zlacker

>>dredmo+(OP)
I've been finding that the strangest part of discussions around art AI among technical people is the complete lack of identification or empathy: it seems to me that most computer programmers should be just as afraid as artists, in the face of technology like this!!! I am a failed artist (read, I studied painting in school and tried to make a go at being a commercial artist in animation and couldn't make the cut), and so I decided to do something easier and became a computer programmer, working for FAANG and other large companies and making absurd (to me!!) amounts of cash. In my humble estimation, making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of computer programming that is done. Art AI is terrifying if you want to make art for a living- and, if AI is able to do these astonishingly difficult things, why shouldn't it, with some finagling, also be able to do the dumb, simple things most programmers do for their jobs?

The lack of empathy is incredibly depressing...

>>meebob+kc
I'm mostly seeing software developers looking at the textual equivalent, GPT-3, and giving a spectrum of responses from "This is fantastic! Take my money so I can use it to help me with my work!" to "Meh, buggy code, worse than dealing with a junior dev."

I think the two biggest differences between art AI and code AI are that (a) code that's only 95% right is just wrong, whereas art can be very wrong before a client even notices [0]; and (b) we've been expecting this for ages already, to the extent that many of us are cynical and jaded about what the newest AI can do.

[0] for example, I was recently in the Cambridge University Press Bookshop, and they sell gift maps of the city. The background of the poster advertising these is pixelated and has JPEG artefacts.

It's highly regarded, and the shop has existed since 1581, and yet they have what I think is an amateur-hour advert on their walls.

>>ben_w+Dg
I do appreciate that the way in which a piece of code "works" and the way in which an piece of art "works" is in some ways totally different- but, I also think that in many cases, notably automated systems that create reports or dashboards, they aren't so far apart. In the end, the result just has to seem right. Even in computer programming, amateur hour level correctness isn't so uncommon, I would say.

I would personally be astonished if any of the distributed systems I've worked on in my career were even close to 95% correct, haha.

>>meebob+oi
Understanding what you are plotting and displaying in the dashboard is the complicated part, not writing the dashboard. Programmers are not very afraid of AI because it is still just a glorified fronted to stackoverflow, and SO has not destroyed the demand for programmers so far. Also, understanding the subtle logical bugs and errors introduced by such boilerplate AI-tools requires no less expertise than knowing how write the code upfront. Debugging is not a very popular activity among programmers for a reason.

It may be that one day AI will also make their creators obsolete. But at that point so many professions will be replaced by it already, that we will live in a massively changed society where talking about the "job" has no meaning anymore.