The deliberate conscious effort that we humans require to do anything, like make art or write an academic paper, has been belittled and glossed over.
Instead results are glamorously prized as the product of success, and the amount of effort that it took to get there is hidden away in shame.
AI is the obscene extreme to that mentality: not more thinking, effort, work, anything— get the result now. While it was that exact effort that made us human in the first place.
Even writing this post took cognitive effort.
I put words down but they didn't have the weight or meaning I had in my mind, looked for synonyms that more accurately represented what I wanted to convey. Then tried to rewrite and rearrange it to something more coherent.
The process was not effortless, but that is the point.
@Ameboid Totally agreed.
I've recently written down my thoughts about generative AI at the bottom of my homepage's "About" section, and hope many people will read them…
@Ameboid There's a take from @oatmeal that captures this idea beautifully [1].
Art, scientific pubs, etc... are all forms of communication, all attempts to connect people across time and space. The process of craftsmanship is useful because it naturally selects for works that have something valuable to contribute to the conversation.
GenAI makes it possible for someone to create an artifact has the trappings of meaning, but without a process that forces the person to actually think through what they actually have to contribute.
It's a hot take, or as The Oatmeal puts it:
"As a kid, I had one of those little Casio keyboards where you could hit a button and it'd automatically play a song.
I remember hitting the button.
I remember standing there pretending to make music.
That's how I see AI art.
Standing there.
Pretending."
The full take is far more nuanced, and the medium conveys the emotion far better than a text excerpt. It's worth a read.
What if B did the work and A took the credit and money for it and got rich and bought an election and... yeah, that's the world we live in huh
@darwinwoodka @Ameboid Sadly, yes. As for the billions that J K Rowling received because they could replicate efforts - multiply what she did with zero further effort by her ....
My brother created a mainframe system to help with his work with IBM. They made much money selling it. A colleague took the credit as my brother just did not seek gain. Or status.
@Ameboid when I see AI companies advertising their stuff as a way to enable your creativity because you can say a sentence to it and have it create a picture, I get so angry.
creativity is the result of human effort. not the result of humans having a random idea, but the result of doing the hard work to bring that idea into the real world. the hard part is never having the idea.
There's a great Kipling poem about not letting pain *or* pleasure control you. (He only aims it at men, but you can ignore that if you like.)
I see the AI development in that light: you can't let the sweat of work deter you from art and you can't let the ease of AI deter you from the sweat of effort.
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