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627 points cratermoon | 5 comments | | HN request time: 1.504s | source
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gyomu ◴[] No.44461457[source]
Broadly agreed with all the points outlined in there.

But for me the biggest issue with all this — that I don't see covered in here, or maybe just a little bit in passing — is what all of this is doing to beginners, and the learning pipeline.

> There are people I once respected who, apparently, don’t actually enjoy doing the thing. They would like to describe what they want and receive Whatever — some beige sludge that vaguely resembles it. That isn’t programming, though.

> I glimpsed someone on Twitter a few days ago, also scoffing at the idea that anyone would decide not to use the Whatever machine. I can’t remember exactly what they said, but it was something like: “I created a whole album, complete with album art, in 3.5 hours. Why wouldn’t I use the make it easier machine?”

When you're a beginner, it's totally normal to not really want to put in the hard work. You try drawing a picture, and it sucks. You try playing the guitar, and you can't even get simple notes right. Of course a machine where you can just say "a picture in the style of Pokémon, but of my cat" and get a perfect result out is much more tempting to a 12 year old kid than the prospect of having to grind for 5 years before being kind of good.

But up until now, you had no choice and to keep making crappy pictures and playing crappy songs until you actually start to develop a taste for the effort, and a few years later you find yourself actually pretty darn competent at the thing. That's a pretty virtuous cycle.

I shudder to think where we'll be if the corporate-media machine keeps hammering the message "you don't have to bother learning how to draw, drawing is hard, just get ChatGPT to draw pictures for you" to young people for years to come.

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raincole ◴[] No.44461707[source]
People will write lengthy and convoluted explanation on why LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is. Humans have been looking for easier and lazier ways to do things since the dawn of civilization.

Tech never ever prevents people who really want to hone their skills from doing so. World record of 100m sprint kept improving even since car was invented. World record of how many digits of pi memorized kept improving even when a computer does that indefinitely times better.

It's ridiculous to think drawing will become a lost art because of LLM/Diffusal models when we live in a reality where powerlifting is a thing.

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zwnow ◴[] No.44461789[source]
My guy its not only about the art its about killing passion and the lifeline of people. Your take is incredibly ignorant to people who value human created work. These things will kill industries. What jobs should people work in, who got their income cut by LLMs? Force them into blue collar work?
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JW_00000 ◴[] No.44461942[source]
But isn't that the same as saying: what about all the horse carrier drivers who lost their jobs due to cars? What about all the bank tellers we lost after inventing the automated teller machine?
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1. zwnow ◴[] No.44461978[source]
There is a difference in killing off passion work and mundane work. We are also killing off empathy while we are at it.
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2. dale_glass ◴[] No.44462094[source]
I don't think there's a real difference. Thinking a job is "mundane" IMO is mostly a case of not working that job. Many "mundane" jobs have depth and rewards, even if not in every instance.

I've heard people express that they liked working in retail. By extension somebody must have enjoyed being a bank teller. After all, why not? You get to talk to a lot of people, and every time you solve some problem or answer a question and get thanked for it you get a little rush of endorphins.

Many jobs that suck only suck due to external factors like having a terrible boss or terrible customers, or having to enforce some terrible policy.

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3. zwnow ◴[] No.44462148[source]
This sounds like a strawman tbh, I have worked retail for years and I do not know a single person enjoying retail work. Especially not cashiers. I can understand what you are on about, but do you think this is the majority of people? The issue is being able to support yourself which these mundane jobs hardly are able to. Personally I want these mundane things automated because I don't want to interact with people. I appreciate art though and I want to support human art. I appreciate everything from ancient architecture and stone cutting to renaissance paintings to basement drawings of amateurs. Art used to have character and now its all the same AI slop. Video games will become unplayable for me in the near future. Advertisements will be fully AI slop. Sure there are still artists out there, but they get overshadowed by AI slop.
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4. badpun ◴[] No.44462198[source]
A lot of people who are passionate about creative fields work jobs that are pretty mundane, e.g. painting drab environmental textures every day for the next iteration of Call of Duty, or cutesy barfy crap for the next Candy Crush Saga. The jobs are very rarely alligned with their own taste and interests, plus they're terribly dull because, as a specialist, you're constantly working only one specific kind of assignments.
5. dale_glass ◴[] No.44462277{3}[source]
I mean, retail has many different instances of it. Yes, I can imagine working in a busy supermarket owned by a giant like Walmart would be unpleasant.

But imagine working in a nice cafe in a quiet small town, or a business that's not too frantically paced, like a clothing store. Add some perks like not always doing the same job and a decent boss, and it shouldn't be too bad. Most any job can be drastically improved by decreasing the workload, cutting hours and adding some variety. I don't think being a cashier is inherently miserable. It's just the way we structure things most of the time makes it suck.

Just like you think a human touch makes art special, a human touch can make a mundane job special. A human serving coffee instead of a machine can tell you about what different options are available, recommend things, offer adjustments a machine might not, chat about stuff while it's brewing... You may end up patronizing a particular cafe because you like the person at the counter.