Tangentially related: Recently I was thinking of commissioning an artist to do some album art for me. I had a specific concept in mind and it needed to have a certain look to it but I didn't mind if the actual art was physically painted or digital.
What struck me is there's no website for hiring an artist. ArtStation has a Shop section (pre-made art for sale) but no Commissions section. Fiverr has some artists taking commissions but none I could find of really good quality, and there's AI art spam now as well (takes commissions but just sends you an AI prompt result). Reddit has two art commission subreddits but there aren't really many artists there. And both Fiverr and Reddit's main selling point is cheap art commissions, but I was happy to pay more for something good.
Unless you know an artist already that suits the style you're after, and they're currently taking commissions, it seems quite hard to find anyone. I kinda thought I'd be able to go to, like, CommissionArt.com and filter by Traditional -> Oils -> Landscapes or whatever to find someone perfect.
To everyone who says hire a real artist instead of using AI - where do you go to find them?
Most of us are reticent to find some centralized place because usually those places get invaded by people trying to shill AI stuff, people spamming requests, scams, and a few toxic egos that try to push down anyone they see as competition. Look at what happened to DeviantArt as an example.
To keep workloads manageable and make sure people don't harass us we usually just put up posts on our social media or forums in known artist hangouts, and then once we have enough work we take the posts down. Things like Bluesky make it easier because people share the post for us, giving us a wider reach, but it still relies on the network effect rather than centralized advertising. Those younger than me have transitioned to doing this kind of stuff with Discord servers, though I have no clue how anyone keeps track of what's going on since it's just a chat client.
You could go to a spec work treadmill like 99designs and look for one. Browse the design categories and from there the portfolios of those artists whose work appeals to you and fit the style you are looking for and then go to their website because real artists have a website.
A lot of artists on Twitter take commissions, but it's an informal process done via private messages and of course there's no way to search by art style (other than regularly following artists you like and getting similar creators who may or may not take commissions recommended to you). Essentially you find them by being part of an existing community.
A lot of the smaller and more amateur ones seem to struggle and end up begging, but I guess the pros have enough of a regular following that they get sufficient work through this system.
One way to find illustrators is through Bluesky. Many illustrators showcase their work there and often have portfolio websites, which sometimes features additional artists. They also usually indicate their upcoming availability.
I’ve messaged people directly, after seeing their work on social media. I’m always ready to hear “no” but so far they’ve been willing. I’m also an artist, and I go out of my way to make art for acquaintances who ask.
The Ai con artistery on fiverr is outrageous . I pay for a human and get canned soulless spam. What ai does with wordplay and neologisms is just atrocious. It sucks at everything new or bleeding edge.
It’s interesting how in music the same application of ML swamps companies like Suno in trillion dollar lawsuits, yet in graphics and text no one cares, even though graphics and text fall victim to the same sleight of hand.
It feels like a big tech company can just ignore the law, unless another big company stands up against it (and hopefully helps the average Joe as a side-effect).
The irony is in their scraping of all data within their significant radius, and yet the likes of twitter and facebook barely let you access anything of thiers without a login.
If they're scraping data from everywhere to feed their beast, then their data must also be open and scrape-able.
This does not, however, help the current situation where they sit upon the shoulders of millions of creative folks and provide no credit whatsoever, whilst also (actively or passively - by their existence and capability) attempting to make those very same creative folks redundant.
Will there be such a thing as AI stagnation if and when creative works for "it" to digest either are no longer created or no longer accessible to 'the great crawlers'?
Maybe artists can sell their works for ingestion in this scenario? Maybe that should already be the case...
Also, the low cost illustration business was already not amazing with the copyright law. Try ordering a few icons on Fiverr for example and see how many are repurposed from other sites.
On the lower end it's not as much whether the assets are in part or fully stolen, but who does it.
> Try ordering a few icons on Fiverr for example and see how many are repurposed from other sites.
In which case would you order icons if they're not custom enough to be unrepurposable? Just curious, Iconify and some basic composition have been good enough for me so far.
