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> Because I don’t write a daily blog to crank out a post every day. If that was the point, I’d have switched to AI long ago already. I write a daily blog to mak

• BurritoAlPastor 10mo ago
  > What’s the point in generating writing … if it gives next to zero feelings of accomplishment? Getting promoted, getting a better job, generating sales leads, things of that nature. A depressing number of blogs or LinkedIn posts exist only because the author is under some vague belief that it’s part of what they’re supposed to be doing to get ahead in their career.
  • toomuchtodo 10mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
    • deleted 10mo ago
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  • SamoyedFurFluff 10mo ago
    I think somewhere along the way something has gone terribly wrong in the way we allocate capital to incentivize behavior. Somehow as a society we incentivize (aka distribute capital to) the people who educate our next generation and the people who care for our elders less than the people who smoke weed on podcasts and talk for hours into a camera or a microphone…
    • rustystump 10mo ago
      Attention is where capital is applied because the demand is so high for it. Society can control supply and demand about as well as it can control the weather.
    • dexterdog 10mo ago
      Those jobs don't scale at all so you can't have the ability for the top .001 pct make significant money
    • renegade-otter 10mo ago
      Someone said "attention", and that is right. We are in the attention/extraction economy now. You are no longer a citizen - you are a walking number with a wallet. Did you see the NYC ball drop by any chance? It was plastered with ads. Ads on screen, ads on people, giant KIA ad below the ball that ruined the shot on purpose. Everything is a money grab now, because we are just eyeballs that see shit and buy it. If you think it's just the old me remembered things differently, here is 2002: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iB6OzLUQE3I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iB6OzLUQE3I
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    • zmgsabst 10mo ago
      On average and in total, we pay more to teach children than we do on podcasts. US podcasts have a total valuation of $8-9B with a revenue of $1.9B; total K-12 spending is $950B a year (about 500x higher). Education receives nearly three orders of magnitude more money per year. Most people sitting on a couch smoking weed on camera make little to nothing, while 3.8M teachers are paid an average of $65,000 per year. You’re comparing one-in-a-million outlier podcasts to the average case teacher in order to reverse the overwhelming amount more we put into education, both in total and on average.
  • Uehreka 10mo ago
    This clearly was not what GP was talking about. Believe it or not, not all people do things for purely cynical reasons.
    • BurritoAlPastor 10mo ago
      I think it’s perfectly germane. When a medium is both a means for making a good living _and_ a form of artistic expression, there’s a natural tension that emerges from people who pursue both those paths at once, in addition to the people who eschew either path entirely. Obviously many people avoid cynical reasons for doing the things they do - I’m among them - but you can’t fail to recognize that there’s always a demographic that doesn’t care about the art.
• fragmede 10mo ago
  Why indeed! Maybe after the singularity we can all be artists and musicians, doing things only for the love of the craft. Until then, we all got bills to pay.
  • socalgal2 10mo ago
    I kind of wonder if there will be more or less. Maybe more doing it for fun but less over all? I watch a few DJs on Twitch. They seem like they are having fun but I'm pretty confident many of them would stop if there was no money in it. Maybe after they don't need the money they'd still do it. They need the money now and it's a fun way to get it. Similarly, I watch Veritasium and Kurzgestat. They both put lots of work in with teams of people. I think they both enjoy it, but some of that enjoyment comes from "making a living at it". If that disappeared, if they didn't need the living from it I wonder if they'd continue.
    • ultratalk 10mo ago
      Both channels were started because of enjoyment and a sense of purpose, and in his latest video, Derek from Veritasium mentioned that he continued doing it, even after money began rolling in, because it was fun and it helped improve people.
• delichon 10mo ago
  It reminds me of one of my dad's favorite dad jokes: "While you're up go to the bathroom for me." It's tough to delegate the catharsis of writing.
  • unyttigfjelltol 10mo ago
    This attitude reminds of a particular 1850s-ish building in my area chock full of intricately hand-carved half-size wooden figurines. These were generated by true masters of their crafts. It’s obvious— work that only could be produced by a lifetime of devotion to a craft. And the industry is gone. No one could produce figurines like that at any worldly price, probably for the last 100 years. The world is less for it, but it doesn’t matter, art follows different more efficient technologies and methods. I sympathize with these artisans of the written word. But they’re all wrong, they’re dinosaurs who don’t know it. I myself was one, churning on high-value bespoke written work. The economic model is wrong, we’re the expert 1850s figurine crafters, adapt or … burn out I guess.
