i was a senior designer that basically had to reclass to a manager/senior manager role just to keep a job that didn't touch AI as much.
the wild thing is, i liked my job 3 years ago. i liked the satisfaction of creating for sales. they could be annoying, but it was minor normal (human) corporate squabbles. now, when they're explicitly bragging about getting rid of designers and treating us as sub-human, it's creating resentment and misery. personally job satisfaction sharply decreased in the last 6 months let alone the last 3 years - i'd say from 80% happy to 20%.
personally, i think suicides are probably going to be on the rise in a big way specifically due to this; and that's just the people who can hang onto a job right now; cannot tell you how many designers and animators are out of jobs and desperate.
What level are you/years of experience do you have? Advice for Manager+ is pretty different from somebody with 2 years of being an independent contributor, or none.
I've heard from several people the one somewhat reliable in is knowing somebody on the inside of the place you're applying to. At this point having somebody being able to vouch for you is helpful to separate your resume from the slosh pile.
I have 25 years of experience, including at prestigious places like Blizzard and JPL. However I've worked for a variety of startups, none of which succeeded.
marginalia's blog for interesting tech problems building a search engine "specifically" for indie/small/old-web sites. (the search engine itself is a gold mine for exactly what you're looking for). https://www.marginalia.nu/log/
that physical/mental pain in the process (much like more severe surgeries) is a thing - especially if it's something you retain any amount of consciousness with.
there's also the elephant in the room of coming back as a vegetable. whether due to biological damage or the brain simply not being able to recalibrate.
There was a really horrible and thought provoking movie on this on netflix, I wish I could remember the name. Basically a guy is revived but they're still experimenting with the unrefined process so he lives as an experiment trapped in a hospital.
also somebody who's worked remote for the last 5 years partially due to disabilities; there's lots of us out there. like somebody else said, go to the linkedin profiles of the fortune 500 (maybe 1000?) companies and start applying to the ones that filter out only-in-office.
also honestly sometimes even if the profile doesn't explicitly say 100% remote, it can be if they want you bad enough. i got an exemption in my current place that's technically "hybrid only" ... wishing you best of luck.
my dayjob (design manager at an international company) just had the mother of all adobe bugs/crashes/forcibly quits around 4pm EST. wonder if it's related to this.
makes me extremely thankful I do all of my creative print projects under this handle purely in OSS; ubuntu + krita + libreoffice. it's tricky sometimes but it's genuinely doable.
AI generated images have the potential to be art in the eyes of the beholder, but let's not pretend that generation is the same as the mental, physical, and spiritual flow state that goes into painting or drawing a piece.
I don't think that's what the parent is doing. They're pointing out the hypocrisy of claiming AI art is copying copyrighted works because human artists are trained in similar ways. That's not making a claim about whether or not AI art is "real" art.
Human artists create with intent. Statistical image generation throws paint at a million walls and keeps the handful that are statistically close to images tagged with words in a prompt.
That's not the same thing, and there's a reason why all of those generated images seem... off.
I think we may be talking about two different concepts regarding creation of art.
Absolutely humans (and myself, I'm a professional illustrator) use a mental patterns to come up with ideas.
The physical difference in AI generation is the lack of butt-in-chair time of the flow state. Painting/drawing/rendering art is not just mindless time to be compressed; it's a mental/physical/emotional/(and some would say spiritual) flow state with a lot of "input" abstractions beyond the patterns. Things like the creative's personal mood, personal past experiences, recent discussions with friends, recent texts they read ... those all fold into it. I wouldn't trade that flow state for the world, and it absolutely leaves fingerprints in my creations.
That’s definitely part of it, yeah. There’s other factors too, but that’s obviously one of the big ones.
So what? FurAffinity’s stated goal with the ban is to protect human artists. Obviously banning something that undermines human artists is a step towards that goal. If you want a place to show your AI art, there are plenty of other sites that will welcome you.
If someone notices. There's no guarantee that anyone will, even the person doing it. I've certainly done my fair share of verbatim copying -- something I only realised weeks later, if ever.
neither does AI. They don't operate in pixel space, but in latent space, which is the same as a mental model and the neural networks that do this even have a lot in common with how our visual cortex works. The conversion to pixel only happens in the last step when the concept has been generated as mental model (latent representation). They're doing the same thing human designers do, just orders of magnitude faster.
the wild thing is, i liked my job 3 years ago. i liked the satisfaction of creating for sales. they could be annoying, but it was minor normal (human) corporate squabbles. now, when they're explicitly bragging about getting rid of designers and treating us as sub-human, it's creating resentment and misery. personally job satisfaction sharply decreased in the last 6 months let alone the last 3 years - i'd say from 80% happy to 20%.
personally, i think suicides are probably going to be on the rise in a big way specifically due to this; and that's just the people who can hang onto a job right now; cannot tell you how many designers and animators are out of jobs and desperate.