Comment by kbos87 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kbos87 | Hacker News Reader

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First: This strikes me as truly amazing - but my mind immediately goes to the economic impact of something like this. Personally I try not to be an alarmist about the potential for jobs to be automated away, but how strikingly good this is makes me wonder if we just haven't seen AI that is good enough to automate away large parts of the workforce.

Seeing the "lovestruck cup of boba" reminded me of an illustration a friend of mine did for a startup a few years back. It would be a lot easier and less time consuming for someone to simply request such an image from an AI assistant. If I were a graphic artist or photographer, this would scare me.

I don't know what the right answer is here. I have little to no faith in regulators to help society deal with the sweeping negative effects even one new AI-based product looks like it could have on a large swath of the economy. Short of regulation and social safety nets, I wonder if society will eventually step up and hold founders and companies accountable when they cause broad negative economic impacts for their own enrichment.

Making goods and services cheaper is 'negative economic impact'? I'd argue the opposite. Greater productivity has been humanities goal ever since they first started sharpening rocks and sticks. I'd argue that it is desirable. Yes, as you point out, greater productivity has disadvantages at first also. See for example the mechanisation of agriculture, people lose their jobs. But as you point out yourself, the blow can easily be softened with better social safety nets.

>but how strikingly good this is

it's good by the standards of machine-generated images but it's not comparable to the work of an artist because it has no intent and it's still in many ways incoherent and lacks details, composition, motives and so on. It's like ML generated music. It sounds okay in a technical sense but it lacks the intent of a composer, and I don't see a lot of people listening to AI generated music for that reason.

If anything it'll help graphic artists to create sketches or ideas they can start from.

I believe founders/companies can and do "cause broad negative economic impacts for their own enrichment", but creating a lower-cost path to the same good/result is a good thing fundamentally. Yes, this can cause greater income/life-experience inequality, and we should adjust for that, but in ways that do not punish innovation. In short, we should optimize for human happiness by better sharing the wealth rather than by limiting it.

One perspective is: anything that can be automated (thus lowered in cost) should be. For drudge-work, of course that's good. For some examples, showing that it can be automated shows that it IS drudge-work. But replacing a creative illustrator? That is not drudge-work, it is a fulfilling and enjoyable profession. I don't think it's clear that changing it to become a hobby (because it's no longer viable as a profession) is "a good thing fundamentally". I would need to hear further arguments on this.

This very quickly gets into "what's the point of it all?" and I'll admit that I don't have the answer. :)

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