[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