Submitted 1 year ago by ChasingEnigma@lemmy.world to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
Quite the opposite, actually. Because of AI, I got back into web development for the first time in 20 years. I’d never be able to figure out the new stuff like HTTPS and DDoS protection on my own if it weren’t for ChatGPT’s help. It got me up to speed on HTML5, and helped me remember how PHP and Javascript work, all within a couple of days. Would have taken months otherwise.
You should be using AI as a tool to expand your creativity, not feel hindered by it.
The whole generative AI thing bums me out as someone who dabbles in writing, but for more philosophical reasons than the ones you listed. Storytelling is supposed to be something humans do to connect with one another. Art and culture are windows into our psyches. This, to me, is why art makes life worth living. It’s why we go through the hassle of maintaining our dreary and tedious obligations, because when all that is done and over with we can sit captivated and spellbound by a good tale from a talented writer.
This? This makes little sense to me. You’re telling me they made a computer program that uses pattern recognition to write and draw for us? Okay, why? This goes against what I always assumed art was for. There’s more to storytelling than just pattern recognition. There’s themes, emotions, metaphor, allegory, messages, politics, and so much more. A computer program doesn’t understand any of that, it just follows it’s programming.
Tech bros insist that AI is not going to take our jobs, but as long as we live under capitalism I don’t buy it. A lot of the people who work in publishing or producing are just doing it for the money. They don’t give a shit about whether the stories are good, only that they are profitable. If you don’t think that they are going to jump at the chance to create product without paying anyone for it, then I have a bridge to sell you. Creators need to eat too. The phrase “starving artist” exists for a reason.
We were supposed to create robots that would handle manual labor so that we could all be free to pursue our passions. Now they have robots creating art while we continue to do manual labor. It’s not the future I wanted to live in.
There will always be a market for human-made creative products. AI will never take it away. Just like there will always be a market for manual transmission cars/regular bicycles (non-electric), or cellphones that aren’t smartphones, or physical video games.
Production of creative products is in the hands of every human alive, so the only time it will stop being produced is if every human decides to stop being creative. Which will never happen.
I get what you’re saying and there is a market for all that but it’s getting smaller by the day.
Physical game copies are only wanted by collectors and for many it makes more sense to just emulate as you can tweak settings, save any time, swap controls/controllers etc.
Bikes? Less and less. Gone are the days, in my town when you would see droves of youth biking from home to home visiting friends.
Who rides bikes around my area now? Tbh mostly wealthy suburbanites with free time and money. I live in the “sticks” so guess that’s by default, but it’s rare to see a bicycle in our big cities right now too. I travel to one of the biggest cities in the country quite often and it’s all E-scooters at the moment, a bike is seldom seen.
Manual transmissions? It’s rare to see those as well. I work in the automotive field and from what I can see, automatics have taken over. The only sticks I’ve seen in years have been on older work/farm vehicles/equipment and that’s only because the owners can’t afford to upgrade. When I have seen them upgrade, it’s almost always automatic when applicable.
What I’m saying is, sure, maybe these things aren’t officially dead yet but they’re not really thriving either.
Just like these things, give it 20 years and AI will be the default. Those who make “real” art will be a small minority, like a person still receiving calls through a landline or something.
Or maybe it won’t? But this is how it’s usually gone in my lifetime. I’ve yet to see much stop the winds of change, but people do still read paperbacks even though kindles exist so who knows. Just seeing a big push for AI rn and the only way it won’t take over is… well I can’t imagine what would stop it. People are paying to use it, and I’ve yet to see something that’s profitable not be expanded upon.
Use the AI as a productivity tool, not the final product. Let it write where creativity is not a value - tech doc, contracts, porn, but you use it as a starting point to get more of your ideas out faster
Writing is way more than creating outlines or checking the plot for problems. It’s more than even writing a first draft. In fact, it starts with the first round of edits, when characters awake and find their voices etc.
People who think writing with AI is just pushing buttons underestimate the complexity of the process, and using AI for things you’d usually use other writers’ feedback or betas or developmental editors for is just an evolution of tools, the same way we don’t scratch on stone tablets anymore today.