Intuitively, there’s quite a big difference between a situation where some ‘artist’ may be sneakily repurposing preexisting work (I don’t think you’ll find a reputable artist doing that, and even a not-so-reputable repurposing artist would at least check that the license allows it), and a situation where a household name corporation only repurposes preexisting work without any regard for licensing.
power can ignore the law, for which money is the most often proxy. we need to get back to talking about who has power and who doesn't as this pretending that we're outside of the nature of such things increasingly has no clothes.
I think that transformation is difficult to appraise from within. In the future we’ll have a much more clear sense of how we feel about the invention of the automobile.
I think that the calm, more disciplined take of “the sky is always falling, it’s never falling. There’s other, probably better ways to be creative” is the one.
Today my eight year old sat at the PC for hours using Scratch to make what was essentially a Flash animation. He had PS5 access, Switch access, iPad access. Nope. Wanted to bash his head against loops and timers for hours.
The craving to be creative is insatiable. It’ll continue to take on new forms.
Professions die in the face of competition, that's nothing new.
What's more perilous is that the internet will soon cease to be a useful way to access and distribute knowledge, and has been transformed from a resource for learning and sharing into a clear-cut forest which nobody will replant.
This is not a very substantial analysis of the industry and I'd be interested in a more comprehensive diagnosis. I believe there are coincidental factors in industries that typically employ illustrators and other artists that are affecting the market that are not AI, namely the market conditions since late 2022. To give the games industry as an example, the industry grew unnaturally during Covid, everyone thought that trend would continue and there was a lot of money and hiring thrown into it. The industry is returning to the normal trend line and it's still highly profitable, but layoffs are happening because executives are not hitting financial forecasts. Similarly, marketing budgets have been slashed across industries as the economy slowed down, and design work dried up in tech because nobody is raising money except the people who think they can replace creative labor with AI.
One thing that I'm not seeing in this thread is the reputational risk of using AI, especially in artistic works like games. AI imagery is generic, lazy, and is seeing a backlash from the public. It's a negative quality marker even if it's trendy in tech spaces. There's definitely a lot of people in executive leadership and management who think they can replace all kinds of labor with AI right now, but from what I've seen, that has not played out as expected in the real workforce. The actual reason this guy is losing half his business is probably more due to people cutting back on discretionary spending more than AI taking jobs.
Anyone that has ever done spec work has already faced just how demoralizing this will all be. When you do spec work for design, it's basically everyone just submitting their designs for the buyer to decide which one to pick. All the designers copy the designs that are getting the "this is going in the right direction" feedback. The average person will now be able to just say "make me something just like that" for free. It's basically the end, and only a world war will reset things. Best of luck all.
I'll add one other thing about war:
Humans are not exactly a peaceful bunch. A bunch of people with nothing to do start gang wars, often on a national scale, country versus country, or country-men versus counter-men. It's a hot-take for sure, but, we're trending towards war and that's especially true if AI can easily be used to rile each other up with ease.
Yeah, this is dead now, never do any "show me your work and we'll think about it" ever again. People will just steal with LLMs and there's not much that can be done.
It is always tough to predict the future. Two years ago I would have agreed but today it seems that we are on the asymptotic part of the curve - waiting for another breakthrough of some sort. AI helps a lot but is nowhere near replacing anyone (for coding at least).
It seems that should be able to replace 1st level support for a bank or something like that but those industries move very slowly so even that could be years away still.
> It seems that should be able to replace 1st level support for a bank or something like that but those industries move very slowly so even that could be years away still.
Klarna is similar to a bank and they tried replacing 1st level support with a chatbot. Spoiler: it didn't work for them, so I wouldn't keep my hopes so high for banks.
LLM’s can reason, assuming a definition of “reason” that doesn’t exclude them because of the way they do it. Not all of them and none perfectly, but they certainly have passed the threshold.
Try disproving your own theory. Can you craft a problem that requires reasoning that an LLM can solve?
there are at least two levels of reasoning. the reasoning that makes logical decisions that do not benefit from lateral thinking. and then higher-order reasoning that is fueled by lateral thinking and motivation to achieve. this higher-order reasoning seems to require inputs that human biology provides.
It's definitely reasoning. Or at least it's doing the same sort of thing as what you call reasoning. A few orders of magnitude less good at it than you, for now. But there's no bright line.
