[bigbassroller]

I know this tech is terrifying to actual 3D artist who don’t want be a “prompt engineer”, but as someone who has never used Blender, I think its cool that I can create something using tools like this and use them in my projects, ex background animation on a website hero section.

[warent]

I don't think this is "terrifying" to 3D artists any more than github copilot is terrying to us haha, I'm not sure why we engineers have this tendency of imagining every other industry as being populated by superstitious peasants from the dark ages who fear new tools.

In my experience the vast majority of people are excited about GPT including artists.

[TeMPOraL]

I don't know, maybe I am one of those "superstitious peasants from the dark ages who fear new tools", but I'm increasingly terrified of GPT-4 and future iterations of it as applied to the industry I work with (i.e. software). It does seem to threaten to suddenly eliminate all the interesting parts of the job, a good chunk of openings, and to significantly reduce salaries for the openings that remain - all at the same time, and rather suddenly.

[kaashif]

In the past, when tools that significantly increased developer productivity emerged, like higher level languages (C, Java, Python), better IDEs, or better access to help (e.g. StackOverflow), the demand for more software has outpaced any decrease in demand for developers due to productivity improvements.

I'm not saying I know that's going to continue forever, but it might. If the cost to produce software goes down, the demand for software will increase. That's what has always happened, but maybe this time is different.

Everyone always thinks this time is different though, it's good to be skeptical of thoughts like that.

My take is that if you stay on the cutting edge and get good at using all kinds of tools with max productivity, you'll probably end up as the tractor driver rather than as an unemployed ox.

[pixl97]

People in the textile industry were well paid and given a place to live at one point in history. Then the auto loom showed up and they were kicked to the street to starve. I wouldn't want to try to live in any major US city on a blue collar salary.

[kaashif]

Maybe one day AI will allow completely unskilled laypeople, ignorant of software, to build and deploy software end to end with no involvement from any software engineers, testers, SREs, anything. That would be the power loom of our time - the power loom allowed unskilled workers to completely replace skilled hand loom weavers with no drop in quality of output.

When that's possible, the world will be very different. Right at this moment, AI is still useless for unskilled workers trying to write software, it's just a productivity multiplier for skilled engineers.

[DrewADesign]

This isn't an all-or-none scenario. It's not like all textile factories got auto-looms and the labor market collapsed overnight. Tools will improve, productivity will improve, and the demand for software development as a specialty will wane dramatically. Making simple tools using prompts will no longer require knowledge of data structures and algorithms, efficiency, networking, or anything else we get paid to know, and over time will shift to something white collar workers put on their resume next to MS Office. A tiny handful of specialist engineers will control development, and software creation as a commodity will essentially be automated. We will feel the impact of these changes LONG before that process is complete.

[ben_w]

> When that's possible, the world will be very different. Right at this moment, AI is still useless for unskilled workers trying to write software, it's just a productivity multiplier for skilled engineers.

Depends on the software, and how much mediocrity the end user is willing to put up with.

A trivial prompt can spit out a web page with functioning JavaScript for a mediocre-but-playable version of Pong.

This may not be of interest to us, but our standards are not necessarily shared by normal people: in the wild, I've seen websites where the thumbnails were all loaded as full-sized images and merely displayed smaller, bottles on supermarket shelves whose labels had easily visible pixelation and JPEG artefacts.

Infamously, there's a lot of stuff done in Excel that really shouldn't be. Some genes had to be renamed because scientists kept using Excel, and Excel kept interpreting the gene's names as dates.

I get SMSes whose sender ID has obviously involved someone somewhere trying to record phone numbers as floats.

Even in places with high standards, the UI of the Calculator app on iOS still gets confused if I tap buttons too fast (before animations finish playing?).

[emehex]

The problem with this is:

Do you want to listen to a 10 brand new songs by 10 brand new artists using generative AI, or do you want to listen to 10 brand new Taylor Swift songs (that were created with the help of generative AI)?

While some people will be able to leverage this to good effect, I fear the established have much more to gain in this new world…

[comfortabledoug]

This, and also every textile worker didn't have an auto loom in their pockets, or a lawyer, or an accountant, or a copywriter....I mean who will be left besides leadership teams??

