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Comment by aetherspawn | Hacker News Reader

Wow, this is cooked.

In a few years, deep learning is going to make any sort of development of real skill feel as archaic as assembler. Learn guitar? What's the point. The little magic black box soon-to-be-smaller-than-your-smartphone can make just about any song based on minimal inputs (i.e. a beat-boxed backing track). You'll be able to generate unique and stylized paintings of your relatives and pets in seconds. Probably you'll be able to generate printable 3D objects from descriptions. Engineers will be able to sketch parts from one perspective and have the details automatically fleshed-out from best-practices learned across millions of similar parts.

You'll never get away with an illegal U-turn ever again because the city will pull footage from peoples' internet-of-crap dashcams and the machine learning algorithms will comb the feeds and send fines directly to your mailbox with basically no human intervention.

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Those mostly sound like good things to me. I’m sure people who enjoy music or art will still do it regardless. The people who might enjoy it but don’t quite have the talent will have more powerful tools to help them express their creativity. And as for the engineering, that seems like an absolutely good thing, as long as we don’t get too complacent and overly trust the machines to do it for us without double checking.

Not saying it's a bad thing at all, it's just going to be very different from the world we know.

People still learn to draw actual objects despite photographs existing for longer than any of our lifetimes.

I'm not convinced. Yes, you will be able to create faces, drawings, 3d models and music just by telling the computer what you want. But I doubt that you can cross the uncanny valley of nearly lifelike artificial output to things made by a skilled human.

It's one thing to have endless amounts of texture, music, content etc. But you also need to combine them into a playable game for example where all those different parts need to match. And the game still needs to feel fresh and make fun. Will a computer alone be able to do that? Can a hobbyist do that?

In contrary, I believe tools like this will increase the required skills someone needs to bring with him to make something worthwhile. That's why tools like Game Engines, 3D Modelling Software or Music DAWs get more complex year by year.

Case in point: do you believe a hobbyist will be able to do something like that [1]? No, it will be a team of dozens and dozens of specialists who will raise to bar even higher and higher. But they will profit the most of artificially generated art, which they can manually adjust and provide the final touches, to turn something generic into something great.

[1] https://youtu.be/d8B1LNrBpqc?t=87

> You'll never get away with an illegal U-turn ever again because the city will pull footage from peoples' internet-of-crap dashcams and the machine learning algorithms will comb the feeds and send fines directly to your mailbox with basically no human intervention.

This is not a "in a few years" thing in some places: https://youtu.be/taZJblMAuko?t=1536

Most likely, a colorful decal print on your car will make you appear to be a flying panda to all those AI algorithms, thereby effectively making it impossible for you to get a speeding ticket.

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