In terms of capability, the trendline from 2020 to 2023 it is impossibly steep. From 2023 to now is much shallower based on my usage / experience with AI.
That's just about a yearish or more. The trendline I'm talking about is the past 15 years.
But that being said, I would say the trendline is the same. LLMs were just an exponential and existential jump in progress that dwarfed anything in the last 15 years. The inevitable slow down after the blip just makes you feel as if it's become much shallower. But in reality, it's the same, and we'll have more and more break throughs.
In terms of personal impact, it looks more like a step function that starts in 2022 with incremental improvement after that. Of course, progress was being made prior to that (AlexNet, AlphaGo, Transformers, etc.) but these things didn't have much impact until ChatGPT came along. Once that landed however, things haven't perceptibly changed that much.
Trendlines are a way to represent some statistical data.
Probability can help predict things with enough instances of an event — statistics are only a small part of how we establish a probability of a future event, and a core ingredient of even that small part is having a sufficiently representative sample (which "trendlines" usually don't).
Eg. you can get statistics for all the winning lottery tickets from the last 5 years — that won't help you predict the next one.
Sure, eventually, but does it really matter? When AI obsoletes humans, humans can focus on enjoying life. And if you still love coding, nothing’s stopping you from doing it as a hobby.
But what about people whose childhood dream was being a typist in a giant room of typists, all typing away at documents they didn’t write and barely pay attention to?
I hope you support really really progressive tax structures because pretty much all human history shows that when humans aren’t needed those with money/power do not provide for them enjoy life.
I mean, people died to get two days off a week and only work eight hours in the US. That isn’t guaranteed for a wide swath of the world population. And the idea of working only four days a week is crazy radical talk.
> Guys we all know this. Follow the trend lines. Where is AI going?
This assumes constant progress. I remember during the early days of self driving cars we were told the same: look how far we’ve come already! We’ll all be in self driving cars within 5 years. And yet, here we are.
I have no doubt we will see a ton of progress. I also have no doubt AI will take over a lot of the tedious, basic coding work people do. But replacing coders entirely? I remain skeptical.
It assumes the trendline, as it's constant. Any other assumption is lower probability.
>. I remember during the early days of self driving cars we were told the same: look how far we’ve come already! We’ll all be in self driving cars within 5 years. And yet, here we are.
5 years is a little speculative. 10 is not. At least for me, whenever I call a taxi, it's always an AI taxi. I no longer have human drivers drive me anywhere. So... that's another trendline for you to follow.
We've given AI self-driving 15 years, and we still don't really have it. And nuclear fusion, what, 75 years?
And possibly never might.
Sometimes, there is a cap to the capability, and maybe we've already reached it. Yes, there will still be small, incremental improvements. Yes, we can change the "rules" to make new tools more valuable (eg. introduce communicating roads and vehicles to make it easier for cars to be self-driving; or introduce some forms of orthogonal resiliency into software that allows us to live with the slop from LLMs).
And yes, possibly you are right too, but there is nothing definitively confirming that.
The stock market runs on feedback loops where people are trying to outguess other people that are also trying to outguess the other, that's why it's so wild.
Stocks are the worst example. Trendlines for AI has been pretty reliable for the last decade and we have a North Star that proves we haven’t hit the limit. If a human brain can exist then such intelligence artificial or not can also exist.
Can we achieve it within a practical timeframe of human civilization of, say, 10 thousand years? Or within a single lifetime (some who've worked on it early are now dead, fwiw).
Stocks are obviously a pretty bad example for your claim, because they are a clear counterpoint (in formal logic, which you appealed to, that's enough to call it a proof that trendlines do not ensure any future outcome).
And feedback loop? LLMs have gotten where they are by simply providing current state of the art at no cost to millions of people, to ensure that investment feedback loop by losing gobs of money yet keep investing. We've seen that with VC-funded companies previously too.
No. That amount of gravitational force is not realizable yet.
The human brain is on earth and exists.
>Stocks are obviously a pretty bad example for your claim, because they are a clear counterpoint (in formal logic, which you appealed to, that's enough to call it a proof that trendlines do not ensure any future outcome).
No they aren't I told you stocks are different. There are many trendlines in the world WHERE scientists use to predict things. So the fact that it's used as a statistical model makes your point completely false. Stocks have one of the most volatile movements.
