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You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-Al is? Wrong direction. I want Al to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not f
by eucryphia 1y ago
You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-Al is? Wrong direction.
I want Al to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for Al to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.
- Joanna Maciejewska
You could add music
- senko 1y agoWe already have machines that do laundry and dishes.
- bicepjai 1y agoWho ever says this have not done laundry :)
- senko 1y agoIncorrect :) Try doing it without the machine, see if you can spot the difference.
- nurettin 1y agoStill a chore with the machine. It is implied that AI will take over the machines, collect your socks and shirts from around the house, put them in the machine, dry them out, iron them and put them back in the drawer in an energy efficient and hygienic way while you are happily painting.
- amarant 1y agoIt's still creative work to make music using AI too. In both cases, the machines just made it a lot easier
- magackame 1y agoI am not too sure about that. Isn't the whole thing about art and music is that you can convey something that words cannot? Of course, these models start to support image and audio inputs as well, but the most interesting mixing step that happens in the artist's head seems missing in the generated output. If you have some vision inside your head, making something out of it by hand is still the best way to convey it. Just as writing something down refines the thoughts and reveals holes in your thinking - drawing something is visual thinking that reveals holes in your imagination. You can imagine some scene or an object pretty easily, but if you try to draw it into existence, you will immediately notice that a lot of detail is missing, a lot of stuff you didn't think through or didn't even notice was there at all. The same applies to creating music and programming. Using generative AI certainly has some artistic component to it, but I feel like using these models you give up too much expressive bandwidth and ability to reflect and take your time on the whole endeavor.
- harvey9 1y agoWho is the work for? If I lived in the automated future (or could afford private staff in the present) I would do more creative stuff just because I enjoy it and with no expectation of having an audience. For context, I'm an occasionally-published photographer, and I like playing piano but I'm not at a level anyone else would want to listen to.
- senko 1y agoBut photography is not art, you didn't paint it! You literally pointed a device at something, twiddled a few knobs and pushed a button. Literally anyone with a smartphone can do that! /s of course, but basically that's the argument people make nowadays related to AI and art (of any form). See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs3ocG5yW88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs3ocG5yW88
- malloryerik 1y agoYep, the beloved image of Aristotle gazing out at the slaves in the fields and saying that someday robots will do the labor and people will be at leisure, and not slaves looking toward the pagoda discussing how someday robots will own us all.
- TiredOfLife 1y agoGet a clothes dryer.
- harshitaneja 1y agoWho ever says this hasn't done laundry without machine assistance :)
- Shorel 1y agoWhoever says this has never washed laundry by hand =)
- dataviz1000 1y agoUgh, why can't AI fold my clothes so I can spend more time on Hacker News writing comments?
- Tepix 1y agoBecause AI can do the commenting better than you...?
- dataviz1000 1y agoBut, can AI fold clothes better than I...? This 'tis the question.
- fullshark 1y agoI recall they asked some elderly women what the greatest invention they saw in their lifetime was a few years back and they said the laundry machine. Before the laundry machine, it was an all day, physical chore with a washboard. Hours of your life devoted to just doing laundry versus putting it in a machine and coming back in an hour
- dyauspitr 1y agoLoading and unloading them and folding clothes makes it not good enough yet. There are so many things a humanoid robot could do around a house. Laundry, dishes, picking up clutter, taking out the trash, wiping down surfaces and dusting, pulling out weeds etc. I actually think we’re somewhat close to gettin g like that relatively soon.
- Applejinx 1y agoHumanoid or not, anything that can do these things and understand you when you ask to do them, in a useful way that's not like 'white mutiny' but actually like a proper servant… …deserves to sit on the back porch playing guitar if it likes. If it's a superintelligence way superior to its human masters, it deserves that MORE than if it's a hapless, semi-useless mechanism.
- dyauspitr 1y agoI wouldn’t say an LLM needs time to relax and it can do all of the above atleast in the virtual space already.
- butlike 1y agoAs always, the last mile is the most difficult. To me 'doing laundry and dishes' encompasses putting them away (and folding in the case of laundry).
