Comment by ripe

I guess I'm in a bubble, because it doesn't feel that way to me.

When AI tops the charts (in country music) and digital visual artists have to basically film themselves working to prove that they're actually creating their art, it's already gone pretty far. It feels like the even when people care (and they great mass do not) it creates problems for real artists. Maybe they will shift to some other forms of art that aren't so easily generated, or maybe they'll all just do "clean up" on generated pieces and fake brush sequences. I'd hate for art to become just tracing the outlines of something made by something else.

Of course, one could say the same about photography where the art is entirely in choosing the place, time, and exposure. Even that has taken a hit with believable photorealistic generators. Even if you can detect a generator, it spoils the field and creates suspicion rather than wonder.

> people who are willing to pay money for art seem to strongly prefer that their money goes to an artist, not a GPU cluster operator

Businesses which don't want to pay money strongly prefer AI.

Art is political more than it is technical. People like Banksy’s art because it’s Banksy, not because he creates accurate images of policemen and girls with balloons.

I'd distinguish between physical art and digital art tbh. Physical art has already grappled with being automated away with the advent of photography, but people still buy physical art because they like the physical medium and want to support the creator. Digital art (for one off needs), however, is a trickier place since I think that's where AI is displacing. It's not making masterpieces, but if someone wanted a picture of a dwarf for a D&D campaign, they'd probably generate it instead of contracting it out.

> more specifically because people who are willing to pay money for art seem to strongly prefer that their money goes to an artist, not a GPU cluster operator.

Look at furniture. People will pay a premium for handcrafted furniture because it becomes part of the story of the result, even when Ikea offers a basically identical piece (with their various solid-wood items) at a fraction of the price and with a much easier delivery process.

Of course, AI art also has the issue that it's effectively impossible to actually dictate details exactly like you want. I've used it for no-profit hobby things (wargames and tabletop games, for example), and getting exact details for anything (think "fantasy character profile using X extensive list of gear in Y specific visual style") takes extensive experimentation (most of which can't be generalized well since it depends on quirks of individual models and sub-models) and photoshopping different results together. If I were doing it for a paid product, just commissioning art would probably be cheaper overall compared to the person-hours involved.

No it doesn’t. The meaning of that phrase has changed. Almost nobody uses the original meaning anymore. Update your dictionary.

No doubt, there are people that still have knowledge of how the system works.

But operator inexperience didn't turn out to be a substantial barrier to automation, and they were still able to achieve the end goal of producing more things at lower cost.

>people claiming that back then, but it didn't really work.

Roger. You could also say that's true today.

Seems like there was always some consensus about miracles just around the corner, but a whole lot wider faith has built by now.

I thoroughly felt like AI was coming fast because I knew what I would do if I had all that computer power. But to all appearances I ran the other way since that was absurdly out-of-reach, while at the same time I could count on those enthusiasts to carry the ball forward. There was only a very short time when I had more "desktop" (benchtop) computing power to dedicate than almost any of my peers. I could see that beginning to reverse as the IBM PC began to take hold.

Then it became plain to see the "brain drain" from natural science as the majority of students who were most capable logically & mathematically, gravitated to computer science of some kind instead. That was one of the only growth opportunities during the Reagan Recession so I did't blame them. For better or worse I wasn't a student any more and it was interesting to see the growth money rain down on them, but I wasn't worried and stuck with what I had a head start in. Mathematically, there was going to be a growing number of professionals spending all their time on computers who would have otherwise been doing it with natural science, with no end in sight. Those kind of odds were in my favor if I could ante up long enough to stay in the game.

I had incredible good fortune coming into far more tonnes of scientific electronics than usual, so my hands were full simply concentrating on natural science efforts, by that time I figured if that was going to come together with AI some day, I would want to be ready.

In the '90's the neural-net people had some major breakthroughs, after I had my own company they tried to get a fit, but not near the level of perfection needed. I knew how cool it would be though. I even tried a little sophomore effort myself after I had hundreds of megabytes but there was an unfortunate crash that had nothing to do with it.

One of the most prevalent feelings the whole time is I hope I live long enough to see the kind of progress I would want :\

While far more people than me have always felt that it already arrived.

In the mean time, whether employed or as an entrepreneur, doing the math says it would have been more expensive to automate rather than do so much manual effort over the decades.

But thousands of the things I worked on, the whole world could automate to tremendous advantage, so I thought it would be worth it to figure out how, even if it took decades :)

There are enormous microcode, firmware and drivers blobs everywhere on any pathway. Even with very privileged access of someone at Intel or NVIDIA, ability to have a reasonable level of deterministic control of systems that involve CPU/GPU/LAN were long gone, almost for a decade now.

I was going to start this with "C's fine, but consider more broadly: one reason I dislike reactive programming is that the magic doesn't work reliably and the plumbing is harder to read than doing it all manually", but then I realised:

While one can in principle learn C as well as you say, in practice there's loads of cases of people getting surprised by undefined behaviour and all the famous classes of bug that C has.