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Comment by recuter | Hacker News Reader

Remember the comments about artists and creatives when DALL-E came out? I remember.

I made the case that anyone that solves problems with objectively correct solutions (programmers) would always be more at risk of AI taking their jobs than people that solve problems with subjectively correct solutions (artists, some designers).

I remember the exact opposite case being made 3 months ago. That art just needs to be good enough and all artists will starve. You need a human to be responsible for a piece if software to sue and imprison when it goes off the deep end if nothing else. Programmers aren't going anywhere.

Programmers' solutions aren't all objective, or at least shouldn't be. Simple tasks are. In some cases people are using overly low-level tooling, creating a lot of repetitive work that the AI would do better, and they might be at risk.

Objectively correct in the sense that we need 2+2 to equal 4 and we don't care how you got there kind of objectively correct.

Whereas an artist might need 2+2 to equal apple, and we can only subjectively solve for why or how.

End-user-facing software is apparently close to art. You're trying to solve a human problem and make it pretty. But even deep backend stuff is largely designed and built around how people understand tasks.

I do look forward to ChatGPT telling me why my C++ code won't link, though.

I'm fine with programmers being a less needed skillset, but most artists were not making any money. The vast vast majority were the proverbial starving artists getting pennies for commissions, fighting for some form of respect for generations. Completely segregated from the idea of a market based economy, completely unwilling to do anything that people actually value, completely unwilling to move away from "discipline and aesthetics" into "story and scarcity" which is what is valued. When doing it for fun is totally an option and is still something we can all do after AI art took off.

How do you feel about NFTs

if referring to the collections

the collectibles market always was able to benefit from transparent supplies, transparent volume. NFT's added that and people acted surprised that the collectibles market was that big, when in reality nobody knows how many baseball cards (for example) were issued, how many rare ones are really out there and more. the analog collectibles market has wash trading too.

if NFT purchasers can remove the parasocial relationships they rely on with the creators and just build their own communities for resales then it'll be fine.

I think my barber and my plumber have safer jobs from automation than average coders.

Sigh. Time to bust out my old will code for food cardboard sign.

I think we'll all get more productive is all. There's a lot of projects that just weren't economical but now may become so.

The bigger disruption will occur when Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit etc become useless from all the AI spam that's sure to overwhelm it all.

But here's the question. If these tools make existing devs 10x more productive, why bother hiring new people in the field?

The new people will still work for a little less.

My guess is that the goals for existing software projects have always been limited by how much talent could be purchased, not by vision. So unless we run out of vision, nobody is actually going to be put out of a job by this technology. We'll just shoot for bigger goals.

The tools of today, even fucking Eclipse and gah Xcode from the early 2000s make programmers far far more than 10x more productive than machine code on punch cards. By your implied logic there should be a tiny fraction of the programmers there were in the 60s.

Anyway I think this 10x more productive claim is still a bunch of BS with the current crop of AI demos.

This will create more demand for our field, not less. Increasing the power of programmers unlocks so much more potential.

Why hire new people, because companies want to do things they couldn't do before. This has been happening for decades already as tooling has evolved. It used to be very hard for average companies to write cross-platform commerce software, now it's a standard thing in the form of a website + payment processor.

There might be some companies or departments that don't need to evolve anymore, and they cut people. That happens already; the product gets finished, so they lay people off. But those people find new jobs.

Companies always have ideas on the backlog. I myself have a huge backlog of dream projects that I don't have time to implement, and I'm just one person.

Tech like this helps us make a bigger impact faster.

Let’s play this out. A company fires all the SE’s and GPT-4 takes over their place.

Who will be there to ask the right questions? Middle management?

Who can validate it spit out what you actually want? Project managers?

Who will determine what questions to ask GPT-4? Product owners?

Who will decide what type of tech (language etc…) to ask GPT-4 to write? College grads turned into corporate GPT-4 pushers?

Who will be able to determine business logic based on prior experience? GPT-4?

IMHO, a lot of the hard work for an SE is not the actual coding.

You don't need to fire all software engineers. You could let's say replace 75% of them with GPT.

Those software engineers are going to be very overloaded.

Will they be troubleshooting 100% of the code with only 25% of the staff?

GPT might become a tool in our arsenal but not a replacement. It needs to be able to say I don’t know before it spits out nonsense.

It takes fewer people to maintain a system than it does to build it. You do not need a team of 7 engineers to stick around to read logs and code, you need exactly one, and in all likelihood he's going to spend most of his time watching YouTube because he's so out of practice that if anything was wrong the AI would most likely find it before him, and when he does find something he's going to just ask the AI to fix it instead of exerting the mental effort to do it himself.

I’ll take the Pepsi Challenge on GPT-4 replacing SEs. It’s the same take I’ve had on self-driving. Outside of very niche situations it’s never going mainstream.

The only people in the short term who are going to greatly benefit from GPT coding are people selling tutorials for using GPT to code.

You could replace 75% of them with a rubber duck. Soon you might replace 22.5% of them with GPT.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

If you want to do a $100 bet I’ll bet you in 5 years that won’t happen. I’ll even take it further, I’ll bet you $100 a year for the next five years it won’t make a huge difference. I’ll pay you in full early if it happens and you can wait to pay me in full after 5 years.