>And feedback loop? LLMs have gotten where they are by simply providing current state of the art at no cost to millions of people, to ensure that investment feedback loop by losing gobs of money yet keep investing. We've seen that with VC-funded companies previously too.
>And feedback loop? LLMs have gotten where they are by simply providing current state of the art at no cost to millions of people, to ensure that investment feedback loop by losing gobs of money yet keep investing. We've seen that with VC-funded companies previously too.
That's not a feedback loop. People aren't looking at the valuation of the company and trying to bet low or high based off of other peoples attempts to do the same thing.
In stocks people literally LOOK at trendlines and bet based off of that. They both influence the trendline and they take the trendline as input into their own trading algorithm. AI is not doing this at all.
I don't think I can match the inconsistency of your "logic": human brain is on Earth so it's by definition "realizable", but fusion isn't?
"Trendlines", before being trusted by "scientists to predict things", are carefully examined and only some of them have any "probability" attached to them. Statistics is not probability (which speaks of chance for something to happen), but instead observation of past patterns. Extrapolation into the future is applied very carefully and with sufficient backing.
You also seem to suggest that OpenAI releasing ChatGPT to the public at a huge financial loss has not led to huge investment in generative AI all over the industry and all over the world since there was no "feedback loop" — my point was that this has provided a huge push by getting many smart people working on it after ChatGPT became available to everyone, thus leading to a continuing upward "trendline" in LLM development: it's as self-reinforcing as the example you give with stocks. In statistics, one aberrant huge spike like this one is usually smoothed over a longer time period: the hustlers usually look for the steepest part of the curve and promote that instead.
POTUS used to be done by AI, in the sense that a large bureaucracy of specialists filtering up through domain-specific experts and summarized by deeply experienced, large-context politicians produced results that were mostly actionable as-is.
Huge investments were made to ensure the highest quality at all layers of the gigantic org, with the more-or-less correct belief that it would improve outcomes.
The president was largely ceremonial day-to-day, and only determinative to the extent they were also head of the majority political views, which mediated the outputs of the bureaucracy.
I’m sure this sounds crazy to anyone under 25 or so, but the era of a YOLO populist autocrat who shapes the bureaucracy to be a giant vanity mirror really is a new thing.
Mixed results. It can produce a generic piece of art, but people don't want a generic piece of art, they want their exact character with all markings and colors exactly correct. It also produces a very distinct style that everyone will pick up on and call you out on.
You also won't be allowed to share your AI generated piece on most furry websites or group chats.
AI didn’t take his job, the commodification of a low-effort task did. AI might be the proximate cause but it isn’t the source of why his illustration side hustle got undercut.
Tons of boiler room illustrators in low income countries would have happily undercut him, too.
Tangentially related: Recently I was thinking of commissioning an artist to do some album art for me. I had a specific concept in mind and it needed to have a certain look to it but I didn't mind if the actual art was physically painted or digital.
What struck me is there's no website for hiring an artist. ArtStation has a Shop section (pre-made art for sale) but no Commissions section. Fiverr has some artists taking commissions but none I could find of really good quality, and there's AI art spam now as well (takes commissions but just sends you an AI prompt result). Reddit has two art commission subreddits but there aren't really many artists there. And both Fiverr and Reddit's main selling point is cheap art commissions, but I was happy to pay more for something good.
Unless you know an artist already that suits the style you're after, and they're currently taking commissions, it seems quite hard to find anyone. I kinda thought I'd be able to go to, like, CommissionArt.com and filter by Traditional -> Oils -> Landscapes or whatever to find someone perfect.
To everyone who says hire a real artist instead of using AI - where do you go to find them?
Most of us are reticent to find some centralized place because usually those places get invaded by people trying to shill AI stuff, people spamming requests, scams, and a few toxic egos that try to push down anyone they see as competition. Look at what happened to DeviantArt as an example.
To keep workloads manageable and make sure people don't harass us we usually just put up posts on our social media or forums in known artist hangouts, and then once we have enough work we take the posts down. Things like Bluesky make it easier because people share the post for us, giving us a wider reach, but it still relies on the network effect rather than centralized advertising. Those younger than me have transitioned to doing this kind of stuff with Discord servers, though I have no clue how anyone keeps track of what's going on since it's just a chat client.
