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Jeff :verifiedgay_2:

“What next, should I have a computer that eats my dinner and fucks my wife?” is one of those perfect sentences that just sticks in your head

zooophagous on Tumblr:
I had a tattoo client ask if l ever used Al to design tattoos for me. Man I
spent the better part of a decade doing shitty bit work as a graphic
designer and now that I have the space to do whatever I want, I'm
gonna let the computer generate random garbage for me? What next
should I have a computer that eats my dinner and fucks my wife?
——
I feel like people get so hung up on the results of a thing that they
don't appreciate that the process of making it is, actually, enjoyable.
It's like if you have a friend who likes to bake, asking if they'd like to
just buy cupcakes from the store instead of making them. The end
result of the cupcake is secondary to the joy you get from having
made cupcakes.
Art isn't a slog or a chore or something I want to avoid. Art is fun. It's
rewarding. It feels good to do it. You may as well be asking me if I want
the Al to watch television for me, it doesn't make any sense, I'm not
participating and would gain nothing from it.
22 comments
Saagar Jha
@jnadeau You could have the computer remember it for you
CheapPontoon

@jnadeau
I totally agreed with the whole thing until I saw that I might get AI to watch TV for me and that sounds pretty good .

Ben Evans

@CheapPontoon @jnadeau Your daily reminder that Sam Bankman-Fried and his chums unironically believe that books are stupid & that anything worth saying can be put into a blog post, or auto-summarized by AI.

And us plebs are supposed to revere these chucklefucks as geniuses rather than have them committed.

Dave Spector

@jnadeau someone — wish I could remember to give proper credit — a few months ago said re: AI generated books,

“why would I read a book no one bothered to write?”

Dr Benoît Jones

@Dhmspector @jnadeau
It's a bit like, would you watch two AI's play chess against each other?

Steve Thompson PhD

@Dhmspector @jnadeau

Seeing that the book was 'written' or put forth in reading form, the matter may border on whether AI has, or at some point will have, designated personhood. It's probably fair to believe AI is headed for personhood so authorship, while perhaps not a bother, will be attributable. AI is already taking credit in academia for its participation in student submissions and may be considered a necessary feature to help waylay charges of plagiarism at times.

mav :happy_blob:

@jnadeau i can never get over the idea - and I wish I'd made a note of where I heard it - that the current generative iterations of 'AI' are essentially the exact reverse of what computers should be doing for us. They should be working the tedious tasks and leaving us time for enjoyment and creation, but instead they're doing all the creation and only leaving behind the tedious tasks.

Adrian Egger

@jnadeau File under: things people who don't actually make anything will never understand.

Kay Ohtie, Bat-Yote!

@jnadeau God, I already disliked AI, but as someone who loves baking that analogy really hit it harder for me. That and the comment of the creation process being enjoyable; I've found I really enjoy some of the tedious facets of another art form I do -- adding plush stitching seams carefully after evaluating where they'd be on a real plush when I'm doing 3D model textures, or other assembly marks. It's often the difference between something looking good in VR and looking real, that extra time spent.

But the baking analogy I'll hold onto tight for future use for sure. My wallet doesn't mean as much as taking my own time to make something delicious everyone, even my GF friends, can enjoy.
@colon_three

@jnadeau God, I already disliked AI, but as someone who loves baking that analogy really hit it harder for me. That and the comment of the creation process being enjoyable; I've found I really enjoy some of the tedious facets of another art form I do -- adding plush stitching seams carefully after evaluating where they'd be on a real plush when I'm doing 3D model textures, or other assembly marks. It's often the difference between something looking good in VR and looking real, that extra time spent.

jmjm

@jnadeau awesome!

This is what a post scarcity utopia would look like. It's not that nobody would ever work at Starbucks again, it's that specific people would show up at the coffee shop because they love making lattes and enjoy the community a good coffee shop creates.

Martijn Vos

@jnadeau

I feel the same way about programming. It's okay if Copilot wants to do the kubernetes configuration, but the algorithms are mine.

Longwing

@jnadeau This facinates me. I'm reminded of the (very popular) AI-voiced (and probably AI-scripted) recap videos on youtube. There's whole channels dedicated to summarizing movies and TV shows with badly done computer-generated voiceovers.

I've watched a couple myself, and while I find them grating, I also found them pretty useful for getting the gist of a movie or show that I wasn't heavily invested in watching.

Longwing

@jnadeau Those videos are immensely popular, and an obvious source of passive income for whoever is churning them out. The channels show up, get copyright struck, disappear, show up again... probably programmatically generated.

In short, there ARE some people who want AI to watch TV for them.

Longwing

@jnadeau The joke about AI eating your dinner also has weird resonance with some people. Consider all the liquid meal replacements, clearly meant to bypass all that boring eating so the person drinking them can speedrun getting their calories and stabilizing their blood sugar.

I'm not going to mock that, as I myself have relied on them more than once, and there's a definite element of assistive-technology to them for certain types of neurodivergence.

Longwing

@jnadeau I guess the point I'm making is that human beings love shortcuts. In some ways that's most of what our brain does. Most engineering is about making a hard thing easier.

We also, as a species, have an obsession with Ideas and mistakenly believe that Ideas have value. Ideas are practically worthless, we all have hundreds of them, but we treat concepts as if they're worth more than the execution of said concepts.

Longwing

@jnadeau Thus the incredible rise of "AI". It's a shortcut machine. Have an idea? Here's a janky implementation of your idea that skips all that hard "training" and "work" that you don't want to perform.

Longwing

@jnadeau I think AI generated art is doing incredible harm, largely because of the extensive use of plagiarism in it's creation, but the argument that it's somehow counter to human nature? I'm not so sure.

There are lots of people who enjoy hard work, or at least enjoy specific kinds of hard work that they're good at, but there's tons of real actual humans who want the result without any of the effort of getting there.

Earthshine

@jnadeau The problem is, as always, capitalism.

Business people want to use AI as a shortcut to creating art so they can use or sell it for profit, without investing the time to learn and use skills to create it themselves or the money to pay someone who did. They see no problem with this because they do not value the art or the artists. Artists have a problem with this because they live in a capitalist hellscape where they need to sell their work to survive instead of just being able to create for creation's sake, and now the capitalists are trying to cut them out of the loop. "Let them paint cake."

@jnadeau The problem is, as always, capitalism.

Business people want to use AI as a shortcut to creating art so they can use or sell it for profit, without investing the time to learn and use skills to create it themselves or the money to pay someone who did. They see no problem with this because they do not value the art or the artists. Artists have a problem with this because they live in a capitalist hellscape where they need to sell their work to survive instead of just being able to create for...

blterrible

@jnadeau I've seen some _really_ _really_ bad tattoos that people are stuck with forever. I get the point here, but I just have to point out that many people would be better off with a soulless AI generated tattoo design. Of course, the actual execution would still be done by a person currently, so there's still plenty of room for the worst of both worlds.

Luka Rubinjoni

@jnadeau I already hear an overly enthusiastic elevator pitch about new tech that eats wives and fucks dinners.

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