AI and Two Hundred Dollar Tasks
11 comments
·January 28, 2025Arainach
panarky
It's a tool, and just like other tools, it multiplies human labor and intellect.
I don't need to spend a decade becoming proficient with a pocket knife, and then another decade becoming an expert with an ax.
Instead, an experienced person can show me how to be safe with a chainsaw in an afternoon.
I won't be an expert with the chainsaw, that still takes many hours of experience, but I don't need the knife and ax prerequisites.
vunderba
When GenAI first started taking off a few years ago I called out that the real market set to be absolutely decimated wasn't corporations - it was the gig economy.
The quality of generative AI may not be professional level quality, but it presents an easy and cheap drop-in replacement for one-off tasks that people previously outsourced to platforms like Fiverr (voiceovers, logo design, clip art, copy editing, translation, etc).
dhumph
I thought this was going to be about my wasted 200 OpenAI pro subscription to get operator. It’s failed all its tasks so far.
mohsen1
AI probably can do very nice landscaping design too. It's just that image generation models are not made for it. If we manage to give AI a more structured input, you'll get a nice design in return.
joshmarinacci
I don't think so. Good landscaping requires knowledge of the site, the local ecosystem, and an understanding of how water and soil flow. It's a whole lot more than generating an image. The image is simply an output of the process.
aprilthird2021
It's worth noting that spending $200 on a graphic design from someone online was already a huge reduction in cost and time from what it would take before platforms like Upwork
fzeroracer
It's funny because I see this exact same thing in game dev. A bunch of games have now decided to outsource basic logos, banners, icons etc to AI.
They all end up looking very obvious and similar and I pass on them every time. It's THE core advertising for your product.
jongjong
It's not just $200 tasks. For example, it's really good with producing music... Which would have cost several thousands of dollars before. E.g: suno.com
I've been recording short tunes on my low-quality $50 Ukulele (which I self-taught myself) and then getting Suno to turn it into full songs. The quality is better than anything I could possibly have produced. Even if I paid thousands of dollars to a professional, I could not get better quality than what I'm getting from Suno. I cannot tell that it's produced by AI. AI is surprisingly suitable for music.
If I want lyrics, I type out the topic and underlying message of the song and the aesthetics I want (e.g. short lines, rhymes, etc...) inside Claude or ChatGPT and make it generate the lyrics.
Also once you have the first draft of lyrics, you can make it refine them by telling it to rhyme in particular ways. For example, the first words of each sentence can rhyme with each other as well as the last word of each sentence and you can tell it to change the rhyme pattern each paragraph. It's amazing how it can keep the meaning of the lyrics the same but totally transform the sounds of it by swapping out words with synonyms.
AI video capability is impressive but it can't get it all the way to a production-quality film. For music though, it definitely seems to be production-quality. Sometimes it takes a few attempts but it definitely seems to cross the 'professional' line regularly. Often, you don't need any tuning, trimming or intervention to the piece; it's just done.
glimshe
Many people see AI as a replacement for the human, but current-gen AI is in my view a replacement for the hammer. It's a tool that needs to be wielded with skill for good results... And when that happens, the productivity can be truly amazing.
jongjong
Agreed, I think music is one of the areas which it nails though (pun intended). The size of the human input can be very small and still produce very high quality output.
I mean you can produce 0 input and fully automate it and it will still sound professional... Maybe it will lack a bit of creativity but typically only a professional would be able to know that.
I think what Suno produces is often higher quality and more creative than what most modern pop stars produce... Just because the bar there happens to be quite low.
If I listen to 80s music, I can see the creativity gap (at least relative to the AI's typical ouput)... But AI output is often superior to modern artists IMO.
This is presented like it's a good thing, but it quite probably implies a local maximum in cultural abilities for a long time.
How do experts become experts? Through time and practice. Many great photographers hone their skills or discover their talent when working at entry level and mid level positions - shooting portraits, etc.
Most great musicians, bartenders, software engineers, etc. do the same. Without entry level/apprentice jobs the only other model is patronage from the rich, and that was never a good model even before today's rich largely abandoned the belief that they had a responsibility to contribute back to the society that allowed them to become rich.
Without a pipeline of new talent, where will new state of the art come from? Where will more training data for the planet burners come from?