Skill atrophy is an issue with nearly every technology though. Unless you want to go back to knapping your own hand axes and starting fires with sticks you will be dependent on some technology to cover the skills you don’t have.
There’s a hard limit on the kind of paywall you can put on LLMs as well. Open source models exist and companies / people are increasingly turning to them instead of shelling out millions to the frontier labs. Even the frontier models are becoming increasingly commoditized as it’s relatively easy to swap out which model a given application is using. If anthropic starts charging exorbitant rates per token you can switch to a gpt or Gemini model relatively easily.
People keep doing this - arguing that if you’re against AI you must not want to use any technology.
Because that’s what happens if you take this argument and apply it to almost any other technology. If you are truly worried about skill atrophy you shouldn’t use calculators to preserve your math skills, you shouldn’t use gps to keep navigation skills, you shouldn’t use the Internet for research to keep library skills, and there were people at the time when these were introduced making those exact arguments that we now regard as irrelevant. Why this time the argument will be relevant has not been shown to me.
all the previous examples of technology improving has a greater benefit to offset the detriment.
Books, for example, did decrease our skill to just retain information; however, the benefit of sharing, storing, and propagating information long after you’re gone has proven WAY more useful.
a GPS might have decreased your skill in navigation (although reading abstractised maps of where you are is a trade-off), but it allowed for improvements in travel, a harder time getting lost, enabling rescue operations etc.
genAI so far does have it’s uses in fields like medicine, chemistry, any domain where generating by hand is unfeasible. But for the general population, it has been proven to impact cognitive skills, it eroded trust across the board:
you have to second guess if someone online is a LLM or a person
you have to scrutinise whether or not an art piece is made with or without AI
news and media have become so much easier to impact
not to mention, all the climate impact the rapid constructions of data centres does (yes, data centres have existed and have been built before, but not to this pace or scale)
and maybe the increasing cases of AI psychosis, with all the varieties of harm people have experienced due to this.
etc.
For all of this to be offset, there’d need to be a phenomenal benefit to come out of genAI the way it’s used today.
I don’t think the advent of books, libraries, calculators and GPS have had a combined net loss for everyone, more than AI has.
And for the record, I do believe AI is an useful technology. But that remaining usefulness will only show itself from the shockwave, after the bubble bursts.
Some fair points, I agree AI definitely has its harms, I was just arguing against the skill atrophy argument that I see some people arguing for without examining the many other skills they have atrophied.
you have to scrutinise whether or not an art piece is made with or without AI
You don’t have to do this, you choose to do this because you think art produced with AI is inherently bad / souless etc. An analogy for this could be drum machines, in most modern music it is very hard to tell whether music is using an actual drummer vs a looped drum sample. This takes away jobs from actual drummers and devalues the skill they worked hard to perfect, and it could be argued that it takes away the soul of the beat.
You could live your life trying to listen only to music that uses an actual drummer and constantly analyze and look for cues in the music to let you know if it’s an actual drummer. Or you could just enjoy the art for what it is and move on, the only thing stopping you from enjoying it is your own objections to the production method. It’s fine to have those objections, but you can’t say that everyone else has to have the same standard as that’s just taking away the enjoyment of others.
We’re talking about a technology that is able to self direct when solving abstract problems, able to develop novel solutions to frontier mathematics. Drum machines do not maintain an internal high dimensional latent information space and display indicators of g. Synthesizers cannot create a novel melody.
This is not “just a tool”. It is impossible for me to attribute ‘art’ created by AI to the human that prompted it. I also now live with the constant paranoia that what is being showed to me was made by an LLM much like who me you are responding to.
It’s not that it’s bad or soulless, quite the contrary, it’s often quite good. It just wasn’t made by a human.
I’m having trouble understanding you’re objection to it then. If the purpose of art is to make you feel something and this AI media is accomplishing that, why do you need to distinguish between the two?
Do you not trust what’s happening in those higher dimensions?
Do you want to preserve a walter benjamin-esque aura in human art?
The purpose of art is not to make me feel something. That’s hedonism; functionally masturbation.