That makes a lot of sense; thanks for the perspective from the artist's side.
You could go to a spec work treadmill like 99designs and look for one. Browse the design categories and from there the portfolios of those artists whose work appeals to you and fit the style you are looking for and then go to their website because real artists have a website.
deviant art, behance, dribble, art station …
A lot of artists on Twitter take commissions, but it's an informal process done via private messages and of course there's no way to search by art style (other than regularly following artists you like and getting similar creators who may or may not take commissions recommended to you). Essentially you find them by being part of an existing community.
A lot of the smaller and more amateur ones seem to struggle and end up begging, but I guess the pros have enough of a regular following that they get sufficient work through this system.
One way to find illustrators is through Bluesky. Many illustrators showcase their work there and often have portfolio websites, which sometimes features additional artists. They also usually indicate their upcoming availability.
https://blueskystarterpack.com/illustrators
I’ve messaged people directly, after seeing their work on social media. I’m always ready to hear “no” but so far they’ve been willing. I’m also an artist, and I go out of my way to make art for acquaintances who ask.
Go to a local art college and put up a flyer: Paid gig. Ask applicants for a sample of past work. Meet the best for coffee.
Unfortunately, social media is the way to get a hold of most artists. Or at least discover them and then find their website.
I have a pool of designers on Upwork that I work with regularly.
The Ai con artistery on fiverr is outrageous . I pay for a human and get canned soulless spam. What ai does with wordplay and neologisms is just atrocious. It sucks at everything new or bleeding edge.
Cara.app?
Etsy
It’s interesting how in music the same application of ML swamps companies like Suno in trillion dollar lawsuits, yet in graphics and text no one cares, even though graphics and text fall victim to the same sleight of hand.
It feels like a big tech company can just ignore the law, unless another big company stands up against it (and hopefully helps the average Joe as a side-effect).
The irony is in their scraping of all data within their significant radius, and yet the likes of twitter and facebook barely let you access anything of thiers without a login.
If they're scraping data from everywhere to feed their beast, then their data must also be open and scrape-able.
This does not, however, help the current situation where they sit upon the shoulders of millions of creative folks and provide no credit whatsoever, whilst also (actively or passively - by their existence and capability) attempting to make those very same creative folks redundant.
Will there be such a thing as AI stagnation if and when creative works for "it" to digest either are no longer created or no longer accessible to 'the great crawlers'?
Maybe artists can sell their works for ingestion in this scenario? Maybe that should already be the case...
> If they're scraping data from everywhere to feed their beast, then their data must also be open and scrape-able.
I think that was the idea behind the original name for ClosedAI.
It’s not big tech. Money can ignore the law.
Also, the low cost illustration business was already not amazing with the copyright law. Try ordering a few icons on Fiverr for example and see how many are repurposed from other sites.
On the lower end it's not as much whether the assets are in part or fully stolen, but who does it.
> Try ordering a few icons on Fiverr for example and see how many are repurposed from other sites.
In which case would you order icons if they're not custom enough to be unrepurposable? Just curious, Iconify and some basic composition have been good enough for me so far.
Intuitively, there’s quite a big difference between a situation where some ‘artist’ may be sneakily repurposing preexisting work (I don’t think you’ll find a reputable artist doing that, and even a not-so-reputable repurposing artist would at least check that the license allows it), and a situation where a household name corporation only repurposes preexisting work without any regard for licensing.
power can ignore the law, for which money is the most often proxy. we need to get back to talking about who has power and who doesn't as this pretending that we're outside of the nature of such things increasingly has no clothes.
I think that transformation is difficult to appraise from within. In the future we’ll have a much more clear sense of how we feel about the invention of the automobile.
I think that the calm, more disciplined take of “the sky is always falling, it’s never falling. There’s other, probably better ways to be creative” is the one.
Today my eight year old sat at the PC for hours using Scratch to make what was essentially a Flash animation. He had PS5 access, Switch access, iPad access. Nope. Wanted to bash his head against loops and timers for hours.
The craving to be creative is insatiable. It’ll continue to take on new forms.