    • komali2 10mo ago
      That sounds like a beauty building, and perhaps the market for such things is quite small now, but those artisans still exist. In Japan there's plenty of master carpenters and woodblock artists, including one American man that moved there like 40 years ago and dedicated the remainder of his life to the craft. In Taiwan I've met indigenous woodworking artists. They sell stuff in markets all the time, plenty of it incredibly intricate. Incidentally, many temples here are also covered in beautifully layered granite carvings.
    • trinsic2 10mo ago
      If you are not doing art for arts sake, then I think you are missing the point. You can create all you want for the creators economy and maybe many people need that right now. There will always be people that go to art to experience the awesomeness of life. Its just a differnt way of seeing the world, no reason to put everyone into a binary category of adapt or die. Its never going to be like that for everyone. I dont feel the need to compete for attention.
    • 10mo ago
• kelnos 10mo ago
  > I could generate some weird 70s sci fi art, make an Instagram profile around that, barrage the algorithm with my posts and rack up likes. The likes will give that instant dopamine but it will never fill that need of accomplishing something. The value, I expect, to some people, is that if they can monetize that, then it's worthwhile to them, while letting them spend less time on it than if they had to do it themselves (or maybe they aren't artists and couldn't do it themselves, period). I personally find this kinda dishonest, uncreative, and not something I'd care to look at, but that's just me.
• mlinhares 10mo ago
  You have to talk to more tech bros, there's clearly not enough of them in your orbit LOL.
• hsn915 10mo ago
  For some, having an instagram profile with many followers is the accomplishment.
  • autoexec 10mo ago
    Exactly. Some people don't have anything to say, and don't care about writing either. They just want attention, clicks/views, ad money, or followers. Others are passionate about something and want to share that passion, or just want to write for their own sake and it's just a bonus if someone else gets anything out of it. As the internet fills with slop, it'll only get harder to find the people who actually care about what they're putting online and not just the views or the ad revenue which is a shame because those are the types of people who make the internet interesting.
• Biganon 10mo ago
  > What’s the point in generating writing or generating art if it gives next to zero feelings of accomplishment? That's how I feel with programming, and sometimes I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I see so many of my colleagues using AI not only for their job, but even for their week-end programming projects. Don't they miss the feeling of..... programming? Am I the weird one here? And when I ask them about it, they answer something like "oh but programming is the boring part, now I can focus on the problem solving" or something like that, even though that's precisely what they delegate to the AI. Weird times.
  • smaudet 10mo ago
    This is why I have yet to use AI, and will probably never. It's either taking away the most important (or rewarding) thing I need to do (think) and just causing me more work, or it has replaced me. AI. Is. Not. Useful.
    • rubidium 10mo ago
      This is the attitude of someone who uses hand tools when power tools are available. Yes you loose the personal touch but also loose the potential efficiency. Still need to measure twice and cut once though.
      • deleted 10mo ago
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      • js8 10mo ago
        I don't like your analogy because there are good reasons for amateurs not to use the power tools (for real-world crafting). They are expensive and you can hurt yourself easier. This is very unlike using AI to help you build something faster.
        • dangus 10mo ago
          The analogy still works and we get the idea. Maybe a better analogy might be a car with an automatic transmission, although that doesn’t capture the pitfalls of AI very well. It could be argued that a good automatic transmission has none of the serious downsides that AI has. Still, the general idea is sometimes getting stuff faster with less effort more automatically is more important than the “reward” of doing it yourself.
• Arn_Thor 10mo ago
  > What’s the point in generating writing or generating art if it gives next to zero feelings of accomplishment? $$$
• parsimo2010 10mo ago
  You can’t write your magnum opus without any practice. Some people write every day, possibly without enjoyment, so that they can create something noteworthy after they have developed their writing skills to be capable of it.