The purpose of art is to serve as a method of communication and bond forming. That’s the clinical way of putting it but to evoke a bit more “woo”…
The purpose of art is to allow two or more humans to communicate on a level simple dialogue cannot achieve. It’s to take the thoughts that live in your head, with or without the limitations of compression needed for transmission (medium), and put them in my head. It was never about feelings or personal satisfaction, those are happy bi-products; its about community and human connection.
AI adds a layer of abstraction in the form of a second, non-human, communicator. I cannot attribute art created by Claude to its user, the user has been obscured, and I can no longer hear their thoughts.
Why would you take that argument and apply it elsewhere? Not every argument applies to every single thing.
Again, rather than just “maybe we should hold onto the skills we have”, the AI brain solution is “let’s just build our own infrastructure for doing the thinking for us”.
Why would you take that argument and apply it elsewhere?
Ask Immanuel Kant . If you inconsistently apply an argument then that is a sign of hypocriticality, ie. Lack of criticality. The hypocrite inconsistently applies criticisms to support an already held belief that is independent of that argument.
For example if I said immigration should be banned but carved out an exception for European countries, then that means I don’t actually believe that immigration should be banned, it probably means I don’t like brown people and am using this argument in bad faith to justify that belief.
The sign of a good argument is consistency, and any inconsistent application of it requires an explanation.
If calculators, gps, and the internet are exceptions to the rule of avoiding skill atrophy, explain why. Otherwise you are being a hypocrite.
But I think the point about bad faith misses the mark. For one to conduct themselves or argue for a position in bad faith (even against only themselves), they must first hold a true, hidden belief. I don’t think that’s typically the case here.
You could argue that there is a hidden belief and that it is something like “AI is bad” or “I don’t like AI.” However, the people arguing this position are often quick to point out themselves that AI has legitimate value, even if they then go on to narrowly define the character and application of that value.
I would argue instead that what is actually being hidden here isn’t a belief, but is instead a sentiment something like, “I’m scared.” Which, while being completely understandable, is an emotive state or pseudo-belief, not a truly-held but hidden belief. Because of that, they (in the general sense) aren’t calculating hypocrites; they’re are just panicking.
Although, I prefer the admittedly archaic flatus vocis for describing this particular brand of cognitive dissonance because it translates basically to “mouth farts,” and that makes me chuckle.
Skill atrophy is an issue with nearly every technology though. Unless you want to go back to knapping your own hand axes and starting fires with sticks you will be dependent on some technology to cover the skills you don’t have.
There’s a fairly hard limit in the kind of paywall that can be put in front of lighters, axes and pencils.
Not all technology is bad, not all exchanges are detrimental.
People keep doing this - arguing that if you’re against AI you must not want to use any technology.
There’s a hard limit on the kind of paywall you can put on LLMs as well. Open source models exist and companies / people are increasingly turning to them instead of shelling out millions to the frontier labs. Even the frontier models are becoming increasingly commoditized as it’s relatively easy to swap out which model a given application is using. If anthropic starts charging exorbitant rates per token you can switch to a gpt or Gemini model relatively easily.
Because that’s what happens if you take this argument and apply it to almost any other technology. If you are truly worried about skill atrophy you shouldn’t use calculators to preserve your math skills, you shouldn’t use gps to keep navigation skills, you shouldn’t use the Internet for research to keep library skills, and there were people at the time when these were introduced making those exact arguments that we now regard as irrelevant. Why this time the argument will be relevant has not been shown to me.
all the previous examples of technology improving has a greater benefit to offset the detriment.
Books, for example, did decrease our skill to just retain information; however, the benefit of sharing, storing, and propagating information long after you’re gone has proven WAY more useful.
a GPS might have decreased your skill in navigation (although reading abstractised maps of where you are is a trade-off), but it allowed for improvements in travel, a harder time getting lost, enabling rescue operations etc.
genAI so far does have it’s uses in fields like medicine, chemistry, any domain where generating by hand is unfeasible. But for the general population, it has been proven to impact cognitive skills, it eroded trust across the board:
For all of this to be offset, there’d need to be a phenomenal benefit to come out of genAI the way it’s used today. I don’t think the advent of books, libraries, calculators and GPS have had a combined net loss for everyone, more than AI has.
