hectorlorenzo

Getting 403'd on all links.

> people who think that a city or neighbourhood is "theirs" just because they happen to live there for a long time — without actually owning anything.

Are you saying that only owners can decide what happens on a given neighbourhood? This is a really narrow way to define a community: suddenly people who do not own become second-class citizens.

> While Airbnb violated local laws, I haven't seem them violating laws that I would ever consider moral or justified.

That is not how local laws work. They are contextual, not absolute. And they are definitively not written while thinking "would golergka think this is _cool_?".

> My dog cannot, for instance, nor can my coffee table.

You must be giving them the wrong prompts.

Regressive Hitler?

One man's caveat is another man's nodding approvingly.

Next logical step is filter customization that you carry around and gets applied seamlessly to all videos you post on the platform. Next to that becomes filters that get applied based on consumer preferences: if you have indicated a certain preference for big brown eyes, TikTok might enlarge and darken them for all videos you watch. Argh.

> Comments on twitter?

Yes. Mostly his.

Fierce anti-communism led to Franco, Pinochet, and Osama bin Laden. We can call it even.

Reading this I have the impression that John Carmack will be to AI what Jeff Hawkins is to brain research: a far-fetched idea, with potential, maybe too abstract and left-field to yield nothing tangible. Looking at the rest of the industry from the sidelines and (maybe) not being taken seriously by it.

I did not know that. It is amazing how perception of HN changes drastically once you turn this flag on. It is not as extreme as "turning into a completely different website" but certainly it becomes less interesting. There is a sizeable amount of toxicity.

Second entry might get some, too:

"The Brit says, 'I would like to buy this bar, restore it to its former glory and then burn it to the ground'".

GPT knows something we don't.

Prompt: "A Spaniard, a German, and a Brit enter a bar."

Response: "The Spaniard says, 'We must get out of the EU.' The German says, 'We must get out of the EU.' And the Brit says, 'I'll have a pint, thanks'".

I mean, it might not be funny, but _it is_ funny.

Is Dan Brown a postmodernist author these days?

That is true: that's why certain industries endure more mistreatment than others (acting, fashion, design in general). Passion can be a pain in the ass when it gets in the way of just making a living.

However, these are individual reactions, not behaviours as a community/society. If you read comments around HN or some other liberal circles, you have the feeling that is our human-ness is being threatened, one of our core defining traits. It seems like "artistic creativity" is being enshrined as a circular argument (also I'm wary of calling startup-landing-page illustrators "artists" – more like craftpeople, although this distinction might hurt the conversation).

My broader point is that ChatGPT is not "the beginning of the end", but another chapter in a history of automation and replacement that will pose serious challenges for humankind. That treating it as more critical than factory automation is demeaning to blue-collar workers and also untrue. Everything we do is what defines us as people: cherry-picking some skills is a relic from Enlightenment we should get rid of.

> Also I'm not sure most artist jobs are middle-upper class.

I do not have any data at hand, only my circle of friends and former colleagues (I was formerly a graphic designer). Few people endure being a "starving artist" without a little financial safety coming from above. Also, it is a profession that only provides status to a certain socio-economic milieu.

Yes I have, care to explain?

I'm still organising my thoughts on the subject so please feel free to push back.

This ongoing discussion feels classist. I've never seen such strong emotions about AI (and automation) taking blue-collar jobs, some shrugs at most. It's considered an unavoidable given, even though it has been happening for decades. The only difference now is that AI is threatening middle-upper class jobs, which nobody saw coming.

I do not see the difference between both. Can somebody that does explain to me why now is "critical" and not so much before?

I agree with all your points and I struggle to see how AI-generated imagery will change any of this. I honesty believe that people will still appreciate (or criticise, or ignore) your work and communities will still be formed around "traditional" artists.

As for the professional aspect of it, yes, designers, illustrators, copywriters, programmers will see their work deeply changed by this technology, to an extend that I do not understand at all. I share your worries in that front.