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- chii 1y agoNothing stops you from doing art and writing, just like nothing is stopping someone today from riding a horse, running a marathon or rowing a boat.
- wavemode 1y agoPresumably, the idea is that AI drives down the cost (and thus, value / career prospects) of art and writing.
- my_username_is_ 1y agoI'm gonna be honest... Very few people are artists for the pay
- thrdbndndn 1y agoI'm not sure how this contradicts what they said. AI would likely lower the number of paid opportunities. Additionally, art requires practice. Sure, some "lower-tier" artists may produce work that AI could replace without anyone noticing. But by removing that step, we risk having fewer truly great artists emerging.
- dist-epoch 1y agoI will also be honest, if you expect to live off your art, you are doing it wrong.
- vkou 1y agoIf you expect to live off typing letters and numbers on a keyboard, (or off the labour of others, while you siphon up the lion's share of their productive surplus), you are doing it wrong.
- j4coh 1y agoYou may not be able to be rich, but at least until recently it was possible to make a living and not be homeless/require patronage.
- etaioinshrdlu 1y agoThese are actually just the problems easier for researchers to solve, mostly due to a lot of readily available data.
- a2128 1y agoEveryone shares music and art they make but nobody ever shares videos and motion capture of themselves doing laundry and vacuuming their house. Maybe we need to start sharing that instead
- numpad0 1y agoEven teleops are janky as hell, robots needs bodies
- my_username_is_ 1y agoCheck out the Epic Kitchens project, there are labeled video data sets of cooking, doing dishes, etc. https://github.com/epic-kitchens https://github.com/epic-kitchens
- fragmede 1y agoThe UMI gripper project is working on this. they have a handheld gripper device full of sensors that they use to record doing things in the field, like picking Starbucks, which they then use as training data. https://umi-gripper.github.io/ https://umi-gripper.github.io/ The other thing to note is part of the aloha project isn't just to record people folding laundry and loading the dishwasher, but to take that data and plug it into a simulator with a physics engine, and use a digital twin to get 10x the amount of data to be used in training the model than if they'd just used real world data. So yes we need that data, but not as much as we would otherwise. https://mobile-aloha.github.io/ https://mobile-aloha.github.io/ https://github.com/tonyzhaozh/aloha https://github.com/tonyzhaozh/aloha
- verdverm 1y agoMeta has several first person pov datasets available https://ai.meta.com/datasets/ https://ai.meta.com/datasets/
- pj_mukh 1y agoThe last 5 years have been a supersized lesson in Moravec’s paradox [1]. More people need to hear about this: the tech world doesn’t have some kind of conspiracy against the creative class, it literally is the lowest hanging fruit as predicted 30 years ago. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
- ImHereToVote 1y agoWho said anything about conspiracies?
- pjmlp 1y agoMany keep forgetting programming is also creative work, but yeah whatever.
- koiueo 1y ago> I want Al to do my laundry Do you want a washing machine with Alexa built-in? Be careful what you ask for. (I know what you meant, but the only laundry-related AI you can hope for, is a cloud connected smart speaker telling you it can't wash with unapproved third party detergent pods)
- antfarm 1y agoI guess automatic sorting, washing at the right temperature, drying and maybe folding is what someone who washes their own clothes would wish for. Talking to the appliance is probably not that high on their list.
- butlike 1y agoThe Jetsons future.
- Keyframe 1y ago> I want Al to do my laundry Do you want a washing machine with Alexa built-in? Be careful what you ask for. https://www.samsung.com/uk/washers-and-dryers/bespoke-ai-laundry/ https://www.samsung.com/uk/washers-and-dryers/bespoke-ai-lau...
- thih9 1y ago> the only laundry-related AI you can hope for, is a cloud connected smart speaker telling you it can't wash with unapproved third party detergent pods This seems unnecessarily fatalist. Laundry folding machines exist[1] and there were attempts to create a consumer friendly one, so far unsuccessful. Technology advancements could make that happen. At least that's what I'm hoping for. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laundry-folding_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laundry-folding_machine
- dkga 1y agoSomeone (probably from here) would develop a local inference model probably - or hopefully.
