AI is not an abstraction layer. If you work entirely on the level of prompting without any knowledge or understanding of the underlying code, you are not actually an engineer, but more of a half-assed technical manager. (And your job will be first on the chopping block.)
I'd love to see Huang's definition of abstraction in which AI is somehow "a new abstraction level" but having some contractors build your product is not.
> Anyway, is it left wing to be anti-racist these days? Yikes.
Unfortunately, on this site, being against white supremacy is treated as some sort of personality disorder. Yes, it's fucked up. No, it's not representative of the general population (or so I dearly hope).
More like this site has tons of anonymous accounts that are quick to coordinate labelling and cancelling someone for something they didn't say.
Ask your self, how come most of VCs and tech people swung "back to right". Literally all of them have been cancelled by the mob years ago. Even our darling PG has been cancelled despite vehemently protesting right.
If being scolded for things you're not doing by anonymous accounts is enough to make you change your core beliefs, such that you change your political alignment, I don't think those were ever core beliefs.
> even our darling PG has been cancelled
Please, do tell - in what way has PG been cancelled? Cancellation is when you lose opportunities, funding, jobs, etc. It is not when people online repeatedly bring up something they didn't like that you did or said.
> Cancelling people for merely trying to open conversation
But you must believe there is a line, no? Sure, open conversation is good, but there are things you can say in open conversation that will make people not want to associate with you. Is that unfair? I don’t think so. Cancellation isn’t bad, imo, unless it’s unfair. Words taken out of context, distorted by mob mentality, that kind of thing. Otherwise, to me “cancellation” is just the consequences of your words and actions.
It allows them to take on tasks they could not before.
For example, creating a game where before you'd have to pay for assets or creating a movie to where you'd have to pay for a lot of various things. I gave an example earlier where I've watched vids people generated based on existing fiction. These are artists (you're still framing the shot, selecting dialogue, etc), and they could not have done this before; it would have been too expensive.
Some artists get cut out of the loop but it allows small teams to do what was impossible. Is this not valid?
Tell that to Kane Parsons (The Backrooms). Or anyone who owns a smartphone. I'd rather watch a million youtube skits where all the actors are played by one person in different wigs than any attempt at passing off AI generated video as big budget special effects.
The animated movie Flow won an Oscar, and that was made by a very small team and entirely in Blender.
Fanvids and AMVs made by clever sampling and splicing have been a thing for a very long time, too.
There are also a lot of games that exclusively use free or self-made assets.
Money allows access to better tools and bigger teams. But replacing artist jobs with AI doesn't seem like a great way for artists to get money (or time to focus on art, for that matter).
Generative AI, especially for video, also keeps getting more expensive, as AI companys' bills finally come due.
I would argue these are influencers and “content creators” cosplaying as artists, taking shortcuts and never bothering to hone their craft or cultivate their taste. End result is tons more low-effort content and outright spam in the world, not some creative golden era.
And maybe film is different in some respects, but AI does not allow musicians, artists, or writers to do anything they could not do already. The only benefit is churning out mediocre content faster.
you don't need to learn blender anymore. you can talk with the ai and describe what you want and iterate. all of the software tools used in media are now accessible to creative but not necessarily technical people.
Koons didn't write a two paragraph description of his ideas and then handed it over to a porcelain factory that repeatedly tried to come up with something that fit the spec until Koons cried out "Yes, that's it! That's what I had in mind!"
He drew sketches, built models, shaped prototypes, etc. He was an active participant in the creative process from the very start to the end, not just a client that checked in on what the artists were doing from time to time to give the thumbs up or thumbs down.
But also, many people consider Koons to be a hack. (He says his art has no intrinsic meaning and he mostly makes vapid balloon sculptures for very rich people.)
I mean i suppose it depends on if you think people using blender are artists. If you think the part that makes them creative is knowing to right click select blah do blah then I get your position. If you say "no, make the background fade out at this point, push the face to the foreground, and add some shadow behind", I really don't understand why knowing the specific keystrokes are the creative part.
But I think you know that and you're just straw manning.
edit- to be clear i'm talking about using existing software like logic pro, blender, etc. i'm not talking about generative AI.
A person using tools to make art is an artist (or craftsman). A person yelling directions at people or machines that make the actual art is a director, at best.
Some community reactions are considered more authentic than others, it would seem.
I’ve seen so many shit articles and corporate announcements manually unflagged by the mods over the years. (Here’s a recent one, flagged to death very quickly before miraculously being resurrected: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49602728) An explanation is rarely given.
This narrative is largely untrue. Scandinavia started to prosper only after they liberalized. Of course, there is a big difference between intelligent redistributionism which respects and leverages market forces, and the kind of socialists who implement rent control and government-run grocery stores.
AFAIK democratic socialism was only relevant for a short while in some places in Africa 100+ years ago, there are no current countries with democratic socialism.
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