This essay falls under a growing category I call "start off sounding like you agree with critics of GenAI, then subtly attempt to undercut all of the power of their arguments." The best way to engage with these sorts of articles is to completely ignore all stated advice and move on. There is no "separation of moving things on the job vs. moving things at the gym" when it comes to creative craft, the entire analogy is…
You do realize that the entire point of the post is to be cautious of AI, right? And to make sure that you have your own personal goals separate from it, and that if you're getting help from it you need to make sure it's in line with those goals. Right? What about that do you disagree with?
Keep the Robots Out of the Gym
41–44 of 44 posts
Re: Keep the Robots Out of the Gym
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah man...that's good. But maybe both of those are in the category of undesirable things. And the things we end up with are like art and baking and walking and talking and drinking coffee and such. Professional Chess is a nice pattern here. A calculator can beat Magnus Carlsen at this point, but Chess is more popular than ever. So it should be ok if AI/Robots are better than us at all the stuff we still decide to do.
Except Professional Chess, taken to mean players earning a living solely from paid tournament play, is in the low hundreds? Thousands? Meanwhile there are over 20 million 'professional' software developers. There are many things about that single number demographic that I would argue against, but despite that I'm not sure there's ever been a market for any kind of 'professional chess player', yet there is for 'profes…
Re: Keep the Robots Out of the Gym
#43This is a great framework for self-development, but I wonder if the Job vs. Gym analogy is a bit premature. There seems to be a level of Silicon Valley optimism here that assumes AI already surpasses human capability in these creative areas. From my perspective, AI only outperforms in areas where the human hasn't developed a real craft. Is it possible that the current hype is causing us to undervalue the unique quali…
How many senior developers do you need to tell you that they've been vastly surpassed (in coding) by AI before you believe them? The creator of Claude Code just said he's not opened an IDE in a while. He was a principal engineer. And why would you think this would be the only place that'll happen? I agree there are things they can still do better than AI, but coding isn't one of them.
Re: Keep the Robots Out of the Gym
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There is no "separation of moving things on the job vs. moving things at the gym" when it comes to creative craft... - Coming up with names for cities in a role-playing game you're making - Summarizing an idea that you're writing about - Doing research for an article - Brainstorming character names - Creating an aesthetic for a new website for a customer - Etc, etc. I could go on for days with these examples. And s…
"Now they're not." ??? For me, there isn't the slightest difference from before 2022 and after 2022, since I continually choose to boycott genAI services, and as an activist in the Pro-Craft movement, encourage others to do the same.