- jsphweid 1y agoI'm getting a little tired of hearing this quote at this point. What about humoring the opposite? I want AI to automate art so I can spend more time doing dishes and doing laundry. Dishes and laundry are purely analog human experiences. Art, at this point, is essentially digital, and digital is the domain of machines so we can let machines do that now.
- Al-Khwarizmi 1y agoYou don't need AI for that. Just come to my house, I can allow you to spend time in analog human experiences like dishes and laundry for free. And I'm sure I'm not the only one.
- voidspark 1y agoI want AI to automate everything, so that I can exist in a pod, fed intravenously, in a permanent vegetative state.
- Toenex 1y agoI want AI to be able to do everything so the I can choose to do anything.
- voidspark 1y agoIf it can do everything, then you will be redundant.
- dgfl 1y agoI keep coming back to this thought. Maybe it’s how I was raised, but knowing that I’m doing something useful to other people / humanity is the entire point. When a machine can do everything better than we can, then what do we derive meaning from? I usually get out of the existential dread by thinking that we’re still some time away from the issue, and that there will still be some pursuits left, like space colonization. But it’s not fully satisfying.
- bufferoverflow 1y agoDoesn't matter what you want. AI is going to do everything that humans do, and probably better, faster and cheaper.
- lionkor 1y agoBut that's a senseless endeavour. We create art not for money, but for fun and expression.
- Legend2440 1y agoStill welcome to do so. Pottery remains a very popular hobby despite the fact that you can buy factory-made cookware.
- bufferoverflow 1y agoYou forgot the most important and most common use of art: viewing and listening. AI can already produce good music, good images. At least I found some that I liked. And AI doesn't stop you from making art and having fun doing so.
- eloisius 1y agoThe entire point of art is about human experience. If we’re really going to automate humans out of art (I don’t believe we will), and you really just want to look at some AI pictures that you like, why stop there? Why don’t we just go straight to the brain stem and have AI-administered doses of dopamine?
- lud_lite 1y agoJust give everyone anti depressants!
- bufferoverflow 1y agoThat's not the entire point of art. There are many points of art: inspiration, expression, fun, interior design, exterior design, etc. AI can create art that covers all of the above, except maybe expression.
- jiehong 1y agoMusic is a form of Art, so the quote checks out. While robots mature, analog arts and one time IRL art events are safe and might be the emphasis.
- jagaerglad 1y agoI don't think there would be any art or writing to do if there was absolutely no "laundry and dishes", conflict, either. The Wall-e future seems more consistent with that honestly, but maybe I'm just revealing an ugly part of my own personality
- Al-Khwarizmi 1y agoThis is contradicted by the fact that, throughout history, there have been tons of rich people who not even once had to do laundry or any other menial tasks. Many of them were interested in art or produced it. And many led fulfilling lives without getting depressed from not working as some people fear.
- jagaerglad 1y agoOk yes very good point you're right. What often happened in the olden times was that science took the shape of art, or religious or ideological conviction drove tireless creation. Let's say science is left to the robots and the lack of "laundry" never leads to people's suffering, never leads to people asking the big questions about life, etc (I was making big assumptions about AI-keeps-us-as-pets, life in abundance, lack of common threats or conflicts etc). What art is there to create, sans banana stuck to the wall? Somebody in the thread joked about being fed through a tube in a pod or something But yeah in such a case there will probably still be some fire art about the alienation implied by merely being a human. In the end, no AI can experience being a human that was replaced by AI. Given the vestigial remains of our by then atrophied intelligence can appreciate it
- AstroBen 1y agoWell the difference is those rich people didn't have to work for money, so had the time and energy to devote to those passions I'm not sure what society would look like if and when AI takes over all artistic and creative work. People that would otherwise have a fulfilling career pushed to do menial tasks just to earn an income?
- voidspark 1y agoSelection bias, and few are smart and talented enough to become successful artists or scientists. Money cannot buy that. There are people who inherited significant wealth and it ruined them. It destroyed their motivation and they became depressed drug addicts. A life without purpose. Debauchery and depression.
