Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

This just assumes I'm listening to mainstream music or whatever when I mostly buy grungy metal and whatever else I enjoy off Bandcamp. Many times, directly supporting the artist.

> ... local diners work, you might not be so impressed.

I already stated the homemade gyro platter and they're mozzarella sticks w/sauce are slammin and they are proud of it. Sure it's business but they crafted some damn fine mozzarella sticks and they always come out crispy and oozing with hot but not roof melting cheese. That's giving a damn even if its slammin a few in the fryer then tossin em on a plate and sendin em into the human ether. I hope they stay around as they're a great Sunday afternoon lunch spot with friends.

Because people have and share ideas, and I was using that as a shorthand. Even if they aren't, if you completely strike that part -- my point remains completely untouched.

> why the relative difference in wealth today is more important than the (magical?) existence of a system were everyone has continually gotten more access to resources and technology

Because in the context of "Wealth is having economic power over the people around you.", that is the definition of wealth that is used. To quote a randomly picked one, emphasis mine:

"Large possessions; a comparative abundance of things"

> You are aware that the default state of humanity hasn't been one of continually increasing access to resources and technology?

There was no default "state", at least by the time you're talking about humans, we probably already learned from each other by observation. Sure, politics and wars and religion and feudal dynasties and whatever make bumps in the line, but generally it goes up. Once things get out, they're out, roughly speaking (that's the keyword here), and even in the animal kingdom.

And as I said, even if that's completely false, doesn't matter for the wider point about wealth, and that it can only buy you power over others if they have less of it.

And the way you achieve and maintain deep knowledge of the shape of the output you want is... well, to write and test it yourself. LLMs are a cognitohazard. If you aren't accustomed to programming without them (or even if you are) it's hard to see the line between using them to remove drudgery and relying on them to think for you.

The Whispering Earring story reminds me of that episode of Rick and Morty in which Morty gets a piece of crystal embedded in his forehead which allows him to perceive the moment of his death; he then begins steering his actions towards the future in which an elderly Jessica (his crush) tells him she loves him as he dies, down to individual articulated phonemes and muscle actions. In the end, it's revealed this future is not what Morty had hoped for.

If you use AI exactly like this I find no issue, but I fear most people are using the calculator without knowing the math and that's the real issue to me.

I'm drawing the line where the human effort is no longer there.

There was a similar argument against electronic music. No effort because no instrument is played. But the fact is the instrument just changed shape, drastically.

Like there's an artist I am sure a few here would be familiar with: Master Boot Record, a video game heavy metal electronic blend fully composed on a DAW. MBR live streams his composition sessions while chillin in his own irc channel he's hosting himself so you can chat with him. It's impressive to hear how he lays down notes, loops it, tweaks and expands it, then little by little builds a song passage by passage. Often with the irc channel reacting to the process itself and perhaps influencing the output. You know when it finally clicks and you're left feeling "Oh that was cool as fuck!" That's uniquely human, a life form that evolved over billions of years on a mud ball floating in a vast vacuum - at random. Talking, thinking, playing, laughing meat. Amazing huh?

An AI shitting out a similar pattern because it was trained on the same and similar patterns is not interesting or original. It's just a really good illusion from a well tuned stochastic parrot. It's interesting in the technical sense, but not in the artistic one. There was no creative process involved. Prompting is just a well formed set of instructions and questions which a human could understand - a spec. Nothing special there. It's like driving to McDonalds and ordering a quarter pounder with cheese meal. As a search engine, cool. As an artist, no thanks.