[imhoguy]

SWE ~20 years, curious I have spend like 4 days to learn and do some hacking around that Stable Diffusion hype :) Well, there are three types of "boring" work I discovered there:

- researchers - math and stuff, optimizing training, inference, reading tons of research papers, writing papers, implementing low level algos, a lot of trial and error work - that is like 0.0001% of the entire community,

- integrators - building workflow front-ends, wrappers, PS plugins, optimizing the stack, doing some Dreambooth training, tinkering with high-level Python, 0.1% guys,

- users - running one-click tools or just clicking thru some AI-art generator webapp, participating in reddit d* size contest, spreading the news, writing sensational articles for mass audience, hype preachers on YT, designers augmenting Photoshop skills, the best are trying to monetize the tutorials and AI-artwork, 99%.

All that reminds me a bit of "blockchain" career hype cycle which is now fading. For now it is all "vitamins" (vs painkiller).

I will definitely play with more of it on the side. But for now I am back to my boring and stable devops/backend web job, I see a lot of K8s pains to kill :)

[khazhoux]

> All that reminds me a bit of "blockchain" career hype cycle which is now fading

We'll see what the job prospects hold in this field, but it holds no comparison with blockchain hype. People aren't claiming (yet?) that AI art and dialogue will free us from the Shackles Of The Oppresionist Financial Regime, with an anonymous manifesto to stir our dreams of revolution.

No -- people are excited about this new AI art and dialogue because it is mind-blowing, magical, inspiring, and wonderful in itself.

I can't wait to see where it goes.

[cj]

FWIW, the GP's reference to "hype cycle" might be Gartner's Hype Cycle [0] rather than the dictionary definition of hype.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

[Juliate]

I’d rather say, it’s impressive. But wonderful?

It produces something impressive, yes, and can be useful for “content” producing. So it can definitely be useful (painkiller and vitamin) to artists or producers.

But all in itself, what is does produce is void of process, meaning and intent. Those have still crucially to be desired, designed, modeled and injected by _someone_.

Or one takes the risk of publishing something either dull either conveying unexpected meaning (thus being inauthentic in both cases).

[khazhoux]

> But all in itself, what is does produce is void of process, meaning and intent

Here's another way to look at it. Everyone has imagination, few have the refined skills to execute. What you find with the explosion of Midjourney AI artwork is people imagining concepts, letting the compute apply the technique, and then iterate until the artifact resembles the vision. This is actually quite similar to the fim director who tells their art director what they want, then reviews, refines, and iterates until the vision is met.

Myself, last week I created an image that matched a visual idea I had over 10 years ago, which I could never execute with my limited drawing/painting skills.

So yeah, on Midjourney there's a ton of meaningless "darth vader cat" images, but there is also meaning and intent.

And we're just at the beginning. Imagine what this will be like when people can tweak an image as fluidly as you could if you were giving a human artist direction in real-time.

[kapsi]

There's some difference between blockchain and AI, that is AI works.

[monero-xmr]

Hmm I can send cryptocurrency across the earth in seconds while my self driving car is perpetually 5 years away…

[kapsi]

That's true but it's also what Bitcoin did 13 years ago, meanwhile all the hype about taking over the world doesn't seem to be coming true.

[hgrth6644fd23]

That certainly depends on whether you are on the paying or the receiving end of the blockchain scam. For one of them it works really well ...

[lnsru]

Blockchain works very well for money laundering too!

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

What are the remaining 0.8999% doing?

[imhoguy]

Haha, yeah. These likely just go long with NVDA and AMD ;)