As it happened with book binders, printing press operators, tailors, lamplighters, milkmen... what is so special about professional artists?

There is something off about this argument. On one hand, you say "Humans derive a lot from process, not the final product", which I completely agree. But you also say "places like ArtStation get flooded with AI generated images", which seems to indicate there is a focus on showing off the final product.

I make pottery, and my pieces suck (in terms of shape, usability, even stability) compared to ones made by professional artists or in a factory. I cannot make two similar mugs for the life of me. But it is the process I enjoy, the learning, the improving. And the nice community I've built around me that shares the same passion.

Maybe I'm underestimating the power of text-to-image, but people still learn how to play the guitar (despite Ableton), or chess (despite Stockfish), or sculpture (despite 3D printing).

My honest question is: why should this time be different?

Maybe you do not even need to write tests: they are just additional cells with prompts aimed at generating fuzzy testing against logic cells.

I wonder if creating code snippets is missing the point. I've just imagined a future in which programmers create lambda-style functions that are essentially GPT prompts and pipe them to process data. As a programmer, you would essentially write tests to ensure prompts are working as expected.

Maybe this is the ultimate no-code programming environment: a fleet of cells, each one containing one prompt, parsing and storing data.

I'm fully aware that I'm stretching the argument and analogies. However, I find all of these expressions ("Capturing the moment", "has a different aim") vague and full of gaps. Maybe it's because I never fully got photography, in a way. The difference between "capturing the moment" and "writing prompt" is that the former has a more romantic feel to it, but let's not forget that some of the most well-known photographies were staged to look spontaneous. And suddenly photography is just an exercise of story-telling and technique (light, exposure, etc), which is not that different from "harnessing the algorithm" to do the same.

Also, we're comparing an art 150 years in the making (with its schools, philosophies, heroes) with one in its infancy.

I think the same argument can be made of photography. A photographer does not "paint" or "create" the image. It points a machine to a place and presses a button with a finger. This machine does "the work" for her. Who is the artist? Are photographers just commisioners of images?

This argument could be made 150 years ago about photography. For the sake of an argument: can a selfie be a form of art?

To take a selfie, human intervention is minimal: someone decides they want to take a selfie; take dozens of them, pretty much at random; choose one they like; publish it.

Similarities with the stable diffusion process are striking. And yet, could you consider a selfie "artistic"? Are all selfies artistic? What if Annie Leibovitz or Marina Abramovic take a selfie?

What if Marina Abramovic generates a million images of a rabbit with stable diffusion and papers a whole warehouse with them? Is this art?

Edit: syntax.

I agree. Also, it's not that stable diffusion spontaneously generates art: someone has thought of a prompt, written it down, iterated, and finally decided that a given image was good enough to publish. Is stable diffusion an "artist" or is it a tool?

I find "what is art" discussions impossible to resolve and untangle from prejudices and biases. The least problematic answer I've found comes from John Carey, paraphrasing: "art is whatever someone has decided it to be". In other words, if I decide something is art, then it is.

The problem shifts slightly to a more interesting way to pose this question: why some art has more value than some other art (or even "does some art has more value than some other art")? Equally difficult to resolve but more prone to highlight prejudices and biases mentioned above.

The woolen blanket is not a precise example: you like one more for sentimental reasons, but you agree that both are blankets. If you had said "I don't think that a factory-made woolen blanket is really a woolen blanket" the discussion would be different.

> If it was not Musk it would be someone else.

This is an argument that needs to be done really carefully: its logical conclusion is that his cruelty is deterministic and there is nothing he can do about it. People have a certain degree of agency, he actively chooses to be cruel amongst other options at his disposal.

Agree, that’s why I specified “because” in the Go example, and “for a simple eCommerce API”. Almost all technical solutions have a place under the sun in the right context. My point is that this “right context” gets lost when the incentives are far removed from business needs and that not all overstaffed companies are “idle”.

> does that make companies overstaffed or just mismanaged?

Good point. The end result is the same: inefficient allocation of resources that could pass for productivity. Weird incentives at the management level.