I made the case that anyone that solves problems with objectively correct solutions (programmers) would always be more at risk of AI taking their jobs than people that solve problems with subjectively correct solutions (artists, some designers).
Programmers' solutions aren't all objective, or at least shouldn't be. Simple tasks are. In some cases people are using overly low-level tooling, creating a lot of repetitive work that the AI would do better, and they might be at risk.
End-user-facing software is apparently close to art. You're trying to solve a human problem and make it pretty. But even deep backend stuff is largely designed and built around how people understand tasks.
I do look forward to ChatGPT telling me why my C++ code won't link, though.
I remember the exact opposite case being made 3 months ago. That art just needs to be good enough and all artists will starve. You need a human to be responsible for a piece if software to sue and imprison when it goes off the deep end if nothing else. Programmers aren't going anywhere.
I'm fine with programmers being a less needed skillset, but most artists were not making any money. The vast vast majority were the proverbial starving artists getting pennies for commissions, fighting for some form of respect for generations. Completely segregated from the idea of a market based economy, completely unwilling to do anything that people actually value, completely unwilling to move away from "discipline and aesthetics" into "story and scarcity" which is what is valued. When doing it for fun is totally an option and is still something we can all do after AI art took off.
the collectibles market always was able to benefit from transparent supplies, transparent volume. NFT's added that and people acted surprised that the collectibles market was that big, when in reality nobody knows how many baseball cards (for example) were issued, how many rare ones are really out there and more. the analog collectibles market has wash trading too.
if NFT purchasers can remove the parasocial relationships they rely on with the creators and just build their own communities for resales then it'll be fine.
The tools of today, even fucking Eclipse and gah Xcode from the early 2000s make programmers far far more than 10x more productive than machine code on punch cards. By your implied logic there should be a tiny fraction of the programmers there were in the 60s.
Anyway I think this 10x more productive claim is still a bunch of BS with the current crop of AI demos.
Why hire new people, because companies want to do things they couldn't do before. This has been happening for decades already as tooling has evolved. It used to be very hard for average companies to write cross-platform commerce software, now it's a standard thing in the form of a website + payment processor.
There might be some companies or departments that don't need to evolve anymore, and they cut people. That happens already; the product gets finished, so they lay people off. But those people find new jobs.
My guess is that the goals for existing software projects have always been limited by how much talent could be purchased, not by vision. So unless we run out of vision, nobody is actually going to be put out of a job by this technology. We'll just shoot for bigger goals.
Companies always have ideas on the backlog. I myself have a huge backlog of dream projects that I don't have time to implement, and I'm just one person.
Tech like this helps us make a bigger impact faster.
If you want to do a $100 bet I’ll bet you in 5 years that won’t happen. I’ll even take it further, I’ll bet you $100 a year for the next five years it won’t make a huge difference. I’ll pay you in full early if it happens and you can wait to pay me in full after 5 years.
I dislike betting money at all and I think $100 is fair.
It takes fewer people to maintain a system than it does to build it. You do not need a team of 7 engineers to stick around to read logs and code, you need exactly one, and in all likelihood he's going to spend most of his time watching YouTube because he's so out of practice that if anything was wrong the AI would most likely find it before him, and when he does find something he's going to just ask the AI to fix it instead of exerting the mental effort to do it himself.
I’ll take the Pepsi Challenge on GPT-4 replacing SEs. It’s the same take I’ve had on self-driving. Outside of very niche situations it’s never going mainstream.
The only people in the short term who are going to greatly benefit from GPT coding are people selling tutorials for using GPT to code.
The problem is and always been how do you describe what you want the computer to do to the computer. This is where this will see some traction as a tool that helps developers do this faster, but my bet is that these sorts of systems will still work a lot better using an artificial language to state the requirements and these advances will be integrated into our languages and compilers.
I remember it came out at the same time as GitHub copilot and a lot of people here said we might need to confront the idea that some development roles may not be long for this earth.
I remember it being vastly overhyped about how artists were now obsolete, but it really hasn't happened. People have quickly became very attuned to the "AI art style"--humans are excellent at pattern recognition, after all--and if anything, it's made people appreciate how important an artists' individual style and attention to detail is.
I've seen intense rage and despair for even top tier 2D artists, Japanese, Chinese, Western all alike. Like top of industry, massive fanbase, they all understand there is no sugarcoating it anymore.
AI improved from 5-year-old scribble to crushing 90% of artists in technical execution within 9 months. So they had no time to process it at all, and had to cope with shock and denial.
Now virtually all traditional 2d artist jobs are on the chopping block, its just inertia keeping them employed for another year or two. At top Chinese game studios like Tencent and Mihoyo, they are already intensely experimenting with AI workflows. And many indie game studios are pretty much already using AI for most concept art.
Artist jobs won't disappear, but they'll become hybrids of 3d modelling, SD prompting, python scripting, model training, and photoshopping. For many artists this means the workflows they spent decades honing is now gone. Also, most of them love drawing, so art jobs that don't involve drawing are despairing to them.
Those who fare best, are those who don't care much about drawing, but storytelling (Say Mangaka), they will be freed from drawing 14 hours a day, and cut their workloads in half.
Note, I think artist jobs will increase and pay better. The true industries in threat are non-virtual entertainment, such as tourism, concerts. They'll be competing with AI augmented artists that can produce awe-inspiring works in weeks not years.
Universal World's hogwarts parks are admirable. But they'll soon be competing against fully realized hogwarts (already modelled in Hogwarts legacy, without AI), that are then filled with fully responsive AIs whom you can actually talk to (Courtesy of GPT5,6,7).
AI will create massive value, but it'll also bring massive, extremely uncomfortable dislocations. Better try to adapt AI as soon as possible, and analyze how your role will transform.
I'm sorry but am I the only one experiencing time dilation? You can't say '
X was supposed to be a big deal but was not' when the number of months since X began is single-digit.
Come back in ten years and tell me that there was no threat.
Also, for anyone living under a rock, the 'AI art style' --- by which you probably mean MidJourney 3 style --- has been steadily disappearing across MJ 4 and 5.
So, yes, actually, artists may now be 'obsolete', at least in the sense of 'viable form of capitalism for an adult North American to pursue as a profession'.
Circumstances for artists were already the worst they'd ever been, in real terms, even before this. Going forward, 'graphic designer', like 'music engineer', is going to be five people with real talent and 20,000 cool kids with trust funds. Everyone else fights for a job at Wal-Mart.
Best queue for your shift, the pinnies that fit well always get grabbed first
I don't really know what you're getting at. My point is that DALL-E/Stable Diffusion hasn't cut into the market for actual paid artists. Like, at all. Unlike what the doomsayers predicted. Software developers should feel equally as threatened, which is to say, not at all.
> There is no financial incentive to replace paid artists. There is an enormous financial incentive to reduce software development headcount.
Older folks will remember when the solution to this was to outsource development to low-cost regions like South American or Southeast Asia. You can ask ChatGPT how that went.
Progress can come to a screeching halt at any point. We saw this with self-driving cars previously: the AI true believers were certain self-driving would be everywhere within 5 years... in 2015. Now the idea of a self-driving car has mostly been abandoned.
Let's get at least one company, at least one, replacing its graphic design department with DALL-E, or its development team with GPT, before calling an entire profession obsolete.