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 empathetic, but my empathy doesn’t overcome my excitement.

This is a moment where individual humans substantially increase their ability to affect change in the world. I’m watching as these tools quickly become commoditized. I’m seeing low income first generation Americans who speak broken English using ChatGPT to translate their messages to “upper middle class business professional” and land contracts that were off limits before. I’m seeing individuals rapidly iterate and explore visual spaces on the scale of 100s to 1000s of designs using stable diffusion, a process that was financially infeasible even for well funded corps due to the cost of human labor this time last year. These aren’t fanciful dreams of how this tech is going to change society - Ive observed these outcomes in real life.

I’m empathetic that the entire world is moving out from under all of our feet. But the direction it’s moving is unbelievably exciting. AI isn’t going to replace humans, humans using AI are going to replace humans who don’t.

Be the human that helps other humans wield AI.