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AI makes you boring

marginalia.nu

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Re: AI makes you boring

#261

Post by AuthAuth »

kouru225 wrote: post #175

This issue exists in art and I want to push back a little. There has always been automation in art even at the most micro level. Take for example (an extreme example) the paintbrush. Do you care where each bristle lands? No of course not. The bristles land randomly on the canvas, but it’s controlled chaos. The cumulative effect of many bristles landing on a canvas is a general feel or texture. This is an extreme exam…

In my opinion, the value of art cant be the quality of the output it must be the intention of the artist.

There are plenty of times in which people will prefer the technically inferior or less aesthetically pleasing output because of the story accompanying it. Different people select different intention to value, some select for the intention to create an accurate depiction of a beautiful landscape, some select for the intention to create a blurry smudge of a landscape.

I can appreciate the art piece made my someone who only has access to a pencil and their imagination more than someone who has access to adobe CC and the internet because its not about the output to me its about the intention and the story.

Saying I made this drawing implies that you at least sat down and had the intention to draw the thing. Then revealing that you actually used AI to generate it changes the baseline assumption and forces people to re-evaluate it. So its not "finding a creative result that they value, but they retroactively devaluing it if it’s not created by a process that they consider artistic

Re: AI makes you boring

#262

Post by kouru225 »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #235
kouru225 wrote: post #175

This issue exists in art and I want to push back a little. There has always been automation in art even at the most micro level. Take for example (an extreme example) the paintbrush. Do you care where each bristle lands? No of course not. The bristles land randomly on the canvas, but it’s controlled chaos. The cumulative effect of many bristles landing on a canvas is a general feel or texture. This is an extreme exam…

AI bros: " You're gatekeeping because you think the result isn't art! " Rest of the world: " No, we're gatekeeping because we think the result isn't good. " If someone can cajole their LLM to emit something worthwhile, e.g. Terence Tao's LLM generated proofs, people will be happy to acknowledge it. Most people are incapable of that and no number of protestations of gatekeeping can cover up the unoriginality and poor…

What concerns me is how easily the “rest of the world” is changing their opinions about what’s good. If the result isn’t good, then it isn’t good, sure. But in my experience there’s a large contingent of people, especially the youth, that are more reactionary about AI than they are interested in creativity. Their idea of creative value is inherently tied to self-expression and individualism, which AI and systems-based creative processes are threatening. When they don’t understand the philosophical case for non-individualistic/systems-based creative processes, they can’t differentiate between computer assisted creativity and computer assisted slop

Re: AI makes you boring

#263

Post by cobbal »

ozim wrote: post #245
fhd2 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users typically don't read code, developers (of the software) do. If it's not worth reading something where the writer didn't take the time to write it, by extension that means nobody read the code. Which means nobody understands it, beyond the external behaviour they've tested. I'd have some issues with using such software, at least where reliability matters. Blackbox testing only gets you so far. But I guess as opp…

Key part is *where reliability matters*, there are not that many cases where it matters. We tell stories of Therac 25 but 90% of software out there doesn’t kill people. Annoys people and wastes time yes, but reliability doesn’t matter as much. E-mail, internet and networking, operations on floating point numbers are only kind of somewhat reliable. No one is saying they will not use email because it might not be deliv…

We guarantee 5 nines of uptime, and 1 nine of not killing people

Re: AI makes you boring

#264

Post by ge96 »

amoorthy wrote: post #251

We built an editor for creating posts on LinkedIn where - to avoid the "all AI output is similar/boring" issue - it operates more like a muse than a writer. i.e. it asks questions, pushes you to have deeper insights, connects the dots with what others are writing about etc. Users appear to be happy but it's early. And while we do scrub the writing of typical AI writing patterns there's no denying that it all probably…

A tangent, I wonder what kind of people actually stick around and read LinkedIn, the posts on there are so bad. I only go on there when I'm trying to get recruiters to find me for a new job. Instagram too I can't bear to use Instagram it has so many ads.

Re: AI makes you boring

#265

Post by [deleted] »

hexaga wrote: post #172
tptacek wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developers do not in fact tend to read all the software they use. I have never once looked at the code for jq, nor would I ever want to (the worst thing I could learn about that contraption is that the code is beautiful, and then live out the rest of my days conflicted about my feelings about it). This "developers read code" thing is just special pleading.

You're a user of jq in the sense of the comment you're replying to, not a developer. The developer is the developer _of jq_, not developers in general.

[deleted]

Re: AI makes you boring

#266

Post by sigbottle »

gspr wrote: post #259
ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you think their is an opposite of that effect too? I feel like I can breeze past the easy, time consuming infrastructure phase of projects, and spend MUCH more time getting to high level interesting problems?

I do believe you, but I have to ask: what are these incredibly tedious "easy, time consuming parts of projects" everyone seems to bring up? Refactoring I can see, but I have a sense that's not what you mean here.

That's actually a great point. I feel like unless you know for sure that you will never need something again, nothing is disposable. I find myself diving into places I thought I would never care about again ALL the time.

Every single time I have vibe coded a project I cared about, letting the AI rip with mild code review and rigorous testing has bit me in the ass, without fail. It doesn't extend it in the taste that I want, things are clearly spiraling out of control, etc. Just satisfying some specs at the time of creation isn't enough. These things evolve, they're a living being.

