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Time has run out... "AI", code gen, etc. have only amplified my creativity and output, soooo if you are feeling mediocracy creeping in, it always was. Sorry.

Time has run out... "AI", code gen, etc. have only amplified my creativity and output, soooo if you are feeling mediocracy creeping in, it always was. Sorry. If anything this has only highlighted something I have said for 40 years. Ideas are a dime a dozen, everyone is mediocre(including me), execute. Now, we will see who has the real ability to produce...

JofArnold 3y ago
Mediocre ideas are a dime a dozen. Meanwhile to me at least it seems as if good ideas are increasingly rare.
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  My idea: Uber for ideas.
  - spacecadet 3y ago
    AWS for ideas, scale the ideas!!
dorkwood 3y ago
I agree with you 100%. Recently, I've been generating landscapes with Midjourney, signing my name at the bottom, and hanging them on my wall. It feels good to finally overcome the artistic challenges I faced in the past.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  But you are still not an artist, lack skill and the "art" has zero value.
  - peebeebee 3y ago
    He might have never been, but he's more of an artist now than he was before.
    - gumballindie 3y ago
      Just like flat earthers are scientists because they produce stuff that looks like science.
      - peebeebee 3y ago
        That's a horrible analogy. And you sound like a bitter person. The person you commented created something he loved. He loved it so much he framed it. With your comment, you created nothing but negativity. Seems like @dorkwood is the artist (creator), and you are the critic. :)
  - dorkwood 3y ago
    Well, that's the beauty of it. I don't need skills anymore. In the future, anyone spending time acquiring "skills" will be falling behind.
    - gumballindie 3y ago
      Yes, it has all been documented in a movie named idiocracy.
      - dorkwood 3y ago
        Thank you, I'll check it out.
  - kerzs 3y ago
    I disagree with you on your claim that the art has zero value - clearly the OP saw enough value in it to frame it and put it up on his wall - he saw more value in this than something he could have purchased because it was exactly as he wanted it. The fact that that art piece might have zero market value is irrelevant as the OP never claims to want to sell them. I also fail to see why it is relevant to point out that the OP lacks artistic skill - it was the vision that was valuable to them; putting a paintbrush to a paper is simply a medium that they were able to circumvent with a simpler solution.
    - gumballindie 3y ago
      I use hammers and nails yet i lack skill and the goods i make lack value. I dont know what’s up with folks thinking that producing a one off using a procedural generator makes them artists and this point i am afraid to ask.
ActionHank 3y ago
I think this is the reality that plays out longer term. Large orgs and high level execs are seeing an opportunity to produce cheaper, lower quality product more quickly. These same orgs seem largely blind to the fact that while they are working to make their staff redundant to surge profits, those same staff have been massively empowered with leverage that would allow them to build competing products that would be more competitive. Work at an org as a backend engineer? Know enough domain to build a competing product, but have no design or frontend knowledge? AI to the rescue. In tech the biggest threats to large orgs has always been small teams with drive and vision, those teams can be smaller now and likely made up of former employees.
moribvndvs 3y ago
I don’t mean this personally, but just because you feel or perhaps are even able to quantify amplified creativity and output, that doesn’t mean it’s not mediocre. After all, mediocrity is subjective. And even if you’re doing incredible things with it, there are most certainly a lot of folks (I’d argue more) who absolutely are not. In my senior role at a software company, I’m increasingly having to spend more time protecting our products, marketing, documentation, and support from developers, product and design staff, support department, and even vendors from jamming in broken, poor quality output from automation. The article touches on a more philosophical (and some cases actual [1]) negative feedback loop: these tools are trained on human output, explodes into popularity, and–greatly boosted by seedier, low rent content farmers and the likes as well as mind boggling scale and speed–is fed back into the same input stream: akin to the “photocopy of a photocopy of a…” effect. I recall years ago scoffing at talks about how the Internet will soon be an unusable torrent of detritus that drowns out actual useful or interesting information and looks at Google search results here we are. When it comes to generative tools, sure, there are defenses and mechanisms to mitigate this effect to a certain extent, but it also has a likewise effect on humans and society, which doesn’t, not really. We are constantly driving the bar lower, both from the business and consumer perspective. A parallel: Look at mass produced, cheap consumer goods. I’m not ancient, but I’m old enough to watch my era of cheap goods (which my betters lamented over compared to “their time”) also become replaced by notably worse quality products than before. We don’t even seem to care if the thing meets some minimum threshold of functional in its purpose, it only matters that it’s immediately available and cheap enough to dispose of if it sucks especially bad. This is an excellent proposition for economies that have been working extremely hard to push society in this direction. It’s awful for everything else. This is a drain-circling race to the bottom with disastrous ecological and human implications. Of course, you can dismiss this as shouting into the void, technological old man yells at the Cloud… which it is. The ram has touched the wall, Pandora’s box has been opened, the genie is out of the bottle. But when I compare it to other technological disruptions in human history, “AI” products and services are impinging upon widespread sociopolitical and economic stressors and challenges resulting from just the regular-ass Information Age. Since we are increasingly a technological society[2], and our most trusted but flawed quantifier for value and worth is money, profitability is the predominant motivator from big tech. Not so much its benefit to humanity or whatever delusion VC sociopaths and techno-narcissists are on about. AI is a tool. I’m not afraid of tools. I’m afraid of a race who has a difficult relationship with its tools and is prone to squander them on stupid or awful things. I think the confluence of hyper capitalism, nascent technology, and human nature will make slowly boiled frogs of all of us, cut off from our true potential emotionally, intellectually, physically, artistically, morally, and ethically. [1] https://futurism.com/ai-trained-ai-generated-data https://futurism.com/ai-trained-ai-generated-data [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Technological_Society https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Technological_Society

JofArnold 3y ago

Mediocre ideas are a dime a dozen. Meanwhile to me at least it seems as if good ideas are increasingly rare.

