Sora could ruin peoples lives

I think what a lot of the answers gloss over is that the period of adjustment to the new technology often does pull the rug from under people who have invested a good deal of time and attention becoming skilled at something. Our lives are of limited length therefore the concern for a generation of people is real and shouldn't be just treated as a detail of history.

Equally in many areas the end result is a loss of something (often intangible) which we accept as "good enough" and which may take a long time to be recaptured.

The steam engine may well have been a good thing in the long run but I'm sure it did tear apart the fabric of many people's lives and I think it's reasonable to commiserate.

IMHO the advancements in technology related with industries in which the end product is digital (movies, animation, texts, programs, etc.,) instead of fundamental spatial services like automation of food productions, cleaning, garbage collection, house building, etc., is a direct consequence of physical space being a luxury around the world, with housing and renting prices skyrocketing.

The Garage Culture is a privilege of few.

Most working-class people are accepting to live into small boxes without space for even a table destined to drawing, reading and studying. Instead, they soon will use virtual desktops inside cheap Chinese Apple Vision Pros clones. Life will get harder and unhealthier.

While designers and some scientists know the importance of physical areas for developing certain activities, most people don't and are subjecting themselves and their children to sad living conditions.

edit: typo ("de" -> "the")

Very good discussion there.

“I am 68 years old, on the opposite spectrum of life’s journey. At your age, I had the same passion to be a writer. But when personal computers became available just a few years later, that passion changed to becoming a computer programmer. I’ve been doing that ever since.

My point is:

Don’t lose your passion. Learn everything you can about this new technology and figure out how to use it to make your dream come true.

Be open to life’s changes. It may seem like nothing will ever change your mind, but no one knows the future. People change, the world changes, and as unbelievable as it may sound, you may one day become passionate about something else.

When Sam Altman announced the new GPTs and Assistants technologies, everybody who had been developing RAG applications for the previous year freaked out. I didn’t. I, as a RAG (sometimes called “Wrapper”) developer saw it as a unique opportunity. And so far, I haven’t been wrong.

So, SORA might just be your opportunity. Use it to CREATE and show that love in every piece you create.”

> You’re forgetting that 100 years ago photographers and filmmakers ended the careers of most of the illustrators, story tellers and theater companies of their time. And everybody adjusted, and storytelling and image making exploded, entering a golden age. There are still amazing portrait painters and theater companies today, but they are specialized art forms and most people have moved on. Today’s photography and filmmaking are going to undergo a similar evolution. And as an avid photographer, I can’t wait.

It's really hard not to agree with the response above.

Well I thought it was gonna be about the hostile deep-fakes but it's about career threat for creatives.

I do wish the robots were doing more mundane or labour intensive tasks and leave the art to humans.

"I’m 16 years old, I’m planning to go to college to become an animator. It has been my life’s dream to become an animator and to share my artwork with people, to create, to show love in every piece I make. And now, I don’t think I’m ever going to have that future."

Is there still something we can realistically tell kids that they should invest time and effort into learning? Seems that the general idea of getting good at something you are passionate about is going away. Also in particular in the arts, the idea that humans practice for a long time to create art, show it to other people who then enjoy it will disappear. I don't think people have really thought about the deeper consequences of this. Seems that a lot of people like to immediately deflect and deny that this is any different from changes in the past, as you can see in the responses to her post.

Sora, in imitating art, also subtly discourages it. How? Well, in ordinary movie making, various artists collaborate to channel a vision into video. The instrumentation (and sets, etc.) they use to do this entails millions of degrees of freedom. They have freedom to create that goes beyond any words that may describe it.

Pre-trained generative models have many fewer degrees of freedom. For instance, try asking Bing to create a picture of a man chasing a bear. This can be done. Now ask it to create a picture of a woman chasing a bear. I have been unable to craft a prompt that succeeds. Bing REALLY does not want women chasing bears. Every picture is a bear chasing a woman.

I was able to get it to picture a woman chasing a child, though.

Talk about formulaic movies! The AI will exert a substantial bias. It’s not just a new kind of canvas for artists.

The responses in that thread are basically telling a 16 year old kid that their feelings are wrong and they should shut up and get on board.