With apologies to the farriers of today.
The tool is not the art. It never was. People who mistake the two always suffer. I empathize, but there is no way to change that reality.
Yes, but how much of a market will there be for this kind of creation?
How much of a market has there ever been for this kind of creation?
Professions die in the face of competition, that's nothing new.
What's more perilous is that the internet will soon cease to be a useful way to access and distribute knowledge, and has been transformed from a resource for learning and sharing into a clear-cut forest which nobody will replant.
But hey, at least sama got a new gruebel forsey.
This is not a very substantial analysis of the industry and I'd be interested in a more comprehensive diagnosis. I believe there are coincidental factors in industries that typically employ illustrators and other artists that are affecting the market that are not AI, namely the market conditions since late 2022. To give the games industry as an example, the industry grew unnaturally during Covid, everyone thought that trend would continue and there was a lot of money and hiring thrown into it. The industry is returning to the normal trend line and it's still highly profitable, but layoffs are happening because executives are not hitting financial forecasts. Similarly, marketing budgets have been slashed across industries as the economy slowed down, and design work dried up in tech because nobody is raising money except the people who think they can replace creative labor with AI.
One thing that I'm not seeing in this thread is the reputational risk of using AI, especially in artistic works like games. AI imagery is generic, lazy, and is seeing a backlash from the public. It's a negative quality marker even if it's trendy in tech spaces. There's definitely a lot of people in executive leadership and management who think they can replace all kinds of labor with AI right now, but from what I've seen, that has not played out as expected in the real workforce. The actual reason this guy is losing half his business is probably more due to people cutting back on discretionary spending more than AI taking jobs.
Anyone that has ever done spec work has already faced just how demoralizing this will all be. When you do spec work for design, it's basically everyone just submitting their designs for the buyer to decide which one to pick. All the designers copy the designs that are getting the "this is going in the right direction" feedback. The average person will now be able to just say "make me something just like that" for free. It's basically the end, and only a world war will reset things. Best of luck all.
I'll add one other thing about war:
Humans are not exactly a peaceful bunch. A bunch of people with nothing to do start gang wars, often on a national scale, country versus country, or country-men versus counter-men. It's a hot-take for sure, but, we're trending towards war and that's especially true if AI can easily be used to rile each other up with ease.
Yeah, this is dead now, never do any "show me your work and we'll think about it" ever again. People will just steal with LLMs and there's not much that can be done.
TL;DR
Love the tech. Hate losing business.
[flagged]
You only risk becoming obsolete if you refuse to learn anything new.
That’s what AI said.
It is always tough to predict the future. Two years ago I would have agreed but today it seems that we are on the asymptotic part of the curve - waiting for another breakthrough of some sort. AI helps a lot but is nowhere near replacing anyone (for coding at least).
It seems that should be able to replace 1st level support for a bank or something like that but those industries move very slowly so even that could be years away still.
> It seems that should be able to replace 1st level support for a bank or something like that but those industries move very slowly so even that could be years away still.
Klarna is similar to a bank and they tried replacing 1st level support with a chatbot. Spoiler: it didn't work for them, so I wouldn't keep my hopes so high for banks.
It still cannot reason, which is the only thing useful a dev actually does. So, sorry, but I still dont feel threatened
LLM’s can reason, assuming a definition of “reason” that doesn’t exclude them because of the way they do it. Not all of them and none perfectly, but they certainly have passed the threshold.
Try disproving your own theory. Can you craft a problem that requires reasoning that an LLM can solve?
> It still cannot reason, which is the only thing useful a dev actually does. So, sorry, but I still dont feel threatened
You should feel threatened. Maybe they missed this time, but they're shooting at you, and will keep shooting at you.
What is coding, if not applied reasoning?
there are at least two levels of reasoning. the reasoning that makes logical decisions that do not benefit from lateral thinking. and then higher-order reasoning that is fueled by lateral thinking and motivation to achieve. this higher-order reasoning seems to require inputs that human biology provides.
Depends what kind of dev we’re talking about. Millions of coders are just doing automaton work.
Yeah "dev" is as informative as "sales guy" which can be anything from a used car salesman to head of sales for a large corp.