[akhosravian]

It’s funny you’re using “blue collar” to mean low skilled probably things like retail cashiers, but folks in trades actually make very livable wages in the US.

Here’s a recent article from the seattle times: https://www.seattletimes.com/pacific-nw-magazine/as-tech-job...

[desmondw]

> if you stay on the cutting edge and get good at using all kinds of tools with max productivity

For people with eternal youthful energy, good health, no family, and a single-mindedness toward work in life.

[Barrin92]

For me the interesting job in software is designing architecture and implementing complex things. Automation with tools like this is not remotely there and to some extent probably won't be because we're often talking about human preferences and subjective design choices. Gpt4 in software is Intellisense++ right now, it provides code snippets for things you want to do, it's just raising the bar of abstraction, not replacing the designer.

On the second point, I actually think my salary is inflated and we'd be in the dark ages if I took that for a reason to hamper technology. Not only am I not just a developer of software but also a consumer, so I benefit directly, but more importantly so does everyone else. If everyone operated on that logic I'd still pay 20 bucks for a potato and a hundred for a hammer.

Let's be real the entire point of software is to replace labor. The software industry has done it to many sectors of the economy and called it progress. Which it is. We have no right to start complaining now.

[IanCal]

> For me the interesting job in software is designing architecture and implementing complex things. Automation with tools like this is not remotely there and to some extent probably won't be because we're often talking about human preferences and subjective design choices. Gpt4 in software is Intellisense++ right now, it provides code snippets for things you want to do, it's just raising the bar of abstraction, not replacing the designer.

It's not a code writer though, that's not its sole trained task. Why do you think it's going to have a drastically harder time doing the fuzzier higher level work? Human preference and subjective work has a wider acceptance of solutions.

I can have it write abstracts and works of fiction and songs. It wrote a great kids song about bumlollies and their terrible flavour, explained syncitial nuclear aggregates to a lay audience as a jaunty pirate and created ember templates in our custom framework. Have you tried it with any architecture questions?

> Let's be real the entire point of software is to replace labor. The software industry has done it to many sectors of the economy and called it progress. Which it is. We have no right to start complaining now.

It's totally fine IMO to have the views that it's big and scary for me and also good for humanity.

[pixl97]

And while doing so income disparity has kept increasing.

Eventually we need to stop and think about how capitalism is winner take all, or we're all in for a very bad time.

[FractalHQ]

We already know capitalism is rotten… but we don’t care because it gives us the opportunity (real or not) to be the one on top standing on a mountain of bodies, basking in the glow of our delusional, narcissistic sense of entitlement.

[DrewADesign]

* for now

[oneshtein]

What is the issue with income inequality? Even in communism, there is income disparity because those in power have greater needs.

[hiq]

> What is the issue with income inequality?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality#Effects

[kranke155]

You are absolutely right. The myth that automation does not replace Jobs is just that, a myth.

Huge numbers were left unemployed with industrial automation in the US and left unemployable. The technical term is structural unemployment. All it means is you cant retrain 10,000 factory workers to be front end developers, and that even If they find a job its often not as well paid.

The two greatest myths of modern capitalism are that free markets are good for everyone (they're not) and that automation doesnt lead to unemployment. Any reasonable assessment of the data will show both of these to be clearly false.

[addcommitpush]

> All it means is you cant retrain 10,000 factory workers to be front end developers, and that even If they find a job its often not as well paid.

An important effect is the speed of change - it _might_ be possible to train the next generation such as those who would have been factory workers become front end developers, but it's an entirely different challenge to take actual factory workers and train them for another job. That is to say, even if in the long run automation doesn't lead to unemployment, the short term effect may be quite different.

[warent]

Well I put my foot in my mouth here and apologize for insulting any uncertainty; these are new technologies so uncertainty is normal of course. In retrospect I tend to communicate things online in a much more careless way

[IanCal]

I'm in a similar boat. I'm currently building setups to have GPT-n write code, and it's surprising how good it really is, and in such a short space of time.

[cwkoss]

Maybe LLMs can help us figure out how to dethrone the greedy and pass UBI into law.