- thelastgallon 1y agoAI is going to do jobs like radiologists, so humans can work at McDonald's or be bartenders! I mean, the pouring drinks part of it, the conversational skills of an AI bartender will be superior to those of humans!
- pjmlp 1y agoIf only, their work is already taken by robots. https://rbtx.com/en-US/solutions/igus-robot-arm-bartender-cocktail-mixer-robolink https://rbtx.com/en-US/solutions/igus-robot-arm-bartender-co... https://smyze.com/en/discover/ https://smyze.com/en/discover/ https://www.kuka.com/en-de/industries/solutions-database/2022/01/ocado-and-karakuri https://www.kuka.com/en-de/industries/solutions-database/202... Really we are going into a dystopian society, but hey AI can complete my code, hurray!
- summerlight 1y agoWell you know, all those fun and creative parts in software engineering has been taken over by vibe coding and now humans are supposed to do only tedious works, so probably the same thing applies here.
- larodi 1y agoPerhaps much of what humans be doing in this regard is - validation, and the physical work left. But we're not there yet, of course. Vibe coding takes a lot of manual labor, and it's nowhere near for the actually complex tasks such as... multi-part CTEs munching gigs of spatial-temporal data. Speaking of AI in music - well, perhaps many will welcome some tools when you have to: - clear hissing - process levels in tedious clearing - auto-removal of aaah, oooh, eeerrmm and similar - podcast restoration, etc. but of course, nobody wants darn model singing in the mornings, and composers definitely don't need anyone to make up melodies, drum rolls, or bass lines for them. I see deepmind advance their offering, still I find it difficult to imagine any of my producer friends embracing such abomination, and particularly giving it is a remix tool before all else, and not a composition tool. People love details the same way a painter loves details.... dilettantes think all this irrelevant, they really can't be wrong more.
- maccard 1y agoAre there any tools that do that better than our existing tools? Are there any companies that are working on that sort of thing? If so, great. If not, then I think the parents point stands.
- tmountain 1y agoI’ve been writing software for 25 years and am “vibe coding” a fairly complex game in my spare time. It saves time on boilerplate but it is absolutely not capable of doing all the work. There’s still some assembly required and doing so requires domain knowledge and expertise. Also, prompting properly requires the same. If I were to compare the experience to building a house, I’m now the foreman—and no longer doing the manual labor. There’s a real risk of systems making it to production that nobody understands, but we have that today.
- jamesrcole 1y ago> You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-Al is? Wrong direction. > I want Al to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for Al to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes. This implies a zero-sum where resources put into LLMs are resources taken away from robotics, and having to choose between one or the other. The reality is that we can have both, and people are working on both. And I'd bet that advancing LLMs will help to advance useful robotics. So I really dislike that sentiment.
- nosianu 1y ago> I want Al to do my laundry Stanisław Lem has told us about the grave dangers of such a development decades ago. This is a good summary, summary quoted below, full article linked on the page (requires a login - but reading Lem's story itself is better than reading about it anyway): https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1981/11/30/the-washing-machine-tragedy https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1981/11/30/the-washing-ma... "Shortly after Ijon Tichy's return from the Eleventh Voyage, newspapers made much of the competition between two washing machine manufacturers. They were producing robot washers of increasing complexity. They came out with sex-pot washers, washers that seduced women, carried on intelligent conversations, etc. A man named Cathodius Mattrass started a religious cult called the cybernophiles, which believed the Creator had intended humans to be a means toward creating electrobrains more perfect than itself. He turned himself into a giant robot and established himself in outer space. A series of court cases ensued. Finally, a special plenary session was held to decide if Mattrass was a planet, a human, a robot, or what, and Tichy was invited to attend. Suddenly, after much argument and deliberation, cries rang out that electronic brains disguised as lawers were present. The Chairman went through the room with a compass and an x-ray machine was brought in. Eventually everyone was kicked outNthey were found to be made of all sorts of thingsNcotton wool, machinery of all kinds. Ijon was the only human, and then he turned the compass on the chairman and found that he, too, was a robot. He kicked out the chairman, paced the empty hall for a while, and then went home." One problem is, you have to make them into real capable robots, since you want them to pick up what needs washing by themselves. That then leads to feature-creep and ever increasing abilities that have little or nothing to do with washing, and it escalates from there. The story also had gangs of abandoned intelligent washing machines robbing parts from still owned and in use ones, and more. The story is part of "Memoirs of a Space Traveler: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/88321.Memoirs_of_a_Space_Traveler https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/88321.Memoirs_of_a_Space... The original Polish book was first published in 1957.