It's definitely reasoning. Or at least it's doing the same sort of thing as what you call reasoning. A few orders of magnitude less good at it than you, for now. But there's no bright line.
If you can’t follow the trendline then you can’t reason yourself.
Not even joking here. If that’s the bar for “reasoning” AI has already beat it.
In terms of capability, the trendline from 2020 to 2023 it is impossibly steep. From 2023 to now is much shallower based on my usage / experience with AI.
That's just about a yearish or more. The trendline I'm talking about is the past 15 years.
But that being said, I would say the trendline is the same. LLMs were just an exponential and existential jump in progress that dwarfed anything in the last 15 years. The inevitable slow down after the blip just makes you feel as if it's become much shallower. But in reality, it's the same, and we'll have more and more break throughs.
In terms of personal impact, it looks more like a step function that starts in 2022 with incremental improvement after that. Of course, progress was being made prior to that (AlexNet, AlphaGo, Transformers, etc.) but these things didn't have much impact until ChatGPT came along. Once that landed however, things haven't perceptibly changed that much.
If you believe trendlines are guaranteed to remain pointing one way, can you reason?
Maybe if you could "reason" you'll see I never said "guaranteed."
Obviously the trendline points to the most probable outcome. If you HAVE to bet, bet on probability. It's the most reasonable answer.
Trendlines are a way to represent some statistical data.
Probability can help predict things with enough instances of an event — statistics are only a small part of how we establish a probability of a future event, and a core ingredient of even that small part is having a sufficiently representative sample (which "trendlines" usually don't).
Eg. you can get statistics for all the winning lottery tickets from the last 5 years — that won't help you predict the next one.
Stop confusing the two.
Sure, eventually, but does it really matter? When AI obsoletes humans, humans can focus on enjoying life. And if you still love coding, nothing’s stopping you from doing it as a hobby.
But what about people whose childhood dream was being a typist in a giant room of typists, all typing away at documents they didn’t write and barely pay attention to?
I hope you support really really progressive tax structures because pretty much all human history shows that when humans aren’t needed those with money/power do not provide for them enjoy life.
I mean, people died to get two days off a week and only work eight hours in the US. That isn’t guaranteed for a wide swath of the world population. And the idea of working only four days a week is crazy radical talk.
> Guys we all know this. Follow the trend lines. Where is AI going?
This assumes constant progress. I remember during the early days of self driving cars we were told the same: look how far we’ve come already! We’ll all be in self driving cars within 5 years. And yet, here we are.
I have no doubt we will see a ton of progress. I also have no doubt AI will take over a lot of the tedious, basic coding work people do. But replacing coders entirely? I remain skeptical.
>This assumes constant progress
It assumes the trendline, as it's constant. Any other assumption is lower probability.
>. I remember during the early days of self driving cars we were told the same: look how far we’ve come already! We’ll all be in self driving cars within 5 years. And yet, here we are.
5 years is a little speculative. 10 is not. At least for me, whenever I call a taxi, it's always an AI taxi. I no longer have human drivers drive me anywhere. So... that's another trendline for you to follow.
We've given AI self-driving 15 years, and we still don't really have it. And nuclear fusion, what, 75 years?
And possibly never might.
Sometimes, there is a cap to the capability, and maybe we've already reached it. Yes, there will still be small, incremental improvements. Yes, we can change the "rules" to make new tools more valuable (eg. introduce communicating roads and vehicles to make it easier for cars to be self-driving; or introduce some forms of orthogonal resiliency into software that allows us to live with the slop from LLMs).
And yes, possibly you are right too, but there is nothing definitively confirming that.
>> Follow the trend lines. Where is AI going?
I mean, there's a reason "past performance is not a guarantee of future returns" is a well-known idiom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6LOWKVq5sQ
It's a great indicator. Just not a guarantee.
Yes the future is unknown but if we had to predict by logic you’d choose the most probable outcome and that outcome is the end tip of the trendline.
Nope: you can most directly see this with investments.
Try that with the stock market and let us know how it goes (spoiler: many have and they are not rich).
The stock market runs on feedback loops where people are trying to outguess other people that are also trying to outguess the other, that's why it's so wild.
