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Comment by olivertaylor | Hacker News Reader

Television will kill movies because people don’t have to leave their homes. The entertainment industry is doomed because people now have social media. Recruiters won’t have jobs any more because we have LinkedIn. Restaurants are obsolete because anyone can learn to cook with YouTube.

I work in an animation adjacent field and this is hogwash. What happens when the person responsible for the creative content says “I don’t like the way this part of the sky looks in the background”? Or “The way this character falls down the stairs is too violent and not funny enough”? Who’s going to sit there with the AI and make it do the thing that someone has asked for? It’s not going to be the director or producer because they have too many other things to do. They will delegate that task to someone. Is that person an animator? Does it matter that they’re working with an AI instead of moving keyframes around?

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>Does it matter that they’re working with an AI instead of moving keyframes around?

Yes, because prompting an AI requires much less skill than animating it yourself. Do you think "AI prompters" will earn the same amount as animators?

Depends - at what level does the result become "good enough"? I suspect that with animation we are still far away from this, so the expert "AI prompters" and those who can fix the results will be in high demand. It takes a lot of know-how to be able to tell what is wrong with some animation.

> prompting an AI requires much less skill than animating it yourself

s/much less skill/different stills/

> Do you think "AI prompters" will earn the same amount as animators?

I do, because animation is not inherently valuable. The value they are paid for is solving a problem, the same problem AI prompters will solve. It is totally valid to argue that AI will reduce the total amount of animators, I think that will happen.

> s/much less skill/different stills/

Much less skill and different skills. Declaring that it will take the same level of skill (measured in mean amount of training and practice to do the job) in order to make a finished product is an appeal to the law of averages. It does not take the same amount of skill to typeset a book well in InDesign as it did to typeset a book in e.g. the 1930s.

True, but there are way more typesetters employed today than in the 1930s, and what they are able to do with their skills has changed a lot. I guess I’m just arguing that animation will follow the same path.

> It is totally valid to argue that AI will reduce the total amount of animators, I think that will happen.

I don’t think that will happen because I believe induced demand is a thing. I think animators will produce more and more efficiently, I also think that amateurs will be animating stuff that they’re currently not animating because it is too hard. I think we will see a huge proliferation in animation as the craft becomes easier, and with the proliferation professionals will not only keep their jobs, but they will actually see their profession expand.

As a comparison, the textile industry still employs millions of experts despite the craft having been automated with the automatic loom as early as the 1780s.

I wonder about this. The global total of agricultural workers is lower than it ever was, even if the total output is higher than it’s ever been.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-people-employed...

I think there is a fundamental difference between creative work like apparel, programming or animation and basic necessities or basic materials like mining, farming, dying, etc.

To continue with the fabric industry. The automatic removed jobs in weaving fabric, but it made fabric cheaper and created many times those jobs in sewing this fabric.

> Do you think "AI prompters" will earn the same amount as animators?

The typical animator doesn't make much. I knew one who worked for a well known movie animation studio. They hire as needed and then let them go easily after the movie is made. He made enough to pay bills, but not much more.

Television has killed movies for me. Wouldn’t be surprised if box office receipts go on a downward trend, at least domestically. Maybe globalization allowing the global poor to pay for movies will save it though.

Yeah, but the total amount of money earned in movies or TV has only gone up. As has the total number of jobs in the industry.

Exactly this. Having WordPress and themes available didn't eliminate income of those who build websites, they just focus on building better sites (or on building plugins for WP).

As it has been with every technology. Sure, the dynamics and specifics change dramatically, and maybe there are less people doing the work, but the idea that those workers are somehow not needed doesn’t make sense.

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