions where being on the older end of things isn't considered a handicap.
I'm pushing 60 and find there is plenty of opportunity. About half of the engineers I've worked with over the last 30 years or so have been over 40, many over 50. I have a coworker on my team right now who is one of the best devs I've worked with and is 73.
Some folks actually seem to be offended that "olds" are doing it (I've been writing Swift since the day it was announced, and have released over 20 apps with it -all on my own time. My paid gig never wanted that stuff).
I ran a C++ shop, with really experienced engineers. They were all able to get jobs, after our department was dissolved, but it took them years, and at least one of them keeps getting laid off, every two years or so.
I used to say "My dream is to be coding for free."
Livin' the dream, baby!
[EDITED TO ADD] I think that I was ready to retire, but had no idea, until I was pushed out of the nest. I was REALLY pissed off, for a while, at the way that I was treated, but, in the aggregate, it has been the best thing that ever happened to me.
Ahh, that makes sense. There are subcultures within the industry that are very bigoted about age. Fortunately, they aren't representative of the entire spectrum of the industry.
> Livin' the dream, baby!
Excellent! That's what we're all striving for, I think (although we all have different dreams). Keep it up!
Then keep doing it.
No amount of generative AI will stop you from writing your own code.
I think it will be a long time before AI produces code of such quality and correctness that I'd give it a passing grade in a college-level CS/programming course.
One thing I give it credit for, it will confidently spit out code when you ask it, often code that works, but it's pretty terrible code.
The laws did not anticipate AI models hoovering up all known IP without any permission from or compensation to its creators, but that does not mean that we cannot correct that and it does not mean those creators cannot or should not be able to assert rights and be compensated for violations.
Ding ding ding.
I think that we're already experiencing all the downsides of having AI-generated content. Look at high-budget movies - they're completely bland, tell nothing, they're only optimized for getting money out of average uneducated customer. Ubisoft is known for making all games according to same template that works and makes money. Mobile gaming lasted three entire months before it was overtaken by those profit-driven.
Some time ago I went to an expensive concert, and I realized... those guys got loaded by playing literally the same songs they've been playing for twenty years. They found the golden formula and they keep on riding it.
Turning to AI only cuts the middle man.
I turned towards independent creators because those guys have a passion and want to share it. So not all hope is lost. It's just that true artists are going to be the minority, just like they always were, while the rest will keep slurping up the commercial slop, just like they always have.
AI can help someone bring their musical ideas to fruition, draw pictures, or write stories.
There is still creative direction from a human - and now, rather than having to be a highly skilled human, it can now be almost anyone. In a way, AI brings creativity to the masses who aren't lucky enough to have the time to hone skills that would take thousands of hours to learn any other way.
As a former professional musician, let me tell you: the skills are not the problem here. People don't not make art because they don't have the skills. They don't make art because they have nothing to say, nothing to express.
The skills are a byproduct of having a worldview, a perspective. And unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) AI can't help anyone with that.
Iterating to get the right output from a prompt- and waiting for the output to be generated - is not an instantaneous endeavor. How much improvement could someone see if they dedicated that time to drawing or writing practice instead?
Developing a "voice" is done, at least partially, via honing one's craft, as well as engaging with art made by other people and cultures. The former is antithetical to prompting, and the latter is actively being destroyed by AI.
I can't help but feel that this strange insistence by industry that AI be used to all but usurp art ultimately comes from a place of jealousy, and/or due to the fact that some intelligent-to-Americans-sounding British voice saying something like "we're operating at the intersection of art and technology..." at some TedX talk causes VCs to turn out their wallets.
No, it is because replacing art is easier than replacing other jobs, that is the only reason. If they could they would replace something way more lucrative to them, but as is replacing artists is the thing they can do so that is what they do.
With art, though - I have some disabilities I don't feel the need to mention here, and am not particularly gifted at drawing or making art. I love making comics but I can't draw. AI allows me to make things like that now. It's been fantastic for someone like me, although I completely understand the arguments presented here by people that create for a living, I do think this is inevitably a losing battle because creating visual stuff is something this current iteration of generative AI seems to be pretty decent at.
Leaving us more time to focus on what matters : work.
Ha ha.