And for the record, I do believe AI is an useful technology. But that remaining usefulness will only show itself from the shockwave, after the bubble bursts.
Some fair points, I agree AI definitely has its harms, I was just arguing against the skill atrophy argument that I see some people arguing for without examining the many other skills they have atrophied.
You don’t have to do this, you choose to do this because you think art produced with AI is inherently bad / souless etc. An analogy for this could be drum machines, in most modern music it is very hard to tell whether music is using an actual drummer vs a looped drum sample. This takes away jobs from actual drummers and devalues the skill they worked hard to perfect, and it could be argued that it takes away the soul of the beat.
You could live your life trying to listen only to music that uses an actual drummer and constantly analyze and look for cues in the music to let you know if it’s an actual drummer. Or you could just enjoy the art for what it is and move on, the only thing stopping you from enjoying it is your own objections to the production method. It’s fine to have those objections, but you can’t say that everyone else has to have the same standard as that’s just taking away the enjoyment of others.
We’re talking about a technology that is able to self direct when solving abstract problems, able to develop novel solutions to frontier mathematics. Drum machines do not maintain an internal high dimensional latent information space and display indicators of g. Synthesizers cannot create a novel melody.
This is not “just a tool”. It is impossible for me to attribute ‘art’ created by AI to the human that prompted it. I also now live with the constant paranoia that what is being showed to me was made by an LLM much like who me you are responding to.
It’s not that it’s bad or soulless, quite the contrary, it’s often quite good. It just wasn’t made by a human.
I’m having trouble understanding you’re objection to it then. If the purpose of art is to make you feel something and this AI media is accomplishing that, why do you need to distinguish between the two?
Do you not trust what’s happening in those higher dimensions?
Do you want to preserve a walter benjamin-esque aura in human art?
The purpose of art is not to make me feel something. That’s hedonism; functionally masturbation.
The purpose of art is to serve as a method of communication and bond forming. That’s the clinical way of putting it but to evoke a bit more “woo”…
The purpose of art is to allow two or more humans to communicate on a level simple dialogue cannot achieve. It’s to take the thoughts that live in your head, with or without the limitations of compression needed for transmission (medium), and put them in my head. It was never about feelings or personal satisfaction, those are happy bi-products; its about community and human connection.
AI adds a layer of abstraction in the form of a second, non-human, communicator. I cannot attribute art created by Claude to its user, the user has been obscured, and I can no longer hear their thoughts.
Why would you take that argument and apply it elsewhere? Not every argument applies to every single thing.
Again, rather than just “maybe we should hold onto the skills we have”, the AI brain solution is “let’s just build our own infrastructure for doing the thinking for us”.
Ask Immanuel Kant . If you inconsistently apply an argument then that is a sign of hypocriticality, ie. Lack of criticality. The hypocrite inconsistently applies criticisms to support an already held belief that is independent of that argument.
For example if I said immigration should be banned but carved out an exception for European countries, then that means I don’t actually believe that immigration should be banned, it probably means I don’t like brown people and am using this argument in bad faith to justify that belief.
The sign of a good argument is consistency, and any inconsistent application of it requires an explanation.
If calculators, gps, and the internet are exceptions to the rule of avoiding skill atrophy, explain why. Otherwise you are being a hypocrite.
I love the appropriate application of Kant!
But I think the point about bad faith misses the mark. For one to conduct themselves or argue for a position in bad faith (even against only themselves), they must first hold a true, hidden belief. I don’t think that’s typically the case here.
You could argue that there is a hidden belief and that it is something like “AI is bad” or “I don’t like AI.” However, the people arguing this position are often quick to point out themselves that AI has legitimate value, even if they then go on to narrowly define the character and application of that value.
I would argue instead that what is actually being hidden here isn’t a belief, but is instead a sentiment something like, “I’m scared.” Which, while being completely understandable, is an emotive state or pseudo-belief, not a truly-held but hidden belief. Because of that, they (in the general sense) aren’t calculating hypocrites; they’re are just panicking.
Although, I prefer the admittedly archaic flatus vocis for describing this particular brand of cognitive dissonance because it translates basically to “mouth farts,” and that makes me chuckle.