- magic_hamster 1y agoI think out of everything Lem has written, the idea of seductive washing machines that lead the way to a semi conscious cyborg planet is not the best example for actual tangible dangers o AI.
- SequoiaHope 1y agoThe reason you don’t have more time for music is not technological, it’s social. We have enough technology to offer a basic life for everyone for free, but we have not agreed that doing so is worthwhile.
- magic_hamster 1y agoWho is "we"? The entire human race? Expecting all humans across different cultures and languages to come together and figure out basic income for 9 billion people is absurd. This kind of cooperation never happened and probably never will. People are completely unable to cooperate at the massive scale this requires, let alone solve far smaller challenges like mitigating outbreaks or making an effort to avert climate change. "We" is not a thing.
- falcor84 1y agoIt's difficult, but not impossible. "We" decided to offer everyone a covid vaccine and achieved that.
- shakna 1y agoAnd as a result of "we" being divided, we have the resurgence of many vaccine preventable diseases, because that achievement was flat out rejected by part of humanity.
- falcor84 1y agoI wonder what part of that was actual rejection of the vaccines vs a rejection of collective action itself as an idea.
- krapp 1y agoThe rejection itself was a collective action. It wasn't passive, anti-vaxxers did work spreading propaganda, protesting and undermining vaccination efforts. They made it a part of their identity and culture. If it was a rejection of anything, it was of any assumption of good faith on the part of either government or scientific institutions. Why that happened, as quickly and thoroughly and as polarized along clear partisan lines as it was, is a mystery.
- int_19h 1y agoThis particular direction is over 180 years old at this point. "[The Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine...Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent." Lovelace, Ada; Menabrea, Luigi (1842). "Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage Esq".
- brulard 1y agoFor the last year I have been generating music heavily with Udio. For few years before that I was creating music by hand, trying to get into all aspects of music creation (theory, composition, sound design, mixing, arrangement, etc.) and let me tell you - this last year was the most fun I had with music. Generation isn't just a big button to push to get the output. It's completely separate creative process that opens a plethora of possibilities which you can mix & match with all the other skills you had before. One other aspect of art generation is that it can complement your other creative process. You may need illustration for a book you're writing, or assets + music for your game. So let the AI help you where you need help and you yourself focus on the things that matter to you the most or where you are having the most fun.
- throwaway422432 1y agoI found AI music generation was more about production. You're the Rick Rubin or Brian Eno shaping the song out of the music, not to musician.
- xaldir 1y agoHowever, Holywood might like the idea of producing an endless stream of content/music/movies/etc. with little human intervention.
- golol 1y agoAll these art producing AIs are a byproduct of the research progress towards AGI and AI that can do your chores. It is inevitable that somebody has made image or music generating AI in a world where household robots exist. So I don't see any problem with DeepMind trying what they can do with current technology. It's just a reality of the world we have to live with.
- Tepix 1y agoHere's another good quote from Kurt Vonnegut's highly relevant "Player Piano" from 1952: “The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings," said Paul, "not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems.”
- fidotron 1y agoThe underlying problem is that humans consistently underestimate how difficult some of our "lowest" functions are, like sorting out socks and folding the laundry. Canonical rant on the subject from a previous AI wave: https://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/elephants.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/elephants.pdf
- throwup238 1y agoIt's called Moravec's paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox (he is cited by the Elephants dont play chess paper)
- waltercool 1y ago[dead]
- williamcotton 1y agoI like to practice my improv solos to backing tracks. Having an AI band that is listening and reacting to my playing, much like a good band would, would make it a lot easier than trying to get jam sessions going. Good drummers with availability are somewhat hard to find!
