Generative "AI": The Guitar Hero of Creativity

"surely you don't actually think you've learned NOTHING from playing Fallout? Nothing about yourself?"

Well, I did write out a couple of paragraphs about what I thought I learned.

I did indeed "learn how to play fallout". Which is pleasant. Like learning to play Rock Band or Sing Star or Guitar Hero was also pleasant.

And although I initially thought that maybe all those "ethically good" decisions I found gratifying might improve my ability to make ethically good choices in the larger world, I believe I was incorrect.

And further, because of the highly contrived nature of the game and it's uncanny closeness to the material world, it might be actually harmful: it encouraged me to pretend I am ethical when in fact it has brought me to do literally nothing with other people.

My point is probably getting hung up on the mechanics of drumming, which I have struggled with off and on for the last 30 years now.

So instead, I'll say what I have to say about writing and general LLM usage and be done:

The real difficulties of writing are a positive adjunct to my thinking, and I believe that almost all of the intellectual things I have struggled with (from learning to read the log files in Linux to predicting what is wrong with the engine in my car) all benefit from the same struggle.

Removing that effort by crapping half-formed thought in and out of an LLM might not be a big deal or even improve the work of folks who have already learned how to think through these complex systems.

However, that flailing certainly doesn't help people get better at thinking in the way that writing or troubleshooting complex systems might.

Further, unlike Guitar Hero an LLM might encourage folks to just "play the game" instead of actually breaking out of the bounds of that game. Because it produces tangible output (from poetry to PLC code), the folks using these "ways of thinking" often feel that they are "doing the same thing" in the same way that I can "bench press" 2-tons-of-steel with a front end loader.

And that intentional confusion between "getting better at doing stuff" and "a lot more crap got done" isn't a good thing to me.

That is the point: a lot of folks do in fact think that creating with an LLM is the same as the process of learning to create.

My point isn't to say that if your motivations for drawing or drumming or whatever come from XYZ, then they aren't valid. I'm also not claiming that picture books about airplanes are bad because they encourage children to become bomber pilots.

People have all kinds of strange and complex motivations, some better than others.

I'd trade your "enjoyment of video games" for "my parents' failures as 'professional' musicians" any day of the week.

My own reasons for going out tonight and playing double bass with my jazz band are way more sus, weird, dumb, illegitimate, whatever and have way less to do with my (very real) love of playing music with my people than anything I think some rando on the internet is going to divulge.

Rather, the point is that struggling and sucking at drawing until you figure out how to do it in a way that feels good can easily get short-circuited by midjourney or whatever.

The hidden midpoint that you think I am hesitant about might be all the pedagogical materials in-between: the scales, drum rudiments, gesture drawings, forum postings, low-rent bar gigs, half-assed bug ridden toy PHP scripts, bizarre sophomore manifestos, bad poetry, broken song lyrics, iffy recitals, lessons with bored teachers, incorrect tableture. Those things are all "pretensions" in your sense: those are all on spectra where folks flail as they approach "doing the thing". And they are all a-okay.

The limit on that spectrum, though is the LLM and the Guitar Hero, where folks are barely even "flailing". Like all parts of a spectrum are on the spectrum, but which is to be avoided if the other end of the spectrum is "good". And I probably wouldn't bother writing that out if there weren't LLMs didn't have literal cults forming around them...

> But in the artistic/creative sense (what the conversation is about), I’m not sure the case is that clear-cut, hence the question.

Art for me is joy (or in wider definition emotion) of the beholders (and the creators). The sum of joy (and other emotions) that people derive from making, sharing and viewing photos manyfold exceeds sum of emotional value that paintings deliver.