[lm28469]

> It does seem to threaten to suddenly eliminate all the interesting parts of the job

Writing generic code that are more or less stackoverflow copy/paste ?

The interesting parts are coming up with the logic &c. not typing the code imho

[quadcore]

Like Covid, it will change the world very fast. Talk to your representative about it.

As an example, I wont code at work anymore, I chatgpt all day. Just like that, overnight. And my productivity went 10x - though i was already 10x more productive than you.> What should have taken 1 week takes 1 day, sometimes less (it's new software im working on).

I would only code if I was doing great software, that is, for myself, we dont do that at work.

It's gonna build tension silently and then release: capital will be massively reallocated - that moment will be tsunami. Talk to your representative.

[SketchySeaBeast]

I think it's because if you're not in that particular industry you have a super simplified model of what the person does - something like "writing code" as the only activity a developer does.

You don't understand the difficulties and problems that people in the profession face, which I think is also why so many developers are convinced they can replace/"disrupt" other people's jobs with software.

[antibasilisk]

>I don't think this is "terrifying" to 3D artists any more than github copilot is terrying to us haha

It sounds more like you're just seriously underestimating the direction GitHub Copilot is headed.

[warent]

This is such a vague comment that it's pretty near impossible to reply to in a very constructive way.

By my estimation it seems probable that we'll end up in the near future with some Jira integration that has an "auto fix" button on tickets. Possibly PMs or managers will be empowered to replace a large chunk of work that is currently done by people like me... and these things are only the beginning!

If you were thinking of something more severe then I'm curious what you're referring to? Otherwise I'm not sure what your point is.

[antibasilisk]

My point is that if a machine can write more or less any program, then the artistic merit of programming falls away completely. It's instead replaced by a slurry of incomprehensible nonsense that simply works for some reason.

[RedNifre]

Yeah, like a binary today, right?

What's the problem if the new "source code" is all prompts written in natural language and the classical code is just a build artifact?

[pedrosorio]

There is no way to have all source code in natural language because natural language is ambiguous. There is no way to debug natural language not doing the right thing.

[antibasilisk]

The problem is that even a Scratch project has greater artistic merit than that.

[wnkrshm]

The reason being tests/constraints specified by someone designing the software.

[tekknik]

Ask GPT to design a program. I’m not sure if people commenting along these lines are serious or lying to themselves. AI is moving faster than any other tech in history, and that’s really saying something.

It’s not hard to see where this is heading. And the goal is to automate away everything so we humans can just kick our feet up.

[Naga]

I was speaking recently to a graphic artist who is terrified of Stable Diffusion and the like. I mentioned that these tools can augment their ability to do work instead of just replacing, but their point is that they are a graphic artist because they like doing the things that the AI will be replacing. Being a prompt engineer wasn't really the reason they studied and learned to become an artist. To me, that is a completely reasonable way to feel.

[ChatGTP]

Do what I do and probably many others. Draw at work (use AI assist or whatever hype is available to keep your boss happy), then draw something at home you love.

[tekknik]

The reason you draw at home is because your work drains you, physically and emotionally. This leads to jobs you end up hating. So AI makes us more productive, and causes mental illness as we all hate our jobs and see no point in continuing. Just let the machines do it.

[anonzzzies]

Just leaving this here;

https://www.reddit.com/r/blender/comments/121lhfq/i_lost_eve...

Edit; I see it was discussed indeed on HN yesterday. I have already seen tons more of these in my circles and not only 3d/artists.

[adelie]

my main issue is the people making hiring and budget decisions aren't 3D artists, they're managers. my work might be objectively better than GPT's, but is that going to matter when my boss compares the cost difference and decides GPT is 'good enough'?

[cwkoss]

When your boss gets fired for delivering garbage it will matter

[addcommitpush]

Will they, though? Automation has replaced highly expensive, artisanal, high quality things with much more cheaply made, worse quality things. And yet we buy the latter because the quality-to-price ratio is much better.

Most clothes people wear are garbage compared to bespoke clothes. Most industrial food is garbage compared to what a chef might make. And yet.

