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Ask HN: What's the Point Anymore?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the Point Anymore?

#21

Post by infecto »

fnoef wrote: post #15
embedding-shape wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you don't get it :) I've written more about how I see it being here: https://emsh.cat/good-taste/ To repeat, I'm not worried. Making music might be easier than before, but having "Good Taste" isn't easier than before, it's still hard. And good stuff isn't just produced and made, they have decisions and choices behind them, and make the wrong ones, your thing ends up sucking. If you just care about average con…

It's a good read, thanks for sharing. But the flaw in it, is the fact that you think that the world is built on merit, i.e. Good Taste, as you call it. And while sure, merit / good taste are important, but if you look at the mainstream it's filled with average. Now, from the consumer side you can claim "what do you care about the mainstream, just look for good taste, and you will find it", and I agree with you. But I…

The world is built at a balance between good taste and good economics. AI slop is still slop. Reminds me when there were massive booms on outsourcing software to low cost labor markets. Most of the software born out of those markets was slop and not much different than what we see today. Good taste still matters in most work. I am pretty big proponent of AI but I don’t think AI can write a book that I enjoy. Similarly I don’t believe AI can write software end to end without a humans input of good taste. Sure you can brute force it but like those early years of outsourcing I bet it won’t be maintainable or well running.

Re: Ask HN: What's the Point Anymore?

#22

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

> How should people make money? No idea, as in the "prosperous future", everything is replaced by AI.

If we taxed land ownership a la Georgism and then taxed negative externalities like pollution, we could give everyone UBI and probably kick back and take it easy for a bit.

Of course this would require a global democratic mandate bigger than the world's ever seen, so I'm not waiting up on it.

Re: Ask HN: What's the Point Anymore?

#24

Post by tbyehl »

embedding-shape wrote: post #11
fnoef wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is different. AI is not a "personal computer" or a "digital camera". AI is a change in perspective of our entire society, how it works, and what we define to be human or human-made creation. The end goal of AI is to abolish all work possible. In a world where there is no work for the common man, I'm afraid to imagine what is left there.

> AI is a change in perspective of our entire society, how it works, and what we define to be human or human-made creation. There are two things you're mixing here. One is how others use AI, the other is how you use AI. No one forcing you to consume content made by AI that you think suck, just turn it off if you don't like it. Seems really doomsday-like to proclaim "The end goal of AI is to abolish all work possible"…

> just turn it off if you don't like it.

How? Or do you mean, like, stop using the Internet entirely?

Re: Ask HN: What's the Point Anymore?

#25

Post by wellpast »

RiverCrochet wrote: post #16
fnoef wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't get it. You, and I, are in the minority. How do you expect authors to keep writing, when the market will be, eventually, flooded by AI generated slop? It's the same with coding: I no longer see point to write OSS by hand, as every day, 10 projects appear on HN front page, that are 95.9% AI generated. Becoming a successful writer / musician, is already hard. With software, it was easier, but in my opinion, i…

Flooded markets get bypassed. I see a future where real creatives simply don't post stuff online, and anything online is not trusted. What AI is going to kill is the Internet, not human creativity.

Had the same thought but feels too overly optimistic.

I don’t think people “internet” for trust, but for dopamine.

Re: Ask HN: What's the Point Anymore?

#26

Post by GaryBluto »

elric wrote: post #23
ilya-pi wrote: post #19

I struggle to think this is not an advertisement written for ClawdBot, if so — please consider that ethics of this post is unclear.

What makes you think that?

I'd say the fact that it mentions a relatively obscure project specifically.

Re: Ask HN: What's the Point Anymore?

#27

Post by MSFT_Edging »

cpt_sobel wrote: post #20

> destroyed by AI: art, music, books Some people crave the connection to the human experience through your examples. And personally, I wouldn't care in the least about any "work of art" created by a model. A model could produce the sequel to Grapes of Wrath, but I wouldn't care, because what experience did it have to motivate it towards it?

A model can generate an image of a room, but a model can't work off a sense of nostalgia visiting grandma to create a feeling of that room.

A model can generate a dance song, but it cannot feel the bass in their chest to know why the bass is there.

Art is about the human connection.

Re: Ask HN: What's the Point Anymore?

#28

Post by skybrian »

To put this in perspective: AI stuff is about talking to ghosts. Yes, there are a lot of things ghosts can do, but they lack something due to being immaterial. Robots are still pretty limited.

There are lot of maintenance chores that ClawdBot can't do. It's not going to cook for you, rake the leaves, shovel the snow off your sidewalk, or pressure-wash your steps. You can still find some satisfaction in doing these things.

Re: Ask HN: What's the Point Anymore?

#30

Post by WillAdams »

Remember that your perception of the past has been filtered by what survived Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) --- the problem is that this is now doubled with a layer of AI, so it's something like:

90% of everything is AI-generated, of the 10% which is left, 90% of it is crap, leaving just 1% of articulate, interesting, well-crafted content.

So, either work to create that 1% of interesting content, or filter/curate to find it.

I will note that there is a _lot_ of interesting old work which has dropped off the radar --- Hermann Hesse's _Magister Ludi_/_The Glass Bead Game_ was a book which greatly inspired me in my youth (arguably, it's why I use programming tools such as: https://github.com/derkork/openscad-graph-editor ) --- read it?

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