>I agree. Also, it's not that stable diffusion spontaneously generates art: someone has thought of a prompt, written it down, iterated, and finally decided that a given image was good enough to publish. Is stable diffusion an "artist" or is it a tool?
I'm curious about the possibility of the commissioner role for this situation.
From my point of view, the AI is the artist and prompting an AI to produce a specific image is akin to commissioning an artwork.
I think we have moved beyond human agency, and creation of art is reduced to the simpler constituents, the roles of artist and (if there is one) commissioner. The request to make an artpiece can also come from a machine.
I think the same argument can be made of photography. A photographer does not "paint" or "create" the image. It points a machine to a place and presses a button with a finger. This machine does "the work" for her. Who is the artist? Are photographers just commisioners of images?
Capturing the moment is more than just pointing.
Look, I know the argument you're making, and it's certainly something to ponder on.
But the whole "writing prompt" thing has a different aim from "human-created" art. Whatever that means. But it's generally a small subset from the latter.
I'm fully aware that I'm stretching the argument and analogies. However, I find all of these expressions ("Capturing the moment", "has a different aim") vague and full of gaps. Maybe it's because I never fully got photography, in a way. The difference between "capturing the moment" and "writing prompt" is that the former has a more romantic feel to it, but let's not forget that some of the most well-known photographies were staged to look spontaneous. And suddenly photography is just an exercise of story-telling and technique (light, exposure, etc), which is not that different from "harnessing the algorithm" to do the same.
Also, we're comparing an art 150 years in the making (with its schools, philosophies, heroes) with one in its infancy.
There are still a few message boards that I frequently go to, not as many as before, but they have their active community. Having their own Discord channel also helps boost activity.
In particular in a hobby like PC building, using a message board for build logs makes sense given the format. And probably other "log/project tracking" sorts of coverage. Like Reddit, you get a free captive audience that requires less effort than blogging about it, but unlike Reddit you can post build updates to bring your topic back to the top without making multiple threads.
And these tech firms don't really ask tricky interviewing questions? I'm aware that FAANG companies ask Leetcode style questions which I'm not willing to drill myself over. That wouldn't be very low maintenance if the interviews are also cutthroat competitive.
I am considering probably Infosys or Accenture, though. I hear their interviews don't go deep and they give some in-house training.
2 hours / day of practice for 30 days will give you enough ability to clear Leetcode style questions. Trust me, it will be worth it. At Microsoft, you have plenty of autonomy over your life and work. Even if you don't work very hard, you get to do interesting things and deliver things of value.
At Infosys you might not work very much, but you will spend long hours in the office. You will have little autonomy and your boss will have great power over your life. Your work will be incredibly boring. In short, it is the worst of all worlds: not low-maintenance, not interesting work, and also doesn't pay as well.
I consider "no major uses beyond web" to be a strength. Whereas other languages were adapted into use for HTTP servers, PHP was a tool for HTML rendering from the ground up, and therefore a specialist. I tend to trust specialists overall when it comes to tools, wouldn't you agree?
Cloud-based hosting services personally give me too much analysis paralysis. Sometimes I just want old school shared hosting that already has an Apache config that is sensible for most small-mid scale work because it's more intuitive to deploy.
Then my goal, ostensibly, is to find a large company with interviewer(s) that are like and sound like me. Instead of trying to blend in, I will try the other approach. Try to find my "soul company" within the major big companies, so I don't need to artificialize myself. There are many big companies to choose from so it's very likely I just haven't found one who has a lot of people like me.
