THE MANDALORIAN: An Extra Claims To Have Been Pressured Into Being Digitally Scanned By Disney

@Mercwitham0uth - but, not surprising :(

@Tasmaniac - you said a mouthful.

@StSteven - it will cettainly effect jobs, yes we wont be entitely replaced by these AI creative tools (or whatever you want to call them, but they are being touted as AI) but when generative fill does what used to take days in seconds, suddenly you only need one op not 4. It devalues those skills as well because suddenly clients who understand barely anything about it think you press the AI button and wham, it looks great, why should I pay for this? Creative industries are constantly battling this devaluation, and its going to accelerate.

@Vision85 - I agree with your points, but while these types of Gen "AI" (I think that I'm going to eventually lose the "AI" term battle because so many people are calling this type of advanced Machine Learning "AI" these days (because it sounds cool)), but keep in mind a couple of things: (1) the way that the models learn is, like I said above, to basically studying many different examples of existing media (i.e. literature, art, music, code, etc.) and then creating their own versions of it based on the specifics in the prompts. So without the human-created original media th models wouldn't have anything to learn from. And if you're thinking that we can just have the models learn from the works created by other models, that's like making a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy where they get progressively less sharp, which brings me to point (2) these models are no where near good enough to take humans out of the loop. It may get to the point where we're using models to generate a rough draft of a script (which will no doubt see time), but you will still need talented writers to go back and rewrite/refine whatever the model created. Just like with images, 3D renderings, etc. So while that may reduce the number of low-level jobs, it will still require the more talented people in the field. The same thing has always happened with innovation, like when the assembly line was created and now with advanced robotics.

Also, unfortunately it's not as easy as "pressing the Ai button" to build and maintain ML models (trust me I know - I've been working on the same model of the better part of a year and it's still not ready for prime time because there are so many different factors to tweak). Plus even when you get a model good enough for production they need to be periodically retrained because they start to "skew" over time. So all that will actually create jobs for people like me. It's kinda like when Walmart/Target/Pick your grocery store reduced the number of check out people by replacing them with self-check out machines. Yes, it reduced the number of low level check out people (nothing against them) but the ones who are there now have to be more attentive having to manage 4, 6, 8, whatever machines at once and have had to service these things hen they have issues, as opposed to just scanning the items and taking the money. Plus now they require more technicians to fix and maintain the machines and more companies with more employees to manufacture the machines and software developers to develop the software that runs them.

So while the types of jobs that this "AI" boom is going to affect is going to vary, to me the main thing is, like I said above, to make sure that everyone is adequately compensated and valued.

On a related note, one thing that I struggle with is the fact that because ML/AI has become so popular, especially recently, more and more companies are popping up offering tools that make it easier and easier to develop ML/AI models without having to have as much of an education behind them to do so. Which for someone like me who spent a lot of time and money getting a PhD in Computer Science kinda cuts both ways: one the one hand it's kind of annoying that people with increasingly lesser educations will be able to do the same kind of work that I can (to a degree anyway) which could ultimately devalue my education, these tools being developed make my job a lot easier. Plus while someone may be able to generate a ML model through some clicks and minimal code, if they don't understand how the model works under the hood, they won't know how to fix it when it inevitably breaks, or just to tune it to get the best performance out of it (like what I'm currently doing). So the education is still required. For now. That being said, scientists are creating more and more complex models (like ChatGPT) and you will have to have to keep increasing your skillset to keep up with them. I've only been out of school for about 10 years and the rate at which ML models have been evolving over that time is amazing and I'm regularly reading which papers and studying trying to keep up with the models that keep coming out. I mean, ChatGPT hasn't even been out for a year and I was reading an article the other day about how it's getting dumber and dumber (don't know if I agree with that).

So it's an interesting time overall and we'll just have to see how things go and evolve with the times.

@StSteven - AI is the greatest marketing misnomer for tech giants today. As you said, none of these machines(which is what they are at the moment)are the actual AI people think about.

I think this whole "AI will take our jobs" is just pure marketing. Until actual AGI, that's all it will ever be. It's tools for people who know how to use them. And despite its prevalence in the medical field already, they still have doctors who have to use and interpret their results because they can still be completely and confidently wrong.

And when it comes to entertainment, scanning someone and using their likeness is very weak AI, it's been around forever. It's just special effects. Also, AI is terrible at writing. While I get the fear that writers have, the quality of the scripts generated by AI models are horrible b-movie or even nonsensical levels. But AI would be a great writing tool and that's all it should be seen as. But everyone is buying into the hype, as always.

@Razorface1 - Yeah, you're right that went right over my head (despite how fast my reflexes are). I thought you were jumping on the "AI is going to kill us all!" train.

So, to your point, I didn't mean to say that GPT types are not a danger to artists (as well as other fields, but we'll get to that later) because that field makes me money, and if what I said came off that way then I apologize. As it is I consider myself an artist (visual, musical, etc.) and if I have any natural talent it would be in visual art. I don't know if I'm good enough to have made a career in it, so it's just a hobby right now. And if I could be anything, I'd be a professional musician (started taking guitar lessons when I was 6, seriously). And my oldest daughter (7) is showing considerable artistic talent, so maybe she'll end up being a professional artist one day (although she's also very good at math, so who knows). Either way, I don't want to see ANY artists (or anyone for that matter) lose their jobs due to the emergence of Generative AI or any new technologies.

But that may not be up to us. I don't know if you read my unnecessarily long last message to Vision85 above (and God help you if you did because I wouldn't have), but in part of it I drew a comparison to other technological innovations, such as the assembly line and the emergence of robotics, which may have initially cost jobs. But the key is that people learned to adapt to those changes and build new skillsets and new fields emerged. So I'm hopeful that Gen AI, like any other tool, will embraced in a way such that artists will learn to use it to help with their work and not be replaced by it, similar to how tools like Photoshop, Maya, Unreal Engine, etc. help game developers to develop better games faster (yeah I know game development as well as I worked with it quite a bit during my grad school years and developed everything from educational games to software that delivers real-time radiation therapy treatments for cancer patients). But how that is all handled is up to the companies bringing in the technology, and unfortunately if they can find a way to utilize it to eliminate jobs to save money, typically they will. In my comment above to Vision85, I was simply trying to identify any possible positive outcomes of the adoption of Gen AI.

Speaking of which, just to be clear, nothing about Gen AI makes ME money. My company is currently researching it and looking for possible applications (such as generating images to be used in our website and easily creating text instructions for our customers instead of having to type them out by hand), but we're not using it yet (which we would have to pay for) and we're no where near creating our own Gen AI models. So I don't stand to profit in any way by the adoption of Gen AI by anyone. In fact, I may very well end up in the same boat as some of the artists we're referring to: what a lot of people overlook but is well know in my area is that in addition to various artists media, Gen AI is being used for... code generation. Right now it's simpler code and not the kind of stuff that I do (kind of like in the artistic space), but it could well get there.

And if we ultimately get to where the Gen AI models are creating their own models, well then we are getting one step closer to how I initially interpreted you original message. 😉