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
In art, you can afford a few mistakes. Like, on many photo-realistic pictures generated by midjourney, if you look closely you'll see a thing or two that are odd in the eyes of characters. In an AI-generated novel, you can accept a typo here and there, or not even notice it if it's really subtle.

In a program, you can't really afford that. A small mistake can have dramatic consequences. Now, maybe in the next few years you'll only need one human supervisor fixing AI bugs where you used to need 10 high-end developers, but you probably won't be able to make reliable programs just by typing a prompt, the way you can currently generate a cover for an e-book just by asking midjourney.

As for the political consequences of all of this, this is yet another issue.

>>sacado+Hx
I'm not sure that humans are going to beat AI in terms of defect rate in software, especially given that with AI you produce code at a fast enough rate that corner cutting (like skipping TDD) often done by human developers is off the table.

I don't think this is going to put developers out of work, however. Instead, lots of small businesses that couldn't afford to be small software companies suddenly will be able to. They'll build 'free puppies,' new applications that are easy to start building, but that require ongoing development and maintenance. As the cambrian explosion of new software happens we'll only end up with more work on our hands.

>>mullin+ee1
Will you be happy to curate bot output?

Could the bot not curate its own output? It has been shown that back feeding into the model result in improvement. I got the idea that better results come from increments. The AI overlords (model owners) will make sure they learn from all that curating you might do too, making your job even less skilled. Read: you are more replaceable.

Please prove me wrong! I hope I am just anxious. History has proven that increases in productivity tend to go to capital owners, unless workers have bargaining power. Mine workers were paid relatively well here, back in the day. Complete villages and cities thrived around this business. When those workers were no longer needed the government had to implement social programs to prevent a societal collapse there.

Look around, Musk wants you to work 10 hours per day already. Don't expect an early retirement or a more relaxed job..

>>except+tp1
I don't think it's a matter of blindly curating bot output.

I think it's more a matter of enlarging the scope of what one person can manage. I think moving from the pure manual labor era, limited by how much weight a human body could move from point A to point B, to the steam engine era. Railroads totally wrecked the industry of people moving things on their backs or in mule trains, and that wasn't a bad thing.

> Don't expect an early retirement or a more relaxed job..

That's kinda my point, I don't think this is going to make less work, it'll turbocharge productivity. When has an industry ever found a way to increase productivity and just said cool, now we'll keep the status quo with our output and work less?

>>mullin+TF1
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

You describe stuff that is harmful or boring. In an other comment I touched upon this, as there seem to be a clear distinction between people that love programming and those that just want to get results. The former does not enjoy being manager of something larger per se if the lose what they love.

I can see a (short term?) increase in demand of software, but it is not infinite. So when productivity increases and demand does not with at least the same pace, you will see jobless people and you will face competition.

What no one has touched yet is that the nature of programming might change too. We try to optimize for the dev experience now, but it is not unreasonable to expect that we have to bend towards being AI-friendly. Maybe human friendly becomes less of a concern (enough desperate people out there), AI-friendly and performance might be more important metrics to the owner.