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below-the-rnbw t1_irea8hh wrote

God fucking dammit, I clearly spent my entire life learning all the wrong things, where the fuck do you go from here?

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mootcat t1_irfbc9z wrote

It's genuinely paralyzed me. Any digital task will rapidly be taken over by AI and most things that can be automated with robots affordably will be. Interpersonal skills seem like a decent bet for now. Maybe engineering or electronic repair? Honestly I don't think it will matter that much in the long term.

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Bakoro t1_irfin4a wrote

Do whatever will make you the most money within ten years, sit on cash until the next market crash, and buy any land you can get your grubby mitts on.

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ChurchOfTheHolyGays t1_irft42l wrote

The next crash won't take 10 years we have entered a stage where the next crisis begins before the last one ends

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kmtrp t1_irfsvr1 wrote

What the other guy said, try to cash in. I guess the only safe jobs for a while are those where the human touch is needed. But yes we are fucked.

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UnionPacifik t1_irfurte wrote

Alternatively, work is about to be a thing of the past for most everyone.

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kmtrp t1_irgdk7v wrote

I agree, but I can't imagine how those events will play out. Even in the most optimistic scenarios, millions of people will face a miserable experience, regardless of their willingness to find jobs, re-train, and so on.

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cwallen t1_irflti2 wrote

Learn to use the new tools, and work at a higher level. What used to take you hours can now take minutes. The AI can do the grunt work, but for now somebody is still needed to direct it.

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gthing t1_irfvtr1 wrote

This. Every advancement just raises the level.

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AllNinjas t1_irf4a1u wrote

Learn programming in order to facilitate your passion in a different form?

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FilthyCommieAccount t1_irf6a2x wrote

Pretty sure programming is also in the process of getting solved.

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BearStorms t1_irfmgeu wrote

It is, but it is a much harder problem to solve. Art that is 98% correct (and we are not there yet) is nearly perfect but code that is 98% correct is utter garbage less valuable than nothing (since debugging and fixing automatically generated code with ton bugs will probably be more work than writing it again from scratch).

But tools that will help you out like Copilot are already here and they are pretty decent. But when tools like DALL-E or SD could mean a productivity multiplier of let's say 100x for a certain kind of artist, Copilot multiplier is perhaps 1.2 at best. Especially since gathering requirements is usually more than half of the battle in a typical software project.

But yeah, I'm a software engineer and always thought that this will be the last job to go - well, I'm not so certain about that now. But not too worried in the short to mid term yet. However concept artists and illustrators - they're already fucked.

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FilthyCommieAccount t1_irfsi1u wrote

Concept artists and illustrators aren't fucked yet. They will be though very shortly within the next few years. Remember image generation systems struggle with a few things that are pretty important such as consistency, hands, eyes etc. There are workarounds by using multiple tools for all of these except really consistency. It would be difficult to get a model to output the same specific teddybear protagonist in a children's book.

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BearStorms t1_irfu02c wrote

>It would be difficult to get a model to output the same specific teddybear protagonist in a children's book.

Isn't this exactly what Dreambooth is for?

But yeah, the tools are still immature but remember it really only blew up few months ago and the progress has been insane. "Within the next few years" is way too generous. I bet the crunch already started for some and in a year it's going to be a bloodbath for the ones who are not firmly established yet. I'm talking about stuff like concept artists, illustrators, stock photography, gamedev artists, basically all kinds of "visual artist tradesmen". But lot of other visual artists are gonna be just fine, high art, conceptual art is not going anywhere (but many of these artists will adopt these tools as well of course).

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FilthyCommieAccount t1_irg5uw5 wrote

>"Within the next few years" is way too generous.

I don't think so. Even if the perfect tool set came out today it would still take time to switch over. The technology is close but the last 2-3% matter a lot.

>I bet the crunch already started for some and in a year it's going to be a bloodbath for the ones who are not firmly established yet. I'm talking about stuff like concept artists, illustrators, stock photography, gamedev artists, basically all kinds of "visual artist tradesmen".

I think gamedev artists are the safest of the list because AI generated 3d modeling isn't as good as 2d stuff right now and 3d artists are also doing shit like rigging and animations. It'll happen eventually, soon actually but not as fast as the others.

>But lot of other visual artists are gonna be just fine, high art, conceptual art is not going anywhere (but many of these artists will adopt these tools as well of course).

Human made art will still exist agreed. Computers are way better than us at chess and yet we still compete. It's just that most art produced for mass consumption will probably be made by media synthesis models in a decade or two.

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BearStorms t1_irg7t8p wrote

I mean let me ask you a question - you want to write a small series children's book and need 20 illustrations. Do you commission a regular artist who will charge you $2000 and deliver in a month or do you contract an artist that will utilize txt2img, charge you $200 and deliver in 3 days provided the results are comparable quality and meet you vision? And as the tools get better this contrast will be even more stark... Lower tier illustration market may be completely self-serve and the cost will be virtually 0.