Stocks are the worst example. Trendlines for AI has been pretty reliable for the last decade and we have a North Star that proves we haven’t hit the limit. If a human brain can exist then such intelligence artificial or not can also exist.
If stars exist, nuclear fusion is achievable.
Can we achieve it within a practical timeframe of human civilization of, say, 10 thousand years? Or within a single lifetime (some who've worked on it early are now dead, fwiw).
Stocks are obviously a pretty bad example for your claim, because they are a clear counterpoint (in formal logic, which you appealed to, that's enough to call it a proof that trendlines do not ensure any future outcome).
And feedback loop? LLMs have gotten where they are by simply providing current state of the art at no cost to millions of people, to ensure that investment feedback loop by losing gobs of money yet keep investing. We've seen that with VC-funded companies previously too.
No. That amount of gravitational force is not realizable yet.
The human brain is on earth and exists.
>Stocks are obviously a pretty bad example for your claim, because they are a clear counterpoint (in formal logic, which you appealed to, that's enough to call it a proof that trendlines do not ensure any future outcome).
No they aren't I told you stocks are different. There are many trendlines in the world WHERE scientists use to predict things. So the fact that it's used as a statistical model makes your point completely false. Stocks have one of the most volatile movements.
>And feedback loop? LLMs have gotten where they are by simply providing current state of the art at no cost to millions of people, to ensure that investment feedback loop by losing gobs of money yet keep investing. We've seen that with VC-funded companies previously too.
>And feedback loop? LLMs have gotten where they are by simply providing current state of the art at no cost to millions of people, to ensure that investment feedback loop by losing gobs of money yet keep investing. We've seen that with VC-funded companies previously too.
That's not a feedback loop. People aren't looking at the valuation of the company and trying to bet low or high based off of other peoples attempts to do the same thing.
In stocks people literally LOOK at trendlines and bet based off of that. They both influence the trendline and they take the trendline as input into their own trading algorithm. AI is not doing this at all.
I don't think I can match the inconsistency of your "logic": human brain is on Earth so it's by definition "realizable", but fusion isn't?
"Trendlines", before being trusted by "scientists to predict things", are carefully examined and only some of them have any "probability" attached to them. Statistics is not probability (which speaks of chance for something to happen), but instead observation of past patterns. Extrapolation into the future is applied very carefully and with sufficient backing.
You also seem to suggest that OpenAI releasing ChatGPT to the public at a huge financial loss has not led to huge investment in generative AI all over the industry and all over the world since there was no "feedback loop" — my point was that this has provided a huge push by getting many smart people working on it after ChatGPT became available to everyone, thus leading to a continuing upward "trendline" in LLM development: it's as self-reinforcing as the example you give with stocks. In statistics, one aberrant huge spike like this one is usually smoothed over a longer time period: the hustlers usually look for the steepest part of the curve and promote that instead.
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POTUS used to be done by AI, in the sense that a large bureaucracy of specialists filtering up through domain-specific experts and summarized by deeply experienced, large-context politicians produced results that were mostly actionable as-is.
Huge investments were made to ensure the highest quality at all layers of the gigantic org, with the more-or-less correct belief that it would improve outcomes.
The president was largely ceremonial day-to-day, and only determinative to the extent they were also head of the majority political views, which mediated the outputs of the bureaucracy.
I’m sure this sounds crazy to anyone under 25 or so, but the era of a YOLO populist autocrat who shapes the bureaucracy to be a giant vanity mirror really is a new thing.
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So, how well does generative AI work on furry art?
Mixed results. It can produce a generic piece of art, but people don't want a generic piece of art, they want their exact character with all markings and colors exactly correct. It also produces a very distinct style that everyone will pick up on and call you out on.
You also won't be allowed to share your AI generated piece on most furry websites or group chats.
AI didn’t take his job, the commodification of a low-effort task did. AI might be the proximate cause but it isn’t the source of why his illustration side hustle got undercut.
Tons of boiler room illustrators in low income countries would have happily undercut him, too.
This is cope. Ai took his job.
AI did his job, equally or better, and cheaper.
Better to say AI took his market.
No, a large scale popular website where one can pay to get tasks done quickly took his job.
The fact that it was done by AI is actually immaterial to the economic claim.
I think you need to re read economics 101