Your tone is not great, but he never had those jobs; he was born in a poor family (for NL), but his talent was recognised by HR Giger when he sent him a paintbrushed work (via dhl with a frame and all on a whim) and that was enough. He is not rich but makes a nice living. Note that this is the EU; there is not much of a risk of dying under a bridge even if you don’t succeed. But he did as far as he is concerned. He never compromised anything like you imply he must have done.
Edit; but you are also implying you think your job is gone with stuff like this? What do you do? Also I am hoping I will be replaced: I have been thinking I will be replaced since the early 80s as my work as a programmer is not so exciting (I love it and will keep doing it even if it’s not viable anymore, which I do believe for the 20% of people who do niche work is very far off AI wise; like I think with creative as well) but it seems closer now than ever.
Edit2: looking at your profile work, you don’t seem you will be replaced by anything soon; what is the anger about? Do you have public blogs/tweets about your feelings about this; looking at your work (in your HN profile) you seem the group not touched by this at all.
What is “soon” here? Admittedly I’m not particularly sanguine about the prospects of AI generated art or code taking many jobs in the near future, but at some point it could well happen even to talented engineers and artists. It’s nice of you to not mind being replaced, but of course not everyone will be happy about existential threats to their hard-earned livelihoods.
I have always been sceptical about AI; I majored in it in the AI winter of the 90s. But now that I am back to it in the past years, I am getting more positive. This now feels not a case of being happy but a case of that this will happen anyway, like so many progress just happened and trampled over jobs and did create other jobs and still people shortage. Things like copilot are now not far from replacing bad programmers; I myself have 100s of lines written a day, in my style, by copilot. I know what prompts work and that’s the hard part, but it is really impressive what it comes up with and correctly ‘guesses’.
Politically, keeping the gains of this not flowing to a few companies or individuals should be a priority; as has been proven (and been said by Carmack), AI is trivial after invention and will be cloned by open source in days/weeks; then trained sets is key to making sure we all benefit. This needs to remain the case to make sure society works imho.
But yeah, soon is 10 years for many things I feel now and 100+ (infinite) years for others. I observe that things that are copilot for me now, are things that millions of programmers cannot even come up with and those need to do something else. And that’s close.
The talented people is further away because of ‘understanding’; statistical pattern matching is maybe (we don’t know) something different than understanding; when we manage to use temporal flow and so, conversational prompts, which a lot of people are researching and developing now, it will get really interesting. So far it seems inevitable… until the next AI winter.
I personally have a while yet before I can be replaced by AI art tools, yes.
What I am concerned and angry about is the next generation. The people who are just becoming pros, who are at the point where they are glad to get a job cranking out hundreds of models of sneakers for EA's Basketball Jam 2024 or doing a bunch of D&D character commissions or whatever other commercial art job because it is paying the bills (including working off their massive student debt) by doing what they actually trained to do instead of some shitty minimum-wage job or an even shittier "gig economy" thing. That's the window that all this AI art crap is making a lot smaller.
Sure, I know. But what is the use being angry about it? It is happening. You are looking for a socialist/basic income world but live in a capitalist one. That is the problem. If AI replaces (it already does) people that doesn’t create new jobs (it still does!), there is no other route than political. I will be dead and have (notably because of this) no kids, but still vote parties that understand this. Living in a country that requires working like you say is already not ok but, if AI moves on, will collapse.
An AI winter might happen though if we don’t move on from this place.
Research moves forwards when people are willing to put time, money, and effort into it. Remember e-paper? Where'd that go? Patents made it hard to work on, and transmissive displays kept getting better, so we're still staring into flashlights while we're arguing about this.
One new law that explicitly redefines "fair use" to exclude "scraping half the entire internet and dumping everything you find into a training dataset", and creates a new framework for proper licensing of training data along with hefty penalties for distributing datasets without these licensing would be a huge roadblock.
A grassroots effort of pissed-off artists starting a sideline in assassinating AI researchers would have a pretty chilling effect on the field, too. This may be a little extreme. There are probably solutions that don't go this far. It sure does make a pleasant revenge fantasy though. Time to go read some accounts of how the Unabomber was caught...
Edit; but you are also implying you think your job is gone with stuff like this? What do you do? Also I am hoping I will be replaced: I have been thinking I will be replaced since the early 80s as my work as a programmer is not so exciting (I love it and will keep doing it even if it’s not viable anymore, which I do believe for the 20% of people who do niche work is very far off AI wise; like I think with creative as well) but it seems closer now than ever.
Edit2: looking at your profile work, you don’t seem you will be replaced by anything soon; what is the anger about? Do you have public blogs/tweets about your feelings about this; looking at your work (in your HN profile) you seem the group not touched by this at all.