I dislike betting money at all and I think $100 is fair.

So far, I haven't seen GPT being used as a tool for programming by non-programmers.

The problem is and always been how do you describe what you want the computer to do to the computer. This is where this will see some traction as a tool that helps developers do this faster, but my bet is that these sorts of systems will still work a lot better using an artificial language to state the requirements and these advances will be integrated into our languages and compilers.

only until the barber and plumber market is swamped with retrained former average coders ...

> I think my barber and my plumber have safer jobs from automation than average coders.

Possible, but their 'advantage' is unlikely to last more than a few years.

I remember it came out at the same time as GitHub copilot and a lot of people here said we might need to confront the idea that some development roles may not be long for this earth.

I sure do love seeing smug people get their comeuppance, unfortunately I expect them to just double down on the cope even when the reality is blinding

I remember it being vastly overhyped about how artists were now obsolete, but it really hasn't happened. People have quickly became very attuned to the "AI art style"--humans are excellent at pattern recognition, after all--and if anything, it's made people appreciate how important an artists' individual style and attention to detail is.

People don’t make art for money (mostly)

People do write code for money (mostly)

See the difference? How would you feel if developers earned as much as artists do?

I don't really know what you're getting at. My point is that DALL-E/Stable Diffusion hasn't cut into the market for actual paid artists. Like, at all. Unlike what the doomsayers predicted. Software developers should feel equally as threatened, which is to say, not at all.

I’m getting at the fact that “art” isn’t a major cost for the most valuable companies in the world. Software development labor is an enormous cost.

There is no financial incentive to replace paid artists. There is an enormous financial incentive to reduce software development headcount.

> There is no financial incentive to replace paid artists. There is an enormous financial incentive to reduce software development headcount.

Older folks will remember when the solution to this was to outsource development to low-cost regions like South American or Southeast Asia. You can ask ChatGPT how that went.

If people don’t make art for money there wouldn’t be such a huge blowback from AI art.

People need to survive. Making 400k/yr is a bit more than survival.

I'm sorry but am I the only one experiencing time dilation? You can't say ' X was supposed to be a big deal but was not' when the number of months since X began is single-digit.

Come back in ten years and tell me that there was no threat.

Also, for anyone living under a rock, the 'AI art style' --- by which you probably mean MidJourney 3 style --- has been steadily disappearing across MJ 4 and 5.

So, yes, actually, artists may now be 'obsolete', at least in the sense of 'viable form of capitalism for an adult North American to pursue as a profession'.

Circumstances for artists were already the worst they'd ever been, in real terms, even before this. Going forward, 'graphic designer', like 'music engineer', is going to be five people with real talent and 20,000 cool kids with trust funds. Everyone else fights for a job at Wal-Mart.

Best queue for your shift, the pinnies that fit well always get grabbed first

It's much too soon to say, no? AI art is going to keep getting better quickly, and DALLE-2 only came out six months ago.

Progress can come to a screeching halt at any point. We saw this with self-driving cars previously: the AI true believers were certain self-driving would be everywhere within 5 years... in 2015. Now the idea of a self-driving car has mostly been abandoned.

Let's get at least one company, at least one, replacing its graphic design department with DALL-E, or its development team with GPT, before calling an entire profession obsolete.

It absolutely has happened.

I've seen intense rage and despair for even top tier 2D artists, Japanese, Chinese, Western all alike. Like top of industry, massive fanbase, they all understand there is no sugarcoating it anymore.

AI improved from 5-year-old scribble to crushing 90% of artists in technical execution within 9 months. So they had no time to process it at all, and had to cope with shock and denial.

Now virtually all traditional 2d artist jobs are on the chopping block, its just inertia keeping them employed for another year or two. At top Chinese game studios like Tencent and Mihoyo, they are already intensely experimenting with AI workflows. And many indie game studios are pretty much already using AI for most concept art.

Artist jobs won't disappear, but they'll become hybrids of 3d modelling, SD prompting, python scripting, model training, and photoshopping. For many artists this means the workflows they spent decades honing is now gone. Also, most of them love drawing, so art jobs that don't involve drawing are despairing to them.

Those who fare best, are those who don't care much about drawing, but storytelling (Say Mangaka), they will be freed from drawing 14 hours a day, and cut their workloads in half.

Note, I think artist jobs will increase and pay better. The true industries in threat are non-virtual entertainment, such as tourism, concerts. They'll be competing with AI augmented artists that can produce awe-inspiring works in weeks not years.

Universal World's hogwarts parks are admirable. But they'll soon be competing against fully realized hogwarts (already modelled in Hogwarts legacy, without AI), that are then filled with fully responsive AIs whom you can actually talk to (Courtesy of GPT5,6,7).

AI will create massive value, but it'll also bring massive, extremely uncomfortable dislocations. Better try to adapt AI as soon as possible, and analyze how your role will transform.

> It absolutely has happened.

Could you list some examples of companies that have laid off their art departments to use DALL-E/SD/etc?

Could you list some examples of companies with an art department? Sterling Cooper doesn't count.

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