• tpmoney 10mo ago
  > I feel like this will get missed by the general public. What’s the point in generating writing or generating art if it gives next to zero feelings of accomplishment? It depends on what you're trying to do. I mean if the point of doing anything is a "feeling of accomplishment" why hire anyone to do anything you could do yourself. Why hire a builder to build your home? Why hire a mechanic to fix your car? Why pay a neighborhood kid to mow your lawn? Why hire a photographer for your wedding? Why hire a cook to make a meal? People hire others because even if they could do it themselves, they don't enjoy it but they need or still want the outcome for some reason or another. Would you want to hire someone to write your blog for you? No you probably wouldn't if its a personal blog, so likewise you probably wouldn't want to use an AI for it either. But if it's a marketing blog like almost every business seems to have on their website these days full of listicles and vague "did you know" marketing? Sure, it's probably already outsourced anyway, so why not use an AI. You probably don't want to be using an AI to generate artwork if you're aiming to make a painting that expresses your inner feelings. But if you're making a game and you suck at painting or drawing, you might hire it out, using an AI in that case isn't any different.
  • andrepd 10mo ago
    > Why hire a builder to build your home? Why hire a mechanic to fix your car? Why pay a neighborhood kid to mow your lawn? Why hire a photographer for your wedding? Why hire a cook to make a meal? But precisely, "AI" is _NOT_ fixing my car or building my home or photographing my wedding!! It's writing a sludge of plausible-looking but empty slop that contaminates everything on the web, it's attempting to automate the visual arts, it's generating fake video that's getting harder and harder to distinguish from real one. It's automating things that SHOULD NOT be automated, and it's NOT automating things that should!
    • djeastm 10mo ago
      >It's writing a sludge of plausible-looking but empty slop that contaminates everything on the web, it's attempting to automate the visual arts, it's generating fake video that's getting harder and harder to distinguish from real one. These are negative externalities, indeed, but the producer of the "goods" here does not feel those effects.
• NooneAtAll3 10mo ago
  > What’s the point in generating writing or generating art if it gives next to zero feelings of accomplishment? "photocamera gives no feelings of accomplishment of creating a picture" and yet photography is an art of its own, and painting also has not disappeared --- or heck, "taking digital photos gives zero feelings of accomplishment because you didn't do developing in a redroom"
• tossandthrow 10mo ago
  For me the issue is not so much the sense of accomplishment. Afterall, usually one needs to iterate with promoting until content, so I think many people can still get a sense of accomplishment. The issue is the loss of control and intimate knowledge about my own work.
• yunohn 10mo ago
  Indeed, AI is basically being used to generate various sorts of “spam”. You can see it all over the internet, and feel the uncanny valley ick.
• musebox35 10mo ago
  I guess, the sense of accomplishment is very person dependent. I enjoy programming a lot, but it is easy to find people who would challenge themselves to scale the said website to a million users/X view per day. I don't know the why, probably there is no fixed meaning to existence and nature likes diversity. For me, the fun in programming also depends a lot on the task. Recently, I wanted to have Python configuration classes that can serialize to yaml, but I also wanted to automatically create an ArgumentParser that fills some of the fields. `hydra` from meta does that but I wanted something simpler. I asked an agent for a design but I did not like the convoluted parsing logic it created. I finally designed something by hand by abusing the metadata fields of the dataclass.field calls. It was deeply satisfying to get it to work the way I wanted. But after that, do I really want to create every config class and fill every field by myself for the several scripts/classes that I planned to use? Once the initial template was there, I was happy to just guide the agent to fill in the boilerplate. I agree that we should keep the fun in programming/art, but how we do that depends on the what, the who, and the when.
• dev_l1x_be 10mo ago
  I view generative AI as a visual synthesizer. It bridges the gap between my imagination and my lack of drawing skills. Just as synthesizers allowed one person to compose a full song without a band, AI allows me to get the exact images I want to create.
