Thread

1. dzink · 1789752442 · focus · HN ↗

   You are a photographer from the olden age. Taking a photo back then took forever. You are standing on a hill trying to get the perfect picture of a sunset. You measure and sort and calculate angles and light. A tourist stands next to you with an high-speed iphone auto-settings camera. They spin around and get thousands of photos from different angles while you are thinking and measuring your one shot. That’s what AI does. It gives you many shots at the same problem. The thinking guy with the one approach will likely lose a photo competition to one of the accidentally better shots of the person who tried a lot more. Make and filter now may be a better approach than overthink and try only once.

   1. ssfdg · 1789752835 · focus · HN ↗

      I don't buy this analogy and I think it takes a depressingly reductive view of creativity. In both cases, the photographers had to take the time to go to a place, see a view they thought was worth capturing, operated their equipment to get a shot, and then had enough discernment to recognize which of their final products were worth something. Both the traditional photographer and the modern photographer can create images of value in different ways.

      If you want to shoehorn AI into this analogy at all then no one is even bothering going hiking at this point, let alone seeing anything worth capturing. It would just vomit up endless permutations of statistically average images that look like the kind of pictures people take of landscapes.

      1. daedrdev · 1789756004 · focus · HN ↗

         There used to be no such thing as a woodworker. It used to be a number of different professions, such as the jointer, the cabinet maker, the planer, etc. now with modern tools it’s merged into one job

         1. Terr_ · 1789767801 · focus · HN ↗

            But surely the reasons for that change are not "the invention of a free army of unpaid minterns."

            Ex: Much-more furniture being sold are duplicates from a factory process; There are better tools—which do not substitute for executive function.

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.