[TeMPOraL]

Which they won't, because the market naturally optimizes towards the most awful, shitty garbage possible that's still barely fit for purpose. This will only accelerate the trend.

[notatoad]

i'm guessing the parent comment is in reference to this link from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35308498

[Thorentis]

It just raises the bar so that 3D artists who are only capable of reproducing the same boring things they saw in YouTube tutorials are no longer considered proficient.

The more I think about this trend, the more I think it might be good.

Bootcamp devs are no longer good enough for junior roles since a GPT could replace them. Digital media people who learnt via YouTube and have no real talent are no longer skilled enough. Writers who can only churn out mediocre blog spam are now jobless.

This seems like it might be a net benefit.

[kypro]

This isn't how it will play out though. At first chess AIs got enough to beat unskilled players. They they were good enough to beat intermediate players. Then they challenged the grandmasters. Today no human, no matter how long they practise or how hard they train will ever get close to beating an AI at chess.

Your assumption that this raises the bar for human 3D artists is correct today, but it won't be long before human 3D artists are seen as much slower and less competent than AI artists, and there will be no going back.

[geraldwhen]

This will not be true if ai produced works can’t be copyrighted.

[tekknik]

Copyrights are one of the foundations of business. As much as the HN crowd hates them, they aren’t going anywhere. You’re literally wasting electrons.

[wizzwizz4]

Chess is fundamentally a different kind of problem. You can prove things about chess in the general case, but it's mathematically impossible to prove things about computer programs in the general case.

[ux-app]

>Chess is fundamentally a different kind of problem.

irrelevant.

my whole world view changed when I read https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.12712.pdf

now pair that with a larger memory, backtracking/revising and on-the-fly weight adjustment (aka, real-time "learning") and I think it might be game over.

add goals and motivations and maybe a vision system? game over for meat bags.

These advances are not only possible, they're inevitable. It's just too tantalising to leave alone.

[DrewADesign]

There's no mathematical proof for the correctness of graphic design, either, but that won't stop cheap AI-generated garbage from taking over the role of making commodity images and putting a lot of people out of work.

[creativenolo]

I'm curious about graphic design and if AI can do it to a passable standard. Generating fiction photographs, paintings, illustrations seems more flexible than constrained and balanced proper graphic design. I am sure AI can mash together templates and icons. Less sure about producing a solution to a client brief with a timely and timeless design.

[DrewADesign]

I do freelance Graphic design. The whole conceptual thinking/visual communication aspect of it seems unlikely to be touched by these tools any time soon... But the commodity work that puts food on a lot of people's tables is likely toast. It's not like it will replace graphic designers, it just takes over the everyday jobs that drive most of the demand for their services and we all know what a drastically reduced demand does to a market.

[riku_iki]

> but it's mathematically impossible to prove things about computer programs in the general case.

there is such thing as verifiable software.

[sebzim4500]

True, but you are verifying that the code meets some formal criteria, not that it actually does what you want.

[riku_iki]

formal criteria defines what you want.

[smilespray]

How do you get senior people when juniors no longer have careers?

[gaganyaan]

Junior software developers will still have careers, they'll just have to learn a slightly different skillset that involves more reviewing of code, like a senior developer already does.

Before sometime hits merge, they need to understand if the code meets all requirements, and it doesn't really matter who or what wrote the code in the PR.

[noisy_boy]

They will be reviewing the unit test written by TestGPT for the code written by CodeGPT.

[bovermyer]

Until ReviewGPT takes over.

[tekknik]

But we’ve automated away their job, why were they hired to exist learn the skills?

The demand for engineers, and therefore junior engineers, will be reduced. That is the goal.

[Thorentis]

There will still be junior devs. My comment was only referring to particular types of junior devs. In short, the barrier to entry foe being a junior dev will be higher, and require more CS knowledge, perhaps even more hardware knowledge. No more of this "I made a todo list in react in 2 weeks and am now ready to be a software engineer" rubbish.

[tekknik]

There has been general hate towards self taught and code bootcamp grads. Some are in the field only for the money, but many others simply lacked the resources to attend a 4 year university.

When you openly state that you dislike these types of programmers, and want to essentially purge them? Hopefully AI destroys your specific job and you can’t find work again.