- snarf21 1y agoWe need to recognize the reason. It is about scale and cost. Pseudo-art and pseudo-writing can be done completely in the cloud and scale easily. Having a robot to fold even a single towel requires millions of physical robots instead of dozens of servers. Physical products are hard to scale and they break more easily plus they have to live in an uncontrolled invironment.
- sbarre 1y agoI think you're missing the point of that statement a bit.
- mensetmanusman 1y agoWe don’t currently have manufacturing scale and precision to make this work. AI is in the thing. It’s too expensive to take it out of the thing and put it in the world.
- vonneumannstan 1y agoUnfortunately the things we think make us human turn out to be trivial to copy and drudgery might be our true destiny. Moravec's paradox writ large.
- sambapa 1y agoHave you heard that AI music? It's absolute shite. AI is a much better boilerplate coder than a musician.
- vonneumannstan 1y agoAs with all things AI this is the worst it will ever be. It will be better next year and the year after and the year after...
- WillAdams 1y agoOr even have a prompt work on multiple files --- why isn't there an LLM front-end which will accept as input a folder of files, and then run a working/tested prompt on each file in that folder, then return the collected output as a single process/result?
- waffletower 1y agoWith all due respect, even if you are Thom Yorke (actually definitely if you are Thom Yorke) I would probably be bored by your music if it is unwilling to expand and grow with the nascent possibilities of technology. While AI music creation tools tend toward vapid imitation at worst and noble democratization of hit songs at best, Google is providing a more sophisticated interface here which may allow the truly creative to discover viably unique and new music. I live for that. While I support those who want to grab an acoustic and sing at open mike, it would be a loss if all music had to sound like that and it never further evolved.
- taylorius 1y agoI would dispute that what is happening with AI music is well described by the phrase "expand and grow". In my view "democratzation" s a weasel word, meaning the removal of skill and effort from the process of production. The operator of such a system inevitably becomes more like a client, choosing between options served up to them. You could plausibly replace the human with a random number generator, and an external observer would not tell the difference.
- BizarroLand 1y agoWhen digital recording became a thing, there was a huge backlash against it from the artists and studios who had invested obscene amounts of money into full analog recording studios, saying that it made the process too easy and would fill the world with amateur slop. Records were released with labels proudly saying that the albums were recorded fully analog. When Autotune became a thing, there were artists complaining that it was inauthentic and cheating, allowing talentless hacks to sound like they have more natural talent than actually talented human beings, and released albums proudly saying that they used no autotune. Even now, the hint that a natural sounding singer is using autotune is a common insult among recording musicians, even though almost everyone does. Whether you agree with the original analog non-autotuned musicians or not, (which, honestly, I think they were correct to a certain degree, but that's its own discussion), AI music generation is almost certainly here to stay. That being said, digital recording made making music possible for people who would have never had the opportunity otherwise, and had generated a lot of good stuff that would have otherwise never have existed. Autotune has enabled people to express themselves the way they want to express themselves even though they didn't otherwise have the talent or skill to do so. AI "might" make it so that people who can imagine a song they could never spend the time and energy needed to create such a song to create the songs they hear in their heads they way they imagine them. AI "might" give people the ability to express themselves in ways they never could before. It doesn't yet do that, it only remixes what it's heard before. But combine that with people then tweaking/reprocessing that output, doing other things to it, making AI mashed potato music into crisp potato chip music, it can be a good thing. Doesn't mean the au-naturale artists are obsolete or wrong, I would rather listen to 1 mediocre human musician than a SOTA AI music box, but if the music box is used as part of the total, I'm ok with that.
- jaggs 1y agoThat's a crummy quote to be honest. Not everybody has the ability to be creative on their own, so AI can help expand the demographic of creativity to those who may not have the basic skills. In the same way that word-processors help those who may not be able to write 'proper' English create prose that is acceptable. It may never be great art, but if it fulfils a a personal need, then why not?