The impact of technology like Sora on people who work in the animation and firm industry is indeed troubling. In my ideal world it leads to an explosion of creativity as people with great skill and taste use it to produce even more ambitious work - but the negative world in which those skills become undervalued and we get way more content of a much lower quality is certainly possible.

Something that worries me more at the moment is the impact this will have on people's plans.

In this post we have a 16 year old who's passionate about animation but is questioning whether it's a viable industry to join.

I've seen plenty of examples of students who planned to be computer programmers but are now having second thoughts about that career as well.

Twenty years ago there was a similar fear in programming, that all of the jobs were going to be outsourced to lower cost countries. I believe there were people who changed their career plans as a result of that fear back then as well.

I hope we don't see a huge flurry of people making life altering career decisions based on their fear of AI which they later come to regret as this shakes out in a more positive direction.

(I also hope we don't see people who genuinely DO regret their career decisions if AI turns out to have the negative impact that many people fear today.)

> I’m 16 years old, I’m planning to go to college to become an animator. It has been my life’s dream to become an animator and to share my artwork with people, to create, to show love in every piece I make. And now, I don’t think I’m ever going to have that future. <

When I was 16 I wanted more than anything to be an astronaut, but reality got in the way.

Change is inevitable, so we all have to adapt throughout life. Fortunately, adapting one of humanity's greatest capabilities.

It might, or it might not. It might enhance many lives too.

Maybe it's just the internet, but sometimes you have to wonder if there is a thriving neo-luddite community out there.

I had a variation of this meta conversation with my sister yesterday, and I pointed out that in addition to all of the attention-drawing advances in the news cycle, there's lots of under-celebrated stuff happening to be really optimistic about.

For example, researchers are using ML to discover new proteins, leading to new drugs and new construction materials. https://www.cradle.bio/ is doing amazing things in this space.

It's true that if you make a living as a drone operator selling stock footage, you might need to diversify. However, I am not worried for intellectually curious teenage creatives at this time.

Chapter 5: Humans learn that not only are they not special, they are pretty low on the spectrum of what they thought was special.

The brutal reality is, if we stopped every development that would result in destroyed livelihoods, we would still be cavemen.

I'm not a fan of this sort of takes. History has shown time and time again that pretty much any technological innovation is a net good, despite the protests of the luddites. Progressive creatives see this type of tech as a tool to simplify and re-adapt their process.

The post author is 16, and an aspiring animator. If their attitude is to be scared of tech, instead of being insanely curious about it, they are not on the right path to become a creative, regardless of AI.

I wonder what Sam Altman's equivalent quote to "I am become death, destroyer of worlds" will be when he sees what his creation leads to.

"I wish AI would advance in other careers than ones that people are passionate about."

So that means? researchers are passionate about their job does that mean that we shouldn't use AI to speed up medical research? material research? so on and so on. It's just someone mad that their job is getting closer to be automated before others.

Every time Sam Altman announces some new offering at OpenAI, I get a little more thankful I don't have any children.

A lot more of this to come, but unfortunately it’s inevitable because the universe affords universal learning algorithms.

For my team, AI augments our capabilities and helps automate routine and mundane tasks. So, all I can say at the moment is positive as it enables us to focus on complex and new tasks that actually requires a human.

I actually don't agree with the idea that it's going to displace creative work. I'm a little worried that people running the finances of firms producing creative will try to displace people, but I don't think this stuff is actually going to displace high quality art. A well curated set of marketing material from openai isn't going to change my opinion on that. If you make something that's of high quality, regardless of how productive you were during the creation, people will seek that quality out. I don't think I've ever heard people be excited about a particular AI artist, just about the models. To me this kind of signals that the market for AI generated work is much smaller than people realize. And if you have to modify the output to actually break through, congratulations you're now an artist.

I don't like using these tools in my own work and I hope tech companies are somehow held accountable for using everyone's data without permission, but I'm actually pretty optimistic that this won't displace that many professional artists once the money people get a handle on how the attention economy actually responds to this stuff. I'm a lot more worried about people using this stuff to create propaganda, to frame people for crimes, or to create non-consentual porn of people.

