Generative "AI": The Guitar Hero of Creativity

I'm sorry you had folks rolling their eyes at you when you got your instrument. That's an exceedingly common thing to happen. Especially with singing. But it doesn't make it okay or correct or nice.

But the lessons and the practicing aren't the same thing as playing a video game.

In the same way that no matter how good I get in Fallout it will never have anything to do with how I am able to deal with folks in my real life.

For instance, I enjoy Fallout and it's very validating to play it and be the "good" guy. For a quite a while I considered that maybe there was something ethically useful in that kind of "education".

As I have gotten older I have come to feel that it's actually closer to some kind of ethics porn: none of the choices have material consequences for me or my community and I can go back and do things from a save game. I have total control over the situation in ways I never have in real life.

And further, I have come to think that this way of thinking ethics might actually be harmful to my practical ethics: because I'm not forced to make choices that actually impact me or anyone else, that game might start to erode the parts of that process that deal with the often-negative outcomes of those decisions.

So, like, sure: Fallout made me more interested in how my ethics function. But it's so far removed in how we actually move through the world that it might actually mess up how I do things.

I used to have an octapad back in the oughts, and if that was the only way I was interacting with the drum kit it would have done a lot of harm to my playing. If I played the video game drum set like I played my real kit, it would get destroyed in short order.

I am certain that you know what I mean when I say that the specific techniques around stick/beater control have virtually nothing to do with the mechanics of that kit, and further I am equally certain that you understand that the timing involved in these games has little or nothing to do with the strictness (and often looseness/feel/dragging/etc) of the timing when we play drums with other humans.

My point isn't even about the specifics of these games, but about how folks seem to abuse AI so easily these days.

I -don't- think there is anything pretentious about buying an instrument you don't play and then doing whatever you do. That's not pretense, that is the process of learning to play music- that's what it is in itself.

But I also don't think that is the same thing as playing a video game, and I think the distinction is important to make because there is much in our world that asks us to pretend we are doing things we aren't doing.

In the same way that I have to think about how to respond and think about why you have a negative reaction to what I wrote, I also have to struggle with a reasonable way of communicating why I think you don't understand what I wrote.

I have to come to terms with the limitations of my ideas and how I can state them-- if I crapped "fuck your strawman and the fleshlight version of music and thought that is generated by an LLM" into an LLM, then I wouldn't really be getting anything at all out of these kinds of interactions.

So when I read and write, I often struggle. But I think that having those difficulites and sitting with them is what is different than dropping half-baked reactions into an LLM or playing Guitar Hero.

  In the same way that I have to think about how to respond and think about why you have a negative reaction to what I wrote, I also have to struggle with a reasonable way of communicating why I think you don't understand what I wrote.

The only people who are saying that way are people who have negative feelings towards the game in the context of music. To me, that's pretentiousness because it assumes the thoughts of the people who play the game. It reminds me of people talking shit about Chicago who've never been to Chicago.

But ultimately I think my point is that people are going to flail, but we shouldn't immediately assume that people don't get anything out of them. You seem to have an absolute position that it's all or nothing -- surely you don't actually think you've learned NOTHING from playing Fallout? Nothing about yourself? Nothing about game mechanics? There's much more to learn than what's "formally" presented and each person gets something different.

Like, I've been playing with cipher mechanisms with LLMs... and after getting frustrated with all that, I'm now learning how to draw so that I can make my own similar cryptographic puzzles. Wouldn't have gotten there if I hadn't stumbled blindly for a bit. So in the same way that you wouldn't invalidate my path towards music, I'd hope you wouldn't invalidate my path towards drawing. There's a middle point somewhere in between that you seem hesitant to intellectually venture towards.

Everything about the data centre buildout is a bet on the singularity, that's the whole operating premise behind what all AI researchers are doing. The most grandiose charlatans of silicon valley talk about that stuff and everyone else has got in line whether or not they believe it. Trillions of dollars have spent on bringing about AGI. If it doesn't usher in AGI (and it won't) then it's all a catastrophically stupid thing to do.

We don't appreciate facts anymore?