• noduerme 10mo ago
  Yeah, sadly few people write or make art or music in order to fulfill their inner need to communicate. It's not like 99% of people who churn out "creative" work do so just to earn likes and followers and make money, but it's definitely way more than 50%. The thing is, what they do churn out is garbage, it's barely read by people who may themselves be garbage (or bots), it can be written by bots, and it, well, it just degrades the whole experience of writing and painting and playing music. Or rather, it pollutes it. But then, the rest of the world don't care either. Creatives themselves are a tiny portion of the population, and most of the population could not be bothered to read a book or a story, or find out who wrote a piece of music or painted a painting or designed the web page they're looking at. We call those people "consumers", but the truth is, lots of the people who currently strive to be "creators" are actually "consumers" who have very little to say and very little talent (but lots of tools to say it with). At some point, society and culture does separate the wheat from the chaff, but it takes a generation.
• sidrag22 10mo ago
  i've been dabbling in writing for the past few weeks, and like anything im working on this past year, i feel the need to somehow route ai into the process... Writing however, is perhaps the area it really is quite literally nothing but a rubber duck for me. I think this past week I have likely written ~10k words, and suggestions from ai that ive taken straight up is at maybe like 10 words and even those were likely modified. I straight up hate all its suggestions for how to word stuff, maybe it has something to do with the amount of prompt responses that Ive read the past year. I imagine if i could generate a nice display of physical eyerolls ive done this past year, topping that list would be when a chatbot responds starting with "your touching on something" or some other output thats painfully common. Also i wouldn't say its worthless for my writing, it helps me kinda really pinpoint my weak portions, i just don't take any of their suggestions to strengthen it and find my own.
• KaiserPro 10mo ago
  This is a big point thats often missed. A lot of american buisness communication is packing, fluff or filler to either disguise a lack of knowledge or not make firm statements. Unless you are very careful, a standard LLM output will wrap a bunch of obvious points in lots of filler language. This works in business because the most toxic phrase you can utter is "I don't know". So we are used to verbal noise, and pick through the filler to glean clues to what the writer actually knows or wants to assert (or not assert) If you look at modern tech journalism, its either thinly re-worded PR pieces, or re-iteration of other not relevant opinions (see meta's AR glasses) You skim them to read to pull out interesting points (full colour, speakers, battery life, etc). The rest is just packing. But for "pleasure" reading, ie stuff thats not directly related to your chain of command, there is no use in reading that shit. Either its a story, where you need to impart emotion, or a. novel viewpoint. Or its an argument, where you also have a story, with some "facts" that also support an emotion. That requires some level of understanding of the subject matter, to make a coherent narrative, that doesn't feel empty. TLDR: LLMs generally produce Buisness passive, which is almost useless as a form of communication. Just send bullet points.
• onion2k 10mo ago
  The likes will give that instant dopamine but it will never fill that need of accomplishing something. The money from sponsors that comes with building a popular account goes a long way to mitigate that though.
• bschmidt1121234 10mo ago
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  • nyarlathotep_ 10mo ago
    This mirrors my experience as well, when using things like ThreeJS. Any SOTA model can one-shot something that looks pretty similar to something from Three's examples, but things go south quickly when attempting to increase the complexity, even with pretty unambiguous instructions.
    • bschmidt200 10mo ago
      [dead]
• b00ty4breakfast 10mo ago
  > What’s the point in generating writing or generating art if it gives next to zero feelings of accomplishment? Within the social milieu of industrialized society, mass-production is the point. It's harder to see that when the goods are essentials like clothing or food, where we obtain some utility and any artfulness is secondary to that utility. But, when we switch that around, and the artfulness of the good is the primary quality, it becomes very obvious that 10 trillion nearly-identical pictures of cake is just production for it's own sake.
• mycall 10mo ago
  Doesn't it depend how you use AI? Sometimes the imagination of gluing things together is the goal and is better than the sum of the parts, and if you don't know how to put the pieces together, AI can help support you there. If you agree with that, then like they say about prostitutes, it is just a matter of cost, appearance and complexity.
• senko 10mo ago
  > What’s the point in generating writing or generating art if it gives next to zero feelings of accomplishment? You answered yourself: to get something else than feeling of accomplishment. Not realizing there can be some is a failure of imagination.
• zahlman 10mo ago
  > I could generate some weird 70s sci fi art, make an Instagram profile around that, barrage the algorithm with my posts and rack up likes. It seems to me that it still takes a significant amount of luck to end up actually racking up likes that way.