The page is having a hard time loading, mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20240218195443/https://community...

Other than generative, what other AI advancements have there been in medical and science fields in the last 12 months? Hopefully the sole focus hasn’t been on white collar job automation in exchange for $20 a month.

The first response to the original post is quite possibly one of the most tone-deaf and unempathetic things I've ever read.

No sympathy. I worked in the industry and loathed my time there. Leaving was a blessing.

The entertainment industry is filled with some of the most insufferable people in the world and now we have technology that will change it forever.

Knocking some of the wind out of the egos that fill the LA basin will go a long way to getting out of the creative dulldrum we've had for the past decade.

Nearly everyone I've encountered with overall positive/optimistic views on the probable impacts of "this technology" seems to be wildly out of touch with the state of human sociocultural systems, the actual ("situation on the ground") nature of their fellow primates, the kind of decisions that the people/companies who get to make those decisions are actually making, what these technologies are capable of automating, and the second/third/etc order effects of automating same.

It's complex, it's "unpredictable", but it is 100% clear that this is absolutely not something this species is actually ready to utilize.

Believing otherwise is sort of naive to the point of being delusional, now.

they’re not wrong, ai will eliminate the lower end of many creative professions… and unfortunately a lot of the lower end comes from poorer countries

it’s probably a net gain in the long run, but it’s going to cause a lot of damage in the process

Sora is a new text to video tool (up to 1 minute) announced by openai.

Almost anything can ruin people's lives... Including water.

I'm waiting for the panic the first time an AI replaces top management.

Potentially, AIs can be better at management than humans, even if no more intelligent, simply because they can communicate faster and remember more data.

At some point in history every human wore clothes that were "hand-made". If we perceive history through the lens of art, we might mistakenly assume that because everyone got to have tailored clothes by professional artisan tailors the likes of which today are highly limited and specialized, that meant that everyone had better clothes.

It's true, tailor was a viable profession, but even then most people couldn't afford them. Families toiled to make their own clothes just as they did to grow enough food not to starve, or find enough fuel to heat their hearths not to freeze.

But there was also still a slice of the classes that could afford tailored clothes when tailors were ubiquitous. And now with the advent of automation no longer can.

Clothing automation made "tailor" no longer a viable profession for the masses, and it reduced the access to hand-made clothing for some people while dramatically increasing the access to clothing for the rest.

The point here is that both perspectives are right. People's lives WILL be ruined. A lack of confidence in the professional arts means that for some time the amount of quality human-generated animation and art will reduce. We may have already passed the peak - the early internet decades when people just put up their art for all to see for free access, not behind paywalls, but just to show that they can. The same art that all the image generation AI tools were trained on.

Will it have been worth it? I genuinely don't know. I'm 40, and I feel like I'm just at the intersection where I start to think that I fear what I don't understand and I invariably think that the way things worked in my 20s was better than the way things will work in my 60s. And yet, this is what has always happened with humanity.

And while the end result of this technology today may end up ruining the livelyhood of animators, legal assistants, and app developers, in the long run, these breakthroughs will end up providing access to more information, knowledge, and access to all of humanity.

Progress is not linear, and comes with tradeoffs. Some things go away and are not always replaced with something better.

But on a humanity time scale beyond the life of an individual human, the development of LLMs is moving us in the right direction.

We need to not lose sight of the macro issues - clean energy, pollution, climate change. We can figure out how to still have tailors and animators in the future. But if we kill all the sharks, dolphins, and polar bears, they're not coming back.

Is it just me or at least half of the answers are so blandly written they seem to be GPT generated?

Take one short statement ("instead of making art, you can make prompts for the model to make arts"). Bury it deep between the four paragraphs of text. Elaborate why the statement is positive or negative. Provide examples from your personal experience. Finish with a conclusion, expressing your own opinion. People don't talk with each other like that, go check Reddit, HN comments, X/Mastodon and figure!

Before advent of GPT, I've seen this particular style of writing only in IELTS essays (where the rules and tasks are, by design, uncanny close to prompting a GPT model) and in r/LinkedinLunatics.

No one is entitled to a job.

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