A pretty daily thought for me now is “there’s no point to this, AI can do it in 1 second, and no one cares” when thinking about doing anything art or programming related. Pretty much anything we do that is on a computer is totally useless now, and companies will probably be firing us all in 10 years or less if you aren’t a manual laborer.
The worst part is, I could be tricked by AI even now. The thought of hearing a song i like, and then finding that it’s AI, makes me physically sick. But 99% of the population wont care one bit.
I pretty much try to ignore it all, and I figure I’ll shut off the internet and enjoy my collection of physical art that I know was made by humans. It just really sucks that we are going down this path and it’s going to utterly destroy us. And no one seems to realize how bad it’s going to get.
Once a year I just poke at ChatGPT and try to solve some not so common task with it.
I’m a Linux user, last time I tried to forward a MIDI stream to Minecraft with the help of ChatGPT. On Pipewire, Java won’t pick up any MIDI sources by default. I was going back and fourth with it for around an hour while it was trying to make me install software for different audio servers and was very confident that this is the correct way. When I get frustrated enough, I do my regular searching routine. In this case, 10 minutes of searching led me to this:
modprobe snd_virmidiI literally needed to modprobe one driver. Java starts to see Pipewire’s MIDI bridge after that. Experiencing this once in a while makes me very confident that this thing would be extermely toxic for anything I do.
You can also ask it about something you are an expert at. The amount of stuff it gets wrong is insane.
I don’t use it and I avoid the hundreds of vapid articles about it on my tech news sites. So I’m less depressed about AI but still depressed about how stupid the people are that use it.
The worst part is, I could be tricked by AI even now. The thought of hearing a song i like, and then finding that it’s AI, makes me physically sick. But 99% of the population wont care one bit.
Maybe it’s my age, but of the people I know, pretty much all of them feel the same way you do.
If you do end up being fooled don’t try to take it too hard. It’s just a mistake. Just keep an eye out for real human connections. That’s what most of us are after more than just the aesthetic gratification of the finished work – it’s just that for most of human history, the finished work was all the proof we needed that another person had put effort into authoring something they cared to put out into the world.
I had it happen that an artist I never heard of on Spotify came up and I kinda liked the music so I wanted to see what they were doing because it was sub 10k listents.
Literally all people pointing out how obvious the ai was an I felt like such an idiot. If I’m looking out for it I can spot it but I can’t just be vigilant 24/7 it’s exhausting.
I look at previous generations of “AI” and see where this generation of “AI” is going. (Hint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkgHapnwBs4)
Turning the computer off and getting real world skills isn’t the worst idea in the world regardless of AI. Jump now, avoid the rush!
I take solace in the fact that a lot of the output of so-called AI needs to be checked and doublechecked, rendering any time and overhead savings nonexistent. This may change but I’m clinging on.
It’s too early to tell where on the “modern technology replaces humans spectrum” the advent of so-called AI falls. Are we talking about enraged workers seeing their livelihoods in danger by industrialization throwing their wooden shoes, sabot, into the machines? Hence, or so the legend goes, the word sabotage. Or are we talking about accountants and bookkeepers, whose need to exist was questioned when Excel became a thing and automated something like 60 percent of their work. They actually grew in number because they could do more sensible things now. We can at least hope it’s the second scenario.
As far as the masses enjoying so-called-AI-generated music is concerned, I think of how the availability of photography changed paintings. When you couldn’t just snap a picture of something, a photorealistic facsimile in oil on canvas was fantastic. It took weeks but you didn’t know better. When photography became widespread, artists went banana. Picasso actually knew how to draw things correctly but you wouldn’t think that seeing his later body of work. Impressionism is delivering lovely scenery without sticking to the realism of the Dutch masters. Art isn’t in a vacuum, it develops around life, life includes technology - it’s an unavoidability that technology influences art.
Any photograph would be amazing to the people in 1830. Wow! It’s my neighbor Bob sitting on a chair. Wow! It’s a picture of a thumb. I have two of those but I’ve never seen them like that. Wow! It’s a picture of New York. I’ll never be able to go there because it takes 6 weeks and costs more than my net worth. Jump to today and we’ve become much more discerning about what a good photograph is. I live in hope that we develop a so-called-AI discerning taste as well. Especially in music. We’ve done okay with photoshopped images too.
The dude(ette) abides.
