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AI makes you boring

marginalia.nu

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Re: AI makes you boring

#281

Post by hhutw »

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…

I think IMO art is about conveying human ideas/emotions that’s beyond words. So it’s more about what the artist intentionally or unintentionally brought into the piece. With AI “art”, it’s just filling noise into the original prompt. In that case, why don’t you just show me the prompt instead of the noisy lossy “art” piece?

Re: AI makes you boring

#282

Post by squidsoup »

kouru225 wrote: post #262
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-base…

The reality is there is very little non-individualistic art (algorithmic, AI generated etc) that has much qualitative merit. Art for the most part has always been the expression of an individual, even art tightly bound to a cultural context.

Re: AI makes you boring

#283

Post by techgnosis »

josefresco wrote: post #62

While I agree overall, I'm going to do some mild pushback here: I'm working on a "vibe" coded project right now. I'm about 2 months in (not a weekend), and I've "thought about" the project more than any other "hand coded" project I've built in the past. Instead of spending time trying to figure out a host of "previously solved issues" AI frees my human brain to think about goals, features, concepts, user experience a…

Exactly. People project all kinds of ethics on writing code. The constant hum of anti-LLM on HN is monotonous and telling. Hurt egos everywhere.

Re: AI makes you boring

#284

Post by The_Fox »

jcalvinowens wrote: post #47

Based on a lot of real world experience, I'm convinced LLM-generated documentation is worse than nothing. It's a complete waste of everybody's time. The number of people who I see having E-mail conversations where person A uses an LLM to turn two sentences into ten paragraphs, and person B uses an LLM to summarize the ten paragraphs into two sentences, is becoming genuinely alarming to me.

Yesterday my manager sent LLM-generated code that did a thing. Of course I didn't read it, I only read Claude's summary of it. Then I died a little inside.

It was especially unfortunate because to do its thing, the code required a third party's own personal user credentials including MFA, which is a complete non-starter in server-side code, but apparently the manager's LLM wasn't aware enough to know that.

Re: AI makes you boring

#285

Post by arjie »

Actually, I often enjoy the stuff that floats up from the muck. A lot of it is vibe-coded but it gives me inspiration to replicate on my own. As an example, I don't use OpenClaw. I use my own replicant version and it's been a lot of fun. The READMEs of various projects are far superior to the functionality. But I really appreciate the READMEs because people have lots of good ideas and I crib them all.

Re: AI makes you boring

#286

Post by panny »

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…

>but many tools I use daily are closed source

I wonder if this is a major differentiator between AI fans and detractors. I dislike and actively avoid anything closed source. I fully agree with the premise of the submission as well.

Re: AI makes you boring

#287

Post by h4kunamata »

As much as I have hate and love relationship with AI, I disagree.

I use AI, mainly Perplexity AI, as a replacement for search engine because they all suck right now.

AI makes homelab more fun and therefore I learn more. Homelab is my main hobby, using AI to ASSIST me with one thing or another, always end-up mentioning something else that I never heard before.

I wish I could clone myself due to the amount of topics and projects I have noted down.

AI is like money, money doesn't make you a bad or good person, money only enhance what you already are. AI doesn't automatically make things boring, they way how you use it is what make things boring or more exciting with you jumping from forum to forum, new topic to new topic.

Re: AI makes you boring

#288

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

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…

Man this approach and philosophy about art baffles me because the greatest and most moving works of art to me couldn’t possibly be created by an LLM. For example “Electric Fan (Feel It Motherfuckers): Only Unclaimed Item from the Stephen Earabino Estate”, which is the only item remaining when the artists lover (Stephen Earabino) died of AIDS and his family threw out everything he ever owned leaving just the box fan. It’s just a box fan but there’s so much loss and pain in that installation. Same as “"Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) ", which is just a pile of colorful candy that audience members are welcome to take from, whose original weight is the ideal weight of a Ross who diminished and died of AIDS.

There’s no gatekeeping in the processes of these works, no secrecy, not even really whatever you’re talking about. These works would in fact be utterly diminished by being produced by an LLM because they’re trying to capture the stories of real, existing people who had real, painful experiences. I have no empathy with a machine but I have all the empathy of a man who loved a man whose family hated him so much when he died they wouldn’t even leave his lover with anything more than a box fan and so he decided to declare the box fan to be art.

Re: AI makes you boring

#289

Post by tptacek »

jgon wrote: post #280
tptacek wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, is that what Show HN is? A community of craftspeople discussing their craft? I hadn't realized.

Based on your replies here, one thing it really doesn't seem like is a community of people trying to earnestly exchange ideas or points of view. It really seems like you're viewing this whole thing as some sort of debate contest or point sparring, and its both aggravating and disappointing to read. What is your hoped for outcome here man? To come off like enough of a jerk or obtuse enough that people just abandon the…

I think people are retconning a lot of things onto Show HN that aren't actually part of the ethos of Show HN. That's not new; in the past, people have tried the same thing to suggest Show HN is about, say, open source software only.

I don't dispute the quality decline on Show HN or the need for some kind of intervention, but this particular argument about how AI interacts with "Show HN" is in fact introducing a new and significant element of gatekeeping to it.

Show HN is not in fact a craftspersons forum! Craft can be one of the things it's about, but it's not the only thing.

Re: AI makes you boring

#290

Post by saratogacx »

claudiulodro wrote: post #217
jcalvinowens wrote: post #47

Based on a lot of real world experience, I'm convinced LLM-generated documentation is worse than nothing. It's a complete waste of everybody's time. The number of people who I see having E-mail conversations where person A uses an LLM to turn two sentences into ten paragraphs, and person B uses an LLM to summarize the ten paragraphs into two sentences, is becoming genuinely alarming to me.

> Based on a lot of real world experience, I'm convinced LLM-generated documentation is worse than nothing. It's a complete waste of everybody's time. I had a similar realization. My team was discussing whether we should hook our open-source codebases into an AI to generate documentation for other developers, and someone said "why can't they just generate documentation for it themselves with AI"? It's a good point: w…

It isn't valuable if you generate and toss it over the fence. Where the value comes in is when the team verifies the content. Once that's done and corrections made, the words have the assurance that they match the code.

If you aren't willing to put in the time to verify it works than it is indeed, no more useful than anyone else doing the same task on their own.

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