Comment by mosesman
1 day ago
As Nader has said: Saying software is dead because anyone can build it is literally saying professional photography is dead because everyone has a camera in their pocket.
Professional photographers are different to everyday phone-photo takers because they have the experience built up over so many years in that sector, same as AI SWE, where the humans in the loop need experience to master AI SWE.
If the camera was capable of deciding how to frame the images, how to stage them, what lighting was required, how to edit them after taking them -- yes, professional photography would be dead. Hobbyist photography may stick around for people that value humanness, but photographers wouldn't be commercially relevant. Just ask the camera.
AI isn't a better keyboard. The goal is to automate the decision making.
people here really struggle with metaphors.
There's no real evidence for it but it is scientific fact that every Hacker News thread that's more than 7 deep is just a war between terrible metaphors.
There is a lot of variability in photography and there aren’t hard rules for deciding what makes a “good” photo. A good photo comes more from selecting a subject, in a particular environment, etc.
There's also a lot of variability in AI, and it doesn't follow hard rules for what makes "good" output; it's capable of selecting a wide variety of subjects, environments, etc. And it's trained on more art critics than any photographer has read.
Taste is a set of heuristics for what's worked for the taster in the past. AI is very good at heuristics.
2 replies →
>The goal is to automate the decision making.
But there is a decision outside of AI directing this.
> capable of deciding how to frame the images, how to stage them, what lighting was required, how to edit them
This is all possible now. I don’t think it’s dead (yet), but it’s certainly becoming more weird and artificial.
> AI isn't a better keyboard. The goal is to automate the decision making.
It pretty much is. And it won't
I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you haven't extensively used the latest models. You should really play around with them. Give Sonnet 5.5 / Opus 5.5 a shot if you haven't.
I am not a shill, I do not work for any AI company, and I used to think like you.
But I've come to terms with the fact that Sonnet 5.5 does most aspects of my job better than me and faster than me.
It made a mistake? No problem, feed the mistake back to it. I have yet to have it fail when it iterated on its mistakes. All that happens asynchronously in the background and quite rapidly with 5.5.
2 replies →
if AI was able to do so...
More like saying painting is dead because people can now take photographs.
Of course, you won't make a living painting. A handful of people might, but it isn't a career choice worth taking.
Yeah I probably know more photographers than ever. Maybe an apt comparison given the wild amount of AI and processing that goes into the average iPhone photo as well.
This analogy is not the greatest. It's more like painters got obsoleted not because of cameras itself but because what people actually wanted was not artistic mastery and celestial strokes of the brush, they wanted simple, accurate portrayals of life's events. The mastery over the brush was an unfortunate necessity for a while to achieve that pedestrian aim. We didn't get what we wanted and once we did the awesome and breathtaking skill of the artist turned out to be an unnecessary over-indexing on a very particular and highly specific skill. It's still awesome and cameras cannot replicate that skill in the slightest, but that skill is not and never was what we actually wanted.
I suspect the same is happening in tech. Nobody asks for software engineering. They just want simple basic accounting of life's events. They didn't ask for kernels, FreeBSD, Ruby on Rails, interrupt handlers, register allocations, APIs, Python, Golang, Rust, HTML, containerization, USB and passkeys. They wanted a way to register that party A bought a bunch of Bs and Cs and that it was paid for using Ds. That person X is in control of Y and that this control was active in period Y through Z. I can keep going for a while. None of the bullshit we created was ever essential complexity. We are drowning in astronomical and I mean biblical amounts of accidental complexity and I feel our paintbrush moment is getting nearer by the day.
> It's more like painters got obsoleted not because of cameras itself but because what people actually wanted was not artistic mastery and celestial strokes of the brush, they wanted simple, accurate portrayals of life's events.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogs_Playing_Poker
again, not a great analogy tho, because the deliverable of the painter vs the camera is a different medium (paint over canvas vs a print/digital image), while the deliverable of the AI vs the SE is indeed the same medium (code).
Not really. Painting and photography both make images.
One uses the imagination of a human to do it though.
A lot of the reason for hiring a photographer is the raw number of shots you need to take at some events. If someone needs to be dedicated to the task all day, you may as well have someone with experience.
Well, someone with experience might be more expensive to hire.
Software isn't dead, thinking is dead (or dying).
That (thinking/memory/human brain functions) has been claimed for 2000 years, I suspect it will still be as not true as it ever was.
Writing, it was claimed, will destroy the ability of people to remember anything.
I dated a professional photographer for a while.
Yes, she knew an assload about lighting, composition, etc.
But her primary skill was marketing herself. Next most important was the editing. Lightroom and such.
You would be surprised how easy it is to take an awesome photo. But you can't just deliver an awesome photo to your clients when you're a pro, you have to deliver photos that look like what they want to remember, not necessarily what the camera captured
Since the technical skills are probably not so valuable anymore, probably the same will happen in software and science. The people who market themselves best or who pretend to know most without any shame, will get the jobs and AI will compensate the most of the lack of other missing perks.
Isn't it more like saying professional portrait painting is dead because everyone has access to a camera today that does a better job and costs significantly less? A phone camera is just an extension of digital photography, which is an extension of film photography, which first drove the massive shift in replacement and is most similar to AI as a metaphor.
Interesting read on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_...
Yeah, but also way more people are getting portraits than before the camera was invented—there’s a bit of a Jevons paradox there.
You get an upvote from me for introducing me to 'Jevons paradox', which I had not heard of before now.
Except that this isn't a good analogy.