I understand that AI is a complex program and not just pressing buttons. That’s not the issue I have with it. My issue is, what happens when the technology improves significantly? It’s my understanding that LLMs keep improving themselves by continuing to train on (often unethically) acquired data. In its present form, sure, maybe we don’t have to worry. But give it 10 years or so, how much more competent will it be?
Let’s look at just the film industry for a second. We already have a huge problem with Hollywood churning out franchise films at the expense of everything else. But even these cash cows are made via the vision of someone whose name is attached to it. Somebody got paid to write Halloween 36: The Final Halloween for Real This Time. That person may or may not have gave a shit about writing a good story, or they may have just wanted a paycheck. Either way, that paycheck could be used to fund something they care about much more. Once AI reaches the point where it could spit out a passable script, what incentive does Mr. Bigshot the Hollywood producer have to involve a writer at all? And because no writer is receiving a paycheck, less risks are taken in general, because risks don’t guarantee profit
I might just be letting my anxieties get the better of me, and I really hope I am. I just can’t seem to move past the bad feeling I’m getting from this.
The machine doesn’t create anything of value on its own. It’s a power tool. You can automate aspects of creativity, but ultimately all art is the study of choice. What you choose to make, how and why, that is the more worthy aspect. If a movie has something predictable and cheap in the story, I don’t care how well it was acted or how fancy the effects were. It will still be a bad movie.
AI only makes it less effortful to generate creative output. Using AI or not is just another choice to evaluate as part of your creative work. What does that choice mean to you? Make that choice deliberately as part of your vision, and you will have done well.
Definitely not. The more I use LLMs, the more I realize how error prone and unreliable they are. They’re good for generate flavor text, I would never rely on them for anything critical. Context size and nothing verifying correctness of the output are two big ones where they’ll never replace humans. They’re a useful tool to augment productivity, they’re no where near replacing humans yet.
Read some existentialism, no joke. I don’t agree 100% but I read a bunch of Beuvoir over the weekend and one thing I did like was it made me internalize the idea that coming up with a project I care about and achieving it is worthwhile in and of itself regardless of if it “could” be done by someone/something else.
Think about it this way, there are mathematicians from 500 years ago who did a lot of stuff by hand for hours that I could work out with a calculator in seconds today. But does that mean all their work was worthless? If I create a fairly shitty drawing, but I’m proud of my having created it, am I wrong to be proud simply because my friend who is a great artist could make a better one in half the time?
It’s not just about the journey, but it’s not just about the destination either–its about the journey to the destination, and placing value only in one of those things will cause you to be at a loss for the rest of your life.
Depends on why people start projects.
When projects are only started to ‘just get them done’, then AI can be seen as a tool to get them started or even do all.
When projects are started to learn something, I personally would ignore AI completely, as I want to learn something other then how to hand over projects to AI.
I am lazy, but not that lazy. I automate IT tasks myself when I have to do it more then once. I automate with Puppet for own use, script at work and Ansible when I can’t avoid it. (The market wants easy partial automation, not total control)
A creative person does creative things because they want to create. If you feel like there is no point to being creative just because someone else could “do it better/cheaper/faster,” then I would recommend looking at the reason you want to create. AI “competition” is a non-factor for a person whose reason for being creative is “because I want/like to.”
No. True AI is still a while away. What is getting traction are Large Language Models which I don’t classify as AI because the systems are not creating anything new, they are appropriating what already existed and saying it in another way.
they are appropriating what already existed and saying it in another way.
Isn't this humanity in a nutshell? Standing on the shoulders of Giants, etc.
Not really. The LLMs use tokens instead of actual words to understand the words. There’s a layer of disassociation. That’s different to taking pre existing knowledge, understanding it, and using it to divine more knowledge.
I guess it depends on your motivation for said project.
Do you enjoy the process of working on the project? Do you use it to learn new things and improve the skills required for it? Or all you care about is the end project?
If it's the last one I can see why you could get discouraged but if it's the other two then not really.
