Technology

Damn that hits the nail on the head. Especially that analogy of watching a robot lift weights on your behalf then claiming gains. It's causing brain atrophy.

The people that use generative Al for art have no interest in being an artist; they simply want product to consume and forget about when the next piece of product goes by their eyes. The people that use generative Al to make music have no interest in being a musician; they simply want a machine to make them something to listen to until they get bored and want the machine to make some other disposable slop for them to pass the time with.

Good sentiment, but my critique on this message is that the people who produce this stuff don't have really have any interest in producing what they do for its own sake. They only have interest in producing content to crowd out the people who actually care, and to produce a worse version of whatever it is in a much faster time than it would for someone with actual talent to do so. And the reason they're producing anything is for profit. Gunk up the search results with no-effort crap to get ad revenue. It is no different than "SEO."

Example: if you go onto YouTube right now and try to find any modern 30-60m long video that's like "chill beats" or "1994 cyberpunk wave" or whatever other bullshit they pump out (once you start finding it you'll find no shortage of it), you'll notice that all of those uploaders only began as of about a year ago at most and produce a lot of videos (which youtube will happily prioritize to serve you) of identical sounding "music." The people producing this don't care about anything except making money. They're happy to take stolen or plagiarized work that originated with humans, throw it into the AI slot machine, and produce something which somehow is no longer considered stolen or plagiarized. And the really egregious ones will link you to their Patreons.

The story is the same with art, music, books, code, and anything else that actually requires creativity, intuition, and understanding.

I don't need chatGPT etc for work, but I've used it a few times. It is indeed a very useful product. But most of the time I can get by without it and I kinda try to avoid using it for environmental reasons. We're boiling the oceans fast enough as it is.

I love how every single app on that list is an app I wouldn’t touch in my life

people currently don't pay for it, because currently it's free. most people aren't using it for anything that requires a subscription.

In house at my work, we've found ChatGPT to be fairly useless, too. Where Claude and Gemini seem to reign supreme.

It seems like ChatGPT is the household name, but hardly the best performing.

Exactly, the users/installation count of such products are clearly a much more accurate indicator of the success of their marketing team, rather than their user's perceived value in such products lol

While true to a degree, I think the fact is that AI is just much more complex than a knife, and clearly has perverse incentives, which cause people to use it "wrong" more often than not.

Sure, you can use a knife to cook just as you can use a knife to kill, but just as society encourages cooking and legally & morally discourages murder, then in the inverse, society encourages any shortcut that can get you to an end goal for the sake of profit, while not caring about personal growth, or the overall state of the world if everyone takes that same shortcut, and the AI technology is designed with the intent to be a shortcut rather than just a tool.

The reason people use AI in so many damaging ways is not just because it is possible for the tool to be used that way, and some people don't care about others, it's that the tool is made with the intention of offloading your cognitive burden, doing things for you, and creating what can be used as a final product.

It's like if generative AI models for image generation could only fill in colors on line art, nothing more. The scope of the harm they could cause is very limited, because you'd always require line art of the final product, which would require human labor, and thus prevent a lot of slop content from people not even willing to do that, and it would be tailored as an assistance tool for artists, rather than an entire creation tool for anyone.

Contrast that with GenAI models that can generate entire images, or even videos, and they come with the explicit premise and design of creating the final content, with all line art, colors, shading, etc, with just a prompt. This directly encourages slop content, because to have it only do something like coloring in lines will require a much more complex setup to prevent it from simply creating the end product all at once on its own.

We can even see how the cultural shifts around AI happened in line with how UX changed for AI tools. The original design for OpenAI's models was on "OpenAI Playground," where you'd have this large box with a bunch of sliders you could tweak, and the model would just continue the previous sentence you typed if you didn't word it like a conversation. It was designed to look like a tool, a research demo, and a mindless machine.

Then, they released ChatGPT, and made it look more like a chat, and almost immediately, people began to humanize it, treating it as its own entity, a sort of semi-conscious figure, because it was "chatting" with them in an interface similar to how they might text with a friend.

And now, ChatGPT's homepage is presented as just a simple search box, and lo and behold, suddenly the marketing has shifted to using ChatGPT not as a companion, but as a research tool (e.g. "deep research") and people have begun treating it more like a source of truth rather than just a thing talking to them.

And even in models where there is extreme complexity to how you could manipulate them, and the many use cases they could be used for, interfaces are made as sleek and minimalistic as possible, to hide away any ability you might have to influence the result with real, human creativity.

The tools might not be "evil" on their own, but when interfaces are designed the way they are, marketing speak is used how it is, and the profit motive incentivizes using them in the laziest way possible, bad outcomes are not just a side effect, they are a result by design.