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FilthyCommieAccount t1_irgfmmn wrote

I agree I just think it's going to take time to set up the infrastructure and just the awareness that the capability even exists.

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BearStorms t1_irghd41 wrote

True. But may be quite quick since the cost savings are going to be immense. And that's what really matters after all. Big customers of commissioned digital art are already on this 100% guaranteed. Like big publishers and what not.

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sidianmsjones t1_irg4ajb wrote

I’m already creating books using only MJ and my own designs.

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FilthyCommieAccount t1_irg6gxf wrote

Right but usually people are somewhat restrained in their design choices because of the limitations inherent in the software. Like I've seen comics that were illustrated using MJ and they were impressive but it was really difficult to generate consistent characters across pages so they'd usually focus more on backgrounds and scenery.

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sidianmsjones t1_irg6ue3 wrote

Agreed but there are lots of other cases like mine where I didn’t need consistency. In such cases that is work directly taken away from an illustrator.

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FilthyCommieAccount t1_irgfdov wrote

Sure but at the moment I don't think it's really impacting illustraters that much. It's primarily allowing people who wouldn't have been able to afford an illustrator in the first place to actually make stuff. It'll happen but not yet. I think it's a couple years off until they start getting majorly impacted.

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sidianmsjones t1_irghcb0 wrote

Guess I could agree on that. But yeah that moment is basically around the corner. Two years absolute max.

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AllNinjas t1_irf8mil wrote

It is becoming more simplified in my opinion and the barrier of entry becomes easier, but the uniqueness that everyone has the ability to bring when it comes to solving a problem they see needs to be fixed and willing to deal with may not be something every artificial intelligence created will be able to solve in my opinion

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FilthyCommieAccount t1_irfavcj wrote

Imho some of our most impressive models are language models. You don't have to solve programming completely. If you can simplify it so much that someone could take a few classes on programming logic and then use natural language instead of a formal language that would be enough to massively disrupt things.

Basically it's the equivalent of spending years honing an art in order to create a beautiful piece or taking a semester or two in art history and using an image generation model to get what you want.

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Ezekiel_W t1_irfk1fu wrote

You will speak software into existence within 3 years.

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6thReplacementMonkey t1_irfygrb wrote

They are trying, but the hard part of programming isn't writing code, it's making a good design that solves the problem and can also be changed in the future.

AI might start eliminating jobs for shitty programmers soon, but there's a long ways to go before it will be able to produce decent software based on the kinds of requirements documentation developers get now.

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FilthyCommieAccount t1_irg67mh wrote

I think what's going to happen first is that you will have programmers but they will just use natural language. Then some time after that they will get replaced.

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gthing t1_irfvr92 wrote

I was going to do that but now I just tell GitHub copilot what I want it to do.

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AllNinjas t1_irgm5w5 wrote

Copilot’s that advance?

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gthing t1_irx41ct wrote

It has enabled me to bring my ideas to life more than any other tool ever. It has changed the trajectory of my life.

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AllNinjas t1_irynck0 wrote

As it should. Programmers are still going to be a need, at a more specific and temporary level in some regardless, permanent in others

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Ominoiuninus t1_irf6bnl wrote

The thing here is that no job or profession or skill is safe from the coming automation that is AI. Programmers will write the code that ends up writing the code of future AI programs. The future is weird.

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BearStorms t1_irfl7mn wrote

Honestly what's weird is that physical jobs, especially irregular ones, may be the hardest to automate. Stuff like a contractor remodeling your kitchen or plumber fixing your clogged sink. Hard problem for an AI to begin with and the need for very complex robotics make me think that trades like these are safe for quite a while...

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kaityl3 t1_irfvwwc wrote

Was talking about this with my friend. I think her job will be one of the last two go; she's a vet tech. Handling lots of agitated animals of various sizes, examining them, keeping them calm... I feel like that would be difficult (though ofc far from impossible) to have an AI/robot do.

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gthing t1_irfvpb0 wrote

It’s never been about the assets, it’s about how you put them together.

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6thReplacementMonkey t1_irfy8ug wrote

By the time AI truly can fully replace humans, we won't need to worry about jobs because we'll either all be dead, or we'll be in a post-scarcity fully automated luxury communist utopia.

In the meantime, just be as good as you can at what you do. Even if AI can do 99% of the work, that last one percent still needs to get done. In this case it might look like tweaks or edits to AI-generated files. Or it might be having the depth of understanding to know how the initial image files need to be generated to get the best results. Or it might mean working with AI developers directly, or helping them build datasets.

If you are always striving to be the best you can be and are always looking for ways to learn new things and improve, then you'll be ok. And I think everyone should be doing that anyway, whether AI is learning to do their jobs or not.

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