Re: AI makes you boring

#267

Post by zahlman »

Uehreka wrote: post #89
aeturnum wrote: post #21

I've seen people say something along the lines of "I am not interested in reading something that you could not be bothered to actually write" and I think that pretty much sums it up. Writing and programming are both a form of working at a problem through text and when it goes well other practitioners of the form can appreciate its shape and direction. With AI you can get a lot of 'function' on the page (so to speak)…

> Writing and programming are both a form of working at a problem through text… Whoa whoa whoa hold your horses, code has a pretty important property that ordinary prose doesn’t have: it can make real things happen even if no one reads it (it’s executable). I don’t want to read something that someone didn’t take the time to write. But I’ll gladly use a tool someone had an AI write, as long as it works (which these th…

> it can make real things happen even if no one reads it (it’s executable).

"One" is the operative word here, supposing this includes only humans and excludes AI agents. When code is executed, it does get read (by the computer). Making that happen is a conscious choice on the part of a human operator.

The same kind of conscious choice can feed writing to an LLM to see what it does in response. That is much the same kind of "execution", just non-deterministic (and, when given any tools beyond standard input and standard output, potentially dangerous in all the same ways, but worse because of the nondeterminism).

Re: AI makes you boring

#268

Post by ozim »

iugtmkbdfil834 wrote: post #252
ozim wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Key part is *where reliability matters*, there are not that many cases where it matters. We tell stories of Therac 25 but 90% of software out there doesn’t kill people. Annoys people and wastes time yes, but reliability doesn’t matter as much. E-mail, internet and networking, operations on floating point numbers are only kind of somewhat reliable. No one is saying they will not use email because it might not be deliv…

As we give more and more autonomy to agents, that % may change. Just yesterday I was looking at hexapods and the first thing it tells you ( with a disclaimer its for competitions only ) that it has a lot of space for weapon install. I had to briefly look at the website to make sure I did not accidentally click on some satirical link.

Main point is that there is many more lines of code of CRUD business apps running on AWS and instances of applications than even non-autonomous car software even though we do have lots of cars.

Re: AI makes you boring

#269

Post by morgoths_bane »

Uehreka wrote: post #89
aeturnum wrote: post #21

I've seen people say something along the lines of "I am not interested in reading something that you could not be bothered to actually write" and I think that pretty much sums it up. Writing and programming are both a form of working at a problem through text and when it goes well other practitioners of the form can appreciate its shape and direction. With AI you can get a lot of 'function' on the page (so to speak)…

> Writing and programming are both a form of working at a problem through text… Whoa whoa whoa hold your horses, code has a pretty important property that ordinary prose doesn’t have: it can make real things happen even if no one reads it (it’s executable). I don’t want to read something that someone didn’t take the time to write. But I’ll gladly use a tool someone had an AI write, as long as it works (which these th…

> I only care if it works

Okay but it is probably not going to be a tool that will be reliable or work as expected for too long depending on how complex it is, how easily it can be understood, and how it can handle updates to libraries, etc. that it is using.

Also, what is our trust with this “tool”? E.g. this is to be used in a brain surgery that you’ll undergo, would you still be fine with using something generated by AI?

Earlier you couldn’t even read something it generated, but we’ll trust a “tool” it created because we believe it works? Why do we believe it will work? Because a computer created it? That’s our own bias towards computing that we assume that it is impartial but this is a probabilistic model trained on data that is just as biased as we are.

I cannot imagine that you have not witnessed these models creating false information that you were able to identify. Understanding their failure on basic understandings, how then could we trust it with engineering tasks? Just because “it works”? What does that mean and how can we be certain? QA perhaps but ask any engineer here if companies are giving a single shit about QA while they’re making them shove out so much slop, and the answer is going to be disappointing.

I don’t think we should trust these things even if we’re not developers. There isn’t anyone to hold accountable if (and when) things go wrong with their outputs.

All I have seen AI be extremely good at is deceiving people, and that is my true concern with generative technologies. Then I must ask, if we know that its only effective use case is deception, why then should I trust ANY tool it created?

Maybe the stakes are quite low, maybe it is just a video player that you use to watch your Sword and Sandal flicks. Ok sure, but maybe someone uses that same video player for an exoscope and the data it is presenting to your neurosurgeon is incorrect causing them to perform an action they otherwise would have not done if provided with the correct information.

We should not be so laissez-faire with this technology.

Re: AI makes you boring

#270

Post by dogleash »

MATTEHWHOU wrote: post #242

There's a version of this argument I agree with and one I don't. Agree: if you use AI as a replacement for thinking, your output converges to the mean. Everything sounds the same because it's all drawn from the same distribution. Disagree: if you use AI as a draft generator and then aggressively edit with your own voice and opinions, the output is better than what most people produce manually — because you're spendin…

> if you use AI as a draft generator [...] you're spending your cognitive budget on the high-value parts (ideas, structure, voice

I don't follow. If you have the ideas and a structure to give to an AI you already have a working draft. Just start revising that. What would an AI add other than turn into the replacement for thinking described in your negative example?

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