If I work on something specific I do it because I want to create this thing using my skills, experience and ideas. I also try to do as much of it as I can on my own, without using other's people assets etc. For me, the work I put in is an important of the process and each step towards completion makes me a little proud and happy that I can create something.
At the same time I'm a weirdo who tends to use less efficient methods if they aren't as fun to use when working on personal projects. I don't really care about using AI in the first place so that might skew my view a bit.
There's also the fact that AI isn't omnipotent. It makes mistakes just like us and I'd rather fix my own mistakes since this way I know what I did, how I did it and where to look when things go wrong.
Sorry for the word salad. Your post gave me a reason to spew some unfiltered thoughts about an issue I never really thought about.
Not even.
I’m shit on ansible because it’s really cheesy and weak. But that’s how the bills get paid some days.
Now I put the task into chatgpt and even 3.5 will give me a 70% solution I can fuck with and send back “hey will this work” and let it correct my indentation - fuck that - so it’ll probably run.
That’s like 90% of the work there, and it’s only an hour in. I’m not chuffed at ‘cheating’, as I know I could have gotten there without the paper to cheat off, but I would have wasted far too long. And Ansible will die either through its own brontosaurus layout or IBM will snshittify it to the point people need to churn away anyway. Then maybe it’ll be to something that brings me joy and I’ll want to do more and not less.
In the end you will gain new knowledge from doing the project.
And you can try to use AI to speed up the project and see if that works for you, and gain a better insight on what are the current AI systems shortcomings are.
Why should i bother doing something “like this” if someone else has already done it? Because you will gain the experience to go to the next level.
Its never a waste of time but an improvement of yourself.
So far AI is pathetic on ideas for things to do, requirements to fulfill, imagination. It’s really not a factor. Your great idea for your needs is still your great idea.
I see AI mainly as a tool to help implement, like documentation, google, stackoverflow. AI is already good enough to help generate templates or boilerplate, so now is the time to get comfortable with it as a productivity tool. Use your great idea to get yourself up to speed on the new tool
What kind of project were you thinking about?
Everyone’s comments here are right but I do feel you OP, I’ve been wanting to learn Godot and react recently but seeing people just pull code straight from ChatGPT and it’s way better then I can code right now, does feel a bit like “should I really try this path”.
Tbf I do think you can work hand in hand with ChatGPT where it just makes you faster at development, but I still do feel a little sting. And with so much stuff I want to do, I’ve re-prioritised other things instead.
I feel the same way. In fact I haven’t painted anything in months. I do arylic realism, painting on canvas board. One of my artist friends was showing me images she made using AI and I was blown away and deeply saddened. This was good art, all at the click of a button. Why would poeple pay me money for art, when they can get it for free? Just spend three bucks to print it at Walmart.
Maybe people won’t pay money for it. Maybe they will. The problem isn’t that people may or may not pay money–it’s that you’ve placed your sense of worth in monetary value.
I quit my job to start the year and I'm currently doing a sabbatical year. I'm apathetic about the idea of eventually honing in on a specialty to learn when I re-enter the workforce because I'm unsure how sustainable the skills I learn will be in demand for.
The only thing I can think of is expanding my base level understanding of LLMs. My bet is that they will become the foundation with which future projects are launched in the same way that elementary school is the foundation for basic reading/writing skills.
No, because the point is to express yourself and tap into your imagination. Did chess players stop playing when a computer finally beat the best of them? Did musicians give up playing when digital synthesizers came into existance? No because the point is the human endeavor of play and curation. I don’t care if computers can generate any picture possible like the canvas of babel or generate every piece of literature to ever exist like the library of babel. through the power of fancy math. the piece has no intention or spirit of life. All AI art is good for is concept art and shit quality porn.
phillaholic@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Somewhere out there there is someone better than you at what you do. There’s a company with more resources to do what you do. There are both that can do it quicker, more efficiently, and for cheaper. I say this not to make you feel worse, but hopefully better as all of this was true way before AI and its never stopped anyone before. Think of AI as a tool to extend yourself, not a replacement.