Fuck AI

We go through this hype cycle every time a technology grows exponentially. Every salesperson shouts "It's going to the moon!" and it goes to Radio Shack and Walmart instead.

It actually turns out that everything that looks exponential, actually follows a logistic growth curve, constrained by other factors.

We're usually pretty bad at guessing which other factors will kick in to stop the exponential growth, and when. And sometimes the exponential growth kills us anyway, before another factor kicks in.

But the current AI hype will also be governed by other factors. Even if we agree to have complete 100% faith in AI's abilities growing as much as possible, it will hit a hard limit of tasks that it will remain stubbornly bad at.

Where ever that limit currently is, is where the interesting work will happen. Currently it's at "go for more than a few minutes without lying or hallucinating". Someday soon it will be around AI driving on a busy day without smearing an unacceptable number of pedestrians into mush.

AI becoming better will be a long, often sad, always interesting journey.

But whoever is telling you that AI has already replaced you is just trying to keep you off balance, hoping you won't find and connect with your local union representative.

I make an AI-generated picture of myself, smiling, and then got it printed out in large. I taped it over my bathroom mirror and now I'm always smiling, as far as I can tell

I still have this general feeling that all this AI nonsense is going to blow over by 2027/2028 and we'll all be going "Hey, remember when that was the big tech buzzword?"

Kind of like how everyone was talking "virtualization" 20 years ago.

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!

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_virmidi

I 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.

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 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.

Working in IT as gen z I have had to accept that everything is already developed, and probably better than I would have done it. If I can think of a problem then someone has solved it.

I would want to say that art is in the eye of the beholder, but there is no one to behold anymore. The only thing art can be today is the process of the artist (unless you are lucky and/or privileged).

While depressing, one has to ask; is an impression needed for art to be valid? I don't think so.

Three is an over abundance of basically everything, and I doubt there is a way to go back.

Tldr: make your own art, there is too much art to view anyway

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.

I look at previous generations of "AI" and see where this generation of "AI" is going. (Hint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkgHapnwBs4)

The dude(ette) abides.