[golergka]

From the real education with courses on compilers, operating systems and databases, not 3 month bootcamps on HTML and JavaScript.

[tekknik]

How many compilers, operating systems, and databases have you written?

I make 6 figures, never took any of these classes (though I did write my own OS, and compiler). Why do you want people to waste time and money? Perhaps it’s time to split out those classes into some degree that’s more relevant to that work?

[golergka]

I don't need to write a complex software system to utilise my knowledge about it.

Also, I don't have a CS degree and that's not what I advocate for. I advocate for developers who spend years honing their skills and learning fundamentals of the craft.

[tekknik]

Spending years honing skills does not mean wasting time. In fact most self studies do it out of passion, which means a lifetime of honing skills.

I have also written a compiler and my own language as well as an operating system, and its usefulness has come up exactly once in near 15 years in the industry, and that was a very niche topic. Explain why, exactly, you need to know compilers and operating systems to write any modern day app.

[warent]

In the same way that junior artists still exist despite us having moved from MS Paint to Photoshop!

[TeMPOraL]

No, that would be comparing to software developers moving from Notepad.exe to proper code editors and IDEs.

The relevant comparison is with junior artists in the age of Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, ControlNet, BlenderGPT, etc. They're facing the same uncertainty as software devs, at the same time, so there isn't much insight to be gained here just yet.

[acapybara]

I don't really care how or where someone learned something, so long as they learned it well and can apply it.

My experience in the software industry (20 years now) showed me that the best ones were the ones who got into it out of genuine interest. They tended to write software as a hobby.

There was no shortage of CS grads who couldn't be nearly as productive.

The self-taught ones, or the ones with genuine interest who also completed a degree program were the best.

I wouldn't discriminate against "boot camp coders" or people who learn things from YouTube.

There's a lot of people who live in a different world where an expensive college/university education is not an option.

[ksrm]

It is good when people lose their jobs, actually!

[Thorentis]

That wasn't my point. It is bad that they will lose their jobs. But that doesn't mean we should keep those jobs around.

[TeMPOraL]

No, but perhaps we should take some responsibility and provide people with alternatives before destroying their lives.

[antibasilisk]

>It just raises the bar so that 3D artists who are only capable of reproducing the same boring things they saw in YouTube tutorials are no longer considered proficient.

That is of course, until GPT-6 surpasses them.

[wnkrshm]

The change of pace isn't regarded in these what-ifs usually:

Why should someone hire someone experienced when they could just cruise on patchwork solutions made by inexperienced contributors using an AI model until the next gen of an AI model is released?

Can the experienced person really outpace the model development in terms of innovation? Is it worth trying to innovate in a niche?

[boppo1]

I use blender a lot. I know what the api can do. I'm not terrified. Getting anything significant done will still take real work/knowledge because the number of potential 'parameters' of what you can do/make requires that you have the language to describe what you want. Having the posession of that language and knowing how to use blender is a very positive correlation.

[greenknight]

Imagine being able to sketch out the outline of what you are after, then say hey blender model it up. Thats what it will get to.

You have a beach, and you want a jetty, just grease pencil approximately where you want it and go Hey thats a jetty build it. and if its not quite right, generate me 50 different versions and ill pick the best.

[raincole]

> I know this tech is terrifying to actual 3D artist who don’t want be a “prompt engineer”

My predication: in the next 5~10 years, most artists won't be "prompt engineers". Instead they'll focus on fix small details on AI-generated art.

It's still kinda sad tho, because it's usually the most tedious and boring part of the process. Now AI is taking the fun part and leaving the unfun part to humans.

[ibejoeb]

Yeah, but it's kinda like making business software. Most working people need to do boring work to sustain their lifestyles.

I hope that these task-specific implementations of AI can reduce the tedium in these fields, like the way PCs did. Certainly, this advancement is leading to the ability for practically anyone to program a computer, in the general sense. Things will shift, but there will be opportunities to exploit those abilities for personal gain.

[cyrialize]

This is exactly what this post from Reddit posted to HN [0] was complaining about.

