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.
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.