AlexandrB 3y ago
My idea: Uber for ideas.
- spacecadet 3y ago
  AWS for ideas, scale the ideas!!

dorkwood 3y ago

I agree with you 100%. Recently, I've been generating landscapes with Midjourney, signing my name at the bottom, and hanging them on my wall. It feels good to finally overcome the artistic challenges I faced in the past.

gumballindie 3y ago
But you are still not an artist, lack skill and the "art" has zero value.
- peebeebee 3y ago
  He might have never been, but he's more of an artist now than he was before.
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    Just like flat earthers are scientists because they produce stuff that looks like science.
    - peebeebee 3y ago
      That's a horrible analogy. And you sound like a bitter person. The person you commented created something he loved. He loved it so much he framed it. With your comment, you created nothing but negativity. Seems like @dorkwood is the artist (creator), and you are the critic. :)
- dorkwood 3y ago
  Well, that's the beauty of it. I don't need skills anymore. In the future, anyone spending time acquiring "skills" will be falling behind.
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    Yes, it has all been documented in a movie named idiocracy.
    - dorkwood 3y ago
      Thank you, I'll check it out.
- kerzs 3y ago
  I disagree with you on your claim that the art has zero value - clearly the OP saw enough value in it to frame it and put it up on his wall - he saw more value in this than something he could have purchased because it was exactly as he wanted it. The fact that that art piece might have zero market value is irrelevant as the OP never claims to want to sell them. I also fail to see why it is relevant to point out that the OP lacks artistic skill - it was the vision that was valuable to them; putting a paintbrush to a paper is simply a medium that they were able to circumvent with a simpler solution.
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    I use hammers and nails yet i lack skill and the goods i make lack value. I dont know what’s up with folks thinking that producing a one off using a procedural generator makes them artists and this point i am afraid to ask.

ActionHank 3y ago

I think this is the reality that plays out longer term. Large orgs and high level execs are seeing an opportunity to produce cheaper, lower quality product more quickly. These same orgs seem largely blind to the fact that while they are working to make their staff redundant to surge profits, those same staff have been massively empowered with leverage that would allow them to build competing products that would be more competitive. Work at an org as a backend engineer? Know enough domain to build a competing product, but have no design or frontend knowledge? AI to the rescue. In tech the biggest threats to large orgs has always been small teams with drive and vision, those teams can be smaller now and likely made up of former employees.

moribvndvs 3y ago

I don’t mean this personally, but just because you feel or perhaps are even able to quantify amplified creativity and output, that doesn’t mean it’s not mediocre. After all, mediocrity is subjective. And even if you’re doing incredible things with it, there are most certainly a lot of folks (I’d argue more) who absolutely are not. In my senior role at a software company, I’m increasingly having to spend more time protecting our products, marketing, documentation, and support from developers, product and design staff, support department, and even vendors from jamming in broken, poor quality output from automation. The article touches on a more philosophical (and some cases actual [1]) negative feedback loop: these tools are trained on human output, explodes into popularity, and–greatly boosted by seedier, low rent content farmers and the likes as well as mind boggling scale and speed–is fed back into the same input stream: akin to the “photocopy of a photocopy of a…” effect. I recall years ago scoffing at talks about how the Internet will soon be an unusable torrent of detritus that drowns out actual useful or interesting information and looks at Google search results here we are. When it comes to generative tools, sure, there are defenses and mechanisms to mitigate this effect to a certain extent, but it also has a likewise effect on humans and society, which doesn’t, not really. We are constantly driving the bar lower, both from the business and consumer perspective. A parallel: Look at mass produced, cheap consumer goods. I’m not ancient, but I’m old enough to watch my era of cheap goods (which my betters lamented over compared to “their time”) also become replaced by notably worse quality products than before. We don’t even seem to care if the thing meets some minimum threshold of functional in its purpose, it only matters that it’s immediately available and cheap enough to dispose of if it sucks especially bad. This is an excellent proposition for economies that have been working extremely hard to push society in this direction. It’s awful for everything else. This is a drain-circling race to the bottom with disastrous ecological and human implications. Of course, you can dismiss this as shouting into the void, technological old man yells at the Cloud… which it is. The ram has touched the wall, Pandora’s box has been opened, the genie is out of the bottle. But when I compare it to other technological disruptions in human history, “AI” products and services are impinging upon widespread sociopolitical and economic stressors and challenges resulting from just the regular-ass Information Age. Since we are increasingly a technological society[2], and our most trusted but flawed quantifier for value and worth is money, profitability is the predominant motivator from big tech. Not so much its benefit to humanity or whatever delusion VC sociopaths and techno-narcissists are on about. AI is a tool. I’m not afraid of tools. I’m afraid of a race who has a difficult relationship with its tools and is prone to squander them on stupid or awful things. I think the confluence of hyper capitalism, nascent technology, and human nature will make slowly boiled frogs of all of us, cut off from our true potential emotionally, intellectually, physically, artistically, morally, and ethically. [1] https://futurism.com/ai-trained-ai-generated-data https://futurism.com/ai-trained-ai-generated-data [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Technological_Society https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Technological_Society