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You Had No Taste Before AI

matthewsanabria.dev

71–80 of 201 posts

Re: You Had No Taste Before AI

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It regurgitates info in a way that is very specific to what and how you requested it. If you ask it a question already having an estimate of how accurate its answers will be, you can get a lot of value from it.

Nope, Ive tested its understanding on things like corporate finance which I know very deeply. It touches surface level stuff - which makes sense, most stuff on the internet is surface level. Good enough to pass an exam (since exams are essentially memorisation and regurigation of that nowadays) but not enough depth of understanding to be able to apply it in a wide range of contexts. The application is where all the v…

Surface level is where you can find the most day to day value. Just today I've used it to get advice about putting up a treehouse, rough price ranges and differences between fridges, common fridge widths, adding second accounts to microG, command flags to identify slow tests, poe support for my wifi router, differences in laser measurement devices, french translation, medication storage, different types of olive, and drafting 3 emails in another language. All of this would have taken me way longer without these tools, I'm confident it gave good results because I know that the information exists and is common.

Re: You Had No Taste Before AI

#72
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do consumers discover new products and services if not through advertising? A product on a shelf at a store is also a form of advertising proven by how much money is spent on packaging. Word of mouth is also one of the most effective forms of advertising.

> How do consumers discover new products By looking them up when they need them

Sometimes sure, but more often than not they ‘realize’ they need x thing because recently they were told they need x thing. It’s a big oroborous.

Re: You Had No Taste Before AI

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe by the textbook definition, sure. Not a single user finds advertising valuable, and yet it’s the focal point of profit maximization nowadays. Welcome to late-stage capitalism.

Only for modern definitions of advertising, mind you, which are all about dark patterns and invasive marketing, rather than putting a descrption of your product out there that can be searched by interested parties looking to buy a product like yours. There were times were advertising was useful and desirable, e.g. Small Ads pages. There was also a time when ads were a single unintrusive scrolling line, curated by the…

And yet it’s the profit motive that has driven the shift to widespread usage of dark patterns and invasive marketing.

Re: You Had No Taste Before AI

#76
Excellent, excellent article. I do have one (odd) question though.

Perhaps I'm in a bubble (or outside of a bubble), but I don't know what the opening premise of this article is talking about. Namely:

> There’s been an influx of people telling others to develop taste to use AI. Designers. Marketers. Developers. All of them touting the same message.

I have not seen this influx. I have never heard anyone telling others to "develop taste to use AI". I work with & talk to a lot of developers, designers, marketers across a span of areas so this seems surprising to me. I've talked to outright skeptics, blind fanatics & some in between - the discussions with those "in betweeners" tend to centre more around functional contributions of AI as an aid rather than it's "creative output" & our judgements of same. I have yet to encounter anyone who has strong thoughts on taste w.r.t. AI beyond the polar extremes of "AI can do my creativity for me" & "only use AI for explicitly functional non-taste-related tasks".

Am I the only one missing this influx?

Re: You Had No Taste Before AI

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe by the textbook definition, sure. Not a single user finds advertising valuable, and yet it’s the focal point of profit maximization nowadays. Welcome to late-stage capitalism.

Many people find advertising valuable. It's tracking, micro targeting, retargeting, and trying to sell me a fridge that I literally just bought while I'm off reading about sailboats that's intrusive. Advertise shoes, cleats, sails, and charters in the Bahamas while I'm doing that, not singles near me and bicycles because I posted in a Facebook group.

>Many people find advertising valuable.

Presumably the advertisers do.

Re: You Had No Taste Before AI

#79

“The loudest voices preaching about taste and AI are often the ones who never demonstrated taste before AI.” Yes, and if even these people can tell that AI generated stuff is godawful and tasteless, that tells you everything you need to know about AI.

AI stuff is tasteless in a different sense: It's like food that has no flavor. It "lacks salt" in some non-literal sense.

And I think that is not all that surprising, because much of what it was trained on was corporate-speak, which has the same problem.

Re: You Had No Taste Before AI

#80

Having taste is one thing, having the standards to hold yourself to a certain level of quality, that's another thing altogether. Generating profits is about the most tasteless thing one could do, yet it underpins all of our professional efforts. The paradox is baked in, and some of us do our best to navigate it.

OK, Banksy.
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