These folks are completely unaware that they have witnessed creative and high quality generative AI content without realizing what it was. Because that's the thing. Good generative AI is invisible per se. And it is a lot more ubiquitous than people think by now.
Generative "AI": The Guitar Hero of Creativity
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Re: Generative "AI": The Guitar Hero of Creativity
#32If you press the button on a camera, you are not a painter.
Don't worry, there's still room for paintings in human culture, even though photos outnumber them billion to one.
Re: Generative "AI": The Guitar Hero of Creativity
#33I'm making a LED Camel Totem for Burning Man. I had the idea to make a Koons-style balloon animal.
I explored this idea with ChatGPT, asking it to make some reference images. I also asked for some prompt generation. I have weak sketching abilities (it's on my list to improve), so this is how I "storyboard".
To be cheeky, I asked Claude to make balloon simulator from which I could eventually drop into Fusion360 to muck with and 3D print. CamelKoons was born! [1]
I wanted a Golang backend and web frontend. Fable pretty much one-shotted the step-one scaffolding: Golang physical simulation of a single balloon, streaming geometry to a Web application. Vibed through various issues and then step two was multiple balloons with twists (which were just choke points).
In the world of disposable, hyper-focused software, this tool remained static to Dromedary Camel topologies. A generalized topology feature is left as an exercise for the reader's LLM.
I like empowering my agents to loop [2]. So, I used Claude-in-Chrome to do some loops where Claude positioned the Camel and could screenshot it. I also gave it an HTTP endpoint to position the camera for itself and me.
Eventually, I wanted to push views and comments from the Web page, so I added a comment box. Claude Code used its new-to-me "monitoring" feature to watch for that action and react to it in the session. Claude made itself a "look-at-camel" skill, so cute! [3]
While the balloons were looking interesting, I noted it wasn't very Koons-like and Claude reminded me that Koons was art and we were doing physical simulation. So then we started distorting the physical model. Of course we also added model export, etc.
After tokenmaxxing, I ended up with something that was a cross between a poop emoji and an alien dildo.
I'm now learning the Forms feature in Fusion360 and following a great balloon-dog tutorial on YouTube. I think this guitar approach will win out over my Guitar Hero approach.
[1] https://github.com/cameltopia/CamelKoons
[2] https://github.com/ConAcademy/WeaselToonCadova
[3] https://github.com/Cameltopia/CamelKoons/blob/main/.claude/s...
Re: Generative "AI": The Guitar Hero of Creativity
#34These folks are completely unaware that they have witnessed creative and high quality generative AI content without realizing what it was. Because that's the thing. Good generative AI is invisible per se. And it is a lot more ubiquitous than people think by now.
Like what? Can you give me an example?
Re: Generative "AI": The Guitar Hero of Creativity
#35These folks are completely unaware that they have witnessed creative and high quality generative AI content without realizing what it was. Because that's the thing. Good generative AI is invisible per se. And it is a lot more ubiquitous than people think by now.
> creative and high quality generative AI content
So high quality I can certainly acknowledge because indeed the output from these models can be indistinguishable from human generated content. However, I am curious to know what you mean by creative here, in two senses:
1) Do you have an example of AI generated content being particularly novel or different, and not just a (admittedly highly consistent) rehash of what it was trained on? 2) What do you think it means to describe the output of a model that doesn't possess any agency as "creative"?
Re: Generative "AI": The Guitar Hero of Creativity
#36Scalzi has developed an almost religious sort of dogmatic hatred of AI. He seems to acknowledge none of the benefits, even those that are obvious. Likely because he feels it's harmful to the way he earns his living. He is rapidly coming to define himself through opposition, rather than promotion. Which is a dangerous and fruitless game. Throughout human history there has never been a still useful technology that we a…
> Likely because he feels it's harmful to the way he earns his living. Absurd. Scalzi fans are not going to stop reading his works because LLMs exist. If anything, established authors are the ones with the least to fear. This talking point that when people dislike something it’s because it affects their personal finances is getting really tired. Not everyone is a greedy selfish prick who only thinks of themselves, pe…
Nobody even started to seriously write books using AI. But at one point there will be AI books on "most read" lists. And a more than one of those will have readership higher than anything by John Scalzi. And he's not bad, I liked what I read of his.
Re: Generative "AI": The Guitar Hero of Creativity
#37Bad analogy. In GH you have to press the buttons at the exact time that is prescribed and you're scored on that. With AI there is no such prescribed goal. The world is your oyster. You can use it in boring ways, but you can use it in immensely creative ways too. You can chain together AI agents, image generators, video generators, 3D asset generators, computer vision models, text embeddings etc. etc. and prompt all the orchestration into existence with your ideas, taste and direction. It's the opposite of a constrained game.
Boring people use it in boring ways, interesting people use it in interesting ways.
The rest is old man yells at cloud, like how people criticized "laptop music" or photography.
Re: Generative "AI": The Guitar Hero of Creativity
#38Scalzi has developed an almost religious sort of dogmatic hatred of AI. He seems to acknowledge none of the benefits, even those that are obvious. Likely because he feels it's harmful to the way he earns his living. He is rapidly coming to define himself through opposition, rather than promotion. Which is a dangerous and fruitless game. Throughout human history there has never been a still useful technology that we a…
Climate Change has accelerated rapidly. We're expecting 3 degrees of warming by 2050 now, 5 degrees by 2100. Betting on the singularity to save us is culty wankery.
Re: Generative "AI": The Guitar Hero of Creativity
#39I don't know enough about DJing, but maybe that is also an analogy to GenAI usage that can work.
DJing is an interesting art. It’s not creative per se, but can be done creatively. Modern DJ software+hardware in particular allows for a ton of on-the-fly remixing, clever use of fx and stems, and even some custom on-the-fly production setups. But the average DJ (and even electronic music producer) is much closer to Guitar Hero than they are to writing their own songs for guitar.
Re: Generative "AI": The Guitar Hero of Creativity
#40Scalzi has developed an almost religious sort of dogmatic hatred of AI. He seems to acknowledge none of the benefits, even those that are obvious. Likely because he feels it's harmful to the way he earns his living. He is rapidly coming to define himself through opposition, rather than promotion. Which is a dangerous and fruitless game. Throughout human history there has never been a still useful technology that we a…
I use AI to code review my personal projects. There's no downside - I ignore what I don't like and take the suggestions that make sense. Most of the suggestions are good and it found a ton of little bugs over time. I think that someone who's radically opposed to any use of AI is simply a poor developer.
There's no downside for you.
You said it yourself - you have the knowledge and ability to know what to ignore and keep what makes sense, but that's because you spent years actually writing and understanding code.
The magic wand of AI is absolutely wreaking havoc with juniors engineers' ability to understand complex code bases and software engineering fundamentals. How will the engineers of tomorrow know what to keep and what to reject if all they've ever known is "you are a principal engineer. read this Jira ticket and build a solution. ultrathink".