The really sad thing is that the natural instinct for many will be to screenshot the page and upload it with "please create me a home assistant dashboard in this style".
Yes, this is the "you wouldn't download a car" moment. Yes, I would.
(And no, I'm not doing it, because I have my own preferences, which involves hitting a very small target in design space, that is applying "dark cockpit" principles and a mix of industrial HIGs and nuclear reactor control room interface standards to LCARS.)
If someone spreads poison on your street to kill the strays and mutts (yes, that’s a thing that happens) and it kills your dog, would you like someone to tell you “that’s not sad, that’s literally what poison is for”?
Using a tool for its intended use has zero relation to it being sad.
That would be the first step to addressing the actual issues: Who will advance the field, assuming that generative AI will always be limited to copying instead of innovating? What will be the place in society for the people that lose their job due to these changes? etc.
And I wish people on HN would steel man arguments and not assume intentions in others, but here we are. There was no “appeal to emotion”, veiled or otherwise. The example used harming dogs because hopefully most¹ of us can agree that’s repulsive and bad.
Everything else you’re saying has nothing to do with the point. AI isn’t the point (hint: that’s why I didn’t mention it), the point is spelled out in plain English at the end of the comment:
> Using a tool for its intended use has zero relation to it being sad.
¹ I promise you that qualifier is necessary. I’ve seen some vile opinions on HN.
Why do you need to invoke an image of something widely considered repulsive to strengthen your point against something much more nuanced/controversial?
What's your problem with emotion?
Yes, I agree. That was not what I was doing.
He said it's sad, and no matter how you want to spin it, it still is incredibly sad and depressing that we're hailing the age of "semantic photocopiers" as some sort of intellectual achievement.
easyThrowaway: "I'll pretend your question is about fast fashion and TEMU!"
On top of this is the gross ethical concerns where all AI companies were allowed to steal all of this information/wisdom/art to train these models. At least with the power looms, a few skilled craftsmen were hired to help design them. This is blatant intellectual theft we're choosing to ignore because we're addicted to cheap products.
We choose temporary sensory pleasure over a healthy society.
I think the concern should be more on "you can't just extrapolate the same process forever and expect the same kind of outcome". Just because it was good in small amounts before doesn't necessarily mean it's inherently good to have an infinite capability to do that.
Regardless of all of that, I think it's important if we do have the AIs we're making we treat it as a common good in terms of wealth (regardless if people were paid) rather than a way to funnel a small amount of money to the companies who initially drive it as we are now. I.e. don't even mind if we "steal" (copy) everyone's available outputs as long as we all decide it should really benefit everyone rather than a handful.
No, I definitely see the difference, but I'm acknowledging that many people probably never cared all that much about how a beautiful thing is made, or at least not as much as they care about being able to have it.
I think it's a net good for the world for more people to be able to afford the things they like (after accounting for all externalities), even though of course it sucks for the craftsmen that lose their economic basis in the process.
> At least with the power looms, a few skilled craftsmen were hired to help design them. This is blatant intellectual theft we're choosing to ignore because we're addicted to cheap products.
I'm pretty sure this was little consolation to e.g. the Swing Rioters [1]. I suspect that this only seems less bad in hindsight. For many people whose livelihood was destroyed by mechanized agriculture, the power loom and other advances of technology during industrialization, I'm pretty sure it seemed equally catastrophic, if not more (18th century government welfare programs were somewhat lacking compared to modern standards).
All that said, while I do believe in human rights, I don't think there should be something like a "right for everyone to continue living like they are used to", which ultimately always means something like economic protectionism, artificial/subsidized demand etc. I'd much rather we find dignified ways to manage the transition for everybody than to engage in some elaborate pretense of economic necessity when there isn't one. If we only grant value or even basic human rights to economically productive workers, maybe that's something worth addressing anyway?
We've been talking about being sad about a lot of different things in this thread.
But here's another thing to be sad about (somewhat related to what I was originally sad about): building "semantic photocopier" is probably quite an intellectual achievement, but so was the atom bomb. intellectual achievements, even impressive ones, can't be assumed to be good.
To hail a "semantic photocopier" requires a pretty myopic and parochial view. Looked at holistically, this stuff amounts to a project to rub out the human and replace it with cheap, inhuman slop. One aspect if that is when I see a picture like this, it's ruined because when I look at it I'm unsure if I'm communing with a human or getting fooled by a simulacrum. Another aspect is how the slop undermines the viability of creative and intellectually engaging professions.
We really ought to look at the kind of world we want to live in (which would probably have maximum satisfying creative work, and a minimum of drudgery), preserve the good parts of what we have, and focus on intellectual achievements to subtract the bad parts. But instead we're just mindlessly building whatever we can manage, damn the consequences or end result (which seems to be: more drudgery, less creative expression).
You can feel differently but it saves you so much money, time, and bring you so much pleasure. Not the other way around.
Decorating when you can easily swap out pieces and parts in images with realistic dimensions makes rapid iteration on physical things much faster and it's easy to figure out what "speaks" to you. Great use of these tools.
refs of colors. atropic has some nice recipes somewhere online, entire prompts you can feed into cc. i used their workflows feature, otherwise it's painfully slow.
do it in two steps, first generate just the named 3d model, walls, stairs etc inspect for correctness, after proceed to the fun part, materials, colors, etc.
I did it in extra one step, not sure if that was needed, i build a local harness first for extra small room 6 ft by 6ft, and after that expanded into real size. It installed lots of tools.
One is a relatively complicated workflow producing 3D assets, the other is "just give pictures to chatgpt and tell it what you want".
Well with one bit of f_ckery that both of us missed until after the concrete had been poured because it was too small to see easily on the plan, and a second also too-small bit that I caught once they'd put the framing up and asked them to take it out again.
I can look out my window and see the exact scene she made in chatGPT.
Really impressive how useful it has become on some very general things
This is cool and I'd like to play around with it, but I'm not going to hire an illustrator for it, at least not to start with.
"One dude did a thing and the rest copied it coz it seemed cool. Everybody wants to be cool..."