I don't want anything your AI generates

The argument that computer generated art is worthless because "if you want custom art, pay an artist"-- this doesn't recognize basic facts about economics. In particular, supply and demand are related, they are almost the same thing. If the cost of free art is exceedingly low, this enables me to make custom art for things that I wouldn't even consider if the price or barrier to entry or time-to-generate were higher.

The author also points out:

> I don't want music recommendations from something that can't appreciate or understand music. Human recommendations will always be better.

While it may be true that humans understand music better than computers, the intelligence behind recommendation systems is actually not the computer programs themselves. It's the wisdom of the aggregation of many people, reflected in the numbers of the model. While talking with an expert curator about the next movie/series you should watch, or the next band you should discover would be nice, the truth is it's just not as practical or easy as firing up a computer recommendation system. While I could book an appointment with an expert music curator and go through a 2 hour interview process to find my perfect music tastes, a recommendation algorithm can still provide easy value for me.

https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_the_paradox_of_choi...

> If you're having AI write your email, it probably wasn't that important.

There's plenty of situations where extra politeness and wordiness has a real measurable impact on the outcome of the communication even when the actual information you're trying to convey could be compressed into one sentence. AI can wrap your thought into an appropriate amount of polite meaningless bullshit solving a real-world problem. It can do it much faster and better than I can. Even when the recipient knows or suspects it was composed with the help of an AI, the rules of engagement and social contract has been uphold successfully.

Maybe this qualifies as "not important" in the mind of the author, but I'd argue that if the outcome of such emails can seriously affect your personal or professional life as it often does, it is important to me.

> I don't want music recommendations from something that can't appreciate or understand music. Human recommendations will always be better.

This is just plain demonstrably false. Humans recommend what they think you'd like based on an imperfect overly biased and incomplete simulation of you in their heads. AI doesn't give a fuck and recommends stuff similar to what it knows you like.

> The images it generates are, at best, a polished regression to the mean. If you want custom art, pay an artist.

Again, my mileage probably varies from the author here, but I have infinitely more scenarios where I don't want custom art but abundant and quick polished regression to the mean. AI can give it to me. It's silly to argue that it has no use.

I generally agree that AI often doesn't deliver what overly enthusiastic marketing claims it does, but it still can do amazing things that are of real use to a lot of people.

I'm earnestly uncertain that a system with near total access to your listening history producing 3-4 great songs per week from the corpus of all human musical endeavour can be considered a "good" effort. Particularly when the 3-4 recommendations are jammed into a 60 minute playlist of otherwise questionable quality.

You, personally, likely are not (apart from electricity use but that's iffy.) But the technology you want to use could not exist, and cannot continue to be improved, without those two things. That's not unclear in the slightest, that's just fact.

> I'm open to that conversation and debate, but diatribes like this make it far too black-and-white with "good" people and "bad" people.

I get that any person's natural response to feeling attacked to defend oneself. That's as natural as natural gets. But if shit tons of people are drawing the same line in the sand, no matter how ridiculous you might think it is, no matter how attacked you might feel, at some point, surely it's worth at least double checking that they don't actually have a point?

If I absolutely steel-man all the pro-AI arguments I have seen, it is, at the very best:

- Using shit tons of content as training data, be it written, visual, or audio/video, for a purpose it was not granted for by it's creators

- Reliant on labor in the developing world that is paid nearly nothing to categorize and filter reams upon reams of data, some of which is the unprocessed bile of some of the worst corners of the Internet imaginable

- Explicitly being created to displace other laborers in the developing and developed world for the financial advantage of people who are already rich

That is, at best, a socially corrosive if extremely cool technology. It stands to benefit people who already benefit everywhere, at the direct and measurable cost of people who are already being exploited.

I don't think you're a bad person for building whatever AI thing you are, for what it's worth. I think you're a person who probably sees cool new shit and wants to play with it, and who doesn't? That's how most of us got into this space. But as empathetic as I am to that, tons of people alongside you who are also championing this technology know exactly what they are doing, they know exactly who they are screwing over in the process, and they have said, to those people's faces, that they don't give a shit. That they will burn their ability to earn a living to the ground, to make themselves rich.

So if you're prepared to stand with them and join them in their quest to do just that, then I don't think anyone is obligated to assuage your feelings about it.