I think many people hear and see these complaints and think that people are being luddites or being afraid of losing their job. People should be looking at it for what it is - someone complaining that their entire job is changing into something they no longer enjoy.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35308498

[Tanoc]

This is terrifying to us, but not in the way you think. Tools like this place selective pressure so that increasingly only the best of the best get paid to make stuff, and their stuff influences the data sets in the future. The rest of us get forced out simply due to cost unless we're doing it as a hobby. Some artists know all too well their limits, and those that do are the most vulnerable to things like this, because these learning machines use the ever higher ceiling of human ability to determine the floor of their ability. You can't go back to the funky weird pasta men of Stable Diffusion's 2021 iteration as the default for example, but someone who started painting in 2002 might still have the same level of skill now as they did in 2010.

Text was paralleled first. Then sound was paralleled next. And now image is being paralleled. It will be on level with highest percentile of human ability just as text and sound were before it. Game devs and comic artists are already replacing texture and background artists with AI generated images, just as they used AI to create hundreds of thousands of lines of fluff dialogue before then.

[pazimzadeh]

Isn’t being a good boss kind of like being a good prompt engineer?

[TeMPOraL]

If so, then this means the good boss will soon no longer need employees, as the LLMs will deliver better results faster and cheaper.

[juvvel]

Who will buy the bosses' shit if everyone is unemployed and can't afford it? Companies can't stay afloat by just buying from each other.

[desmondw]

> Companies can't stay afloat by just buying from each other.

After an initial injection of capital, yes they can.

[singularity2001]

GPTs with access to budget

[juvvel]

So any and all commerce just becomes a different form of stock trading? I doubt it. People will still need and want tangible things.

[TeMPOraL]

> People will still need and want tangible things.

And that matters to who, and why, exactly?

Once enough of the economy is automated, there's hardly a reason for it to keep humans in the loop. It can just run in a circle, serving itself. Humans, meanwhile, will just have to barter for scraps amongst themselves.

[DrewADesign]

Most people aren't worried about being a prompt engineer-- they're worried about being a Doordash driver if it turns out that one prompt engineer can replace many professional, well-paid people in their industry. That's pretty rational.

[TeMPOraL]

> being a Doordash driver

If that job will even be available. The other day my sister sent me a photo of a little food delivery robot she spotted on the streets[0], and mind you, we're not living in Silicon Valley, but in Poland.

--

[0] - https://www.deliverycouple.com/ - based on the markings on that robot, its these people.

[anonzzzies]

There is not much to prompt engineer; the obvious trivial thing that is already happening and will make the glorious job of prompt ‘engineer’ completely redundant is AI doing the ‘engineering’ for you. One person (or AI in the future; this is already possible now for humans and gpt though) that the AI has been trained to ‘know’ and work with will blurb things into a mic and the AI will instruct millions of brains to whatever the ‘boss’ wants, translating his mumbling into actionable user and system prompts. There won’t be prompt ‘engineers’ for long.

[DrewADesign]

I think you drastically underestimate the intellectual component of other people's work behind the tools they use to perform it.

[tekknik]

In some industries sure, in many others it’s just mindless repetition. The argument is that AI is to free up their time so they can do more important things. Regardless, less demand means less wages across the board. Those that are intelectuales capable of doing more will look to the higher paying jobs once AI automates theirs away.

[DrewADesign]

That those jobs exist and might be automated doesn't negate the existence of all the others. One selfish benefit I see in this will be the hubris of my fellow software developers being taken down a few hundred notches when the market for commodity software development collapses.

[tekknik]

Self driving cars and drones are pretty close, door dash driver won’t be an option much longer either.

[elif]

I asked my friend (renowned vfx artist) what he thought about AI in his field and he mentioned some niche cases where it was useful for blending models with film etc, but overall seemed uninterested.

He offered the explanation that so much of their time is consumed with nit picking through purely aesthetic decisions that AI would not be capable of the artistic reasoning required to produce work that could even get to the "pass or reject" stage.

[jeron]

As someone who had tried my hand at Blender and failed miserably/given up years ago, I am so excited to use this to make up for my Blender skill deficiency

[whitemary]

Have you used it yet? Was it actually that easy? I can't wait to try.