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627 points cratermoon | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.206s | source
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gyomu ◴[] No.44461457[source]
Broadly agreed with all the points outlined in there.

But for me the biggest issue with all this — that I don't see covered in here, or maybe just a little bit in passing — is what all of this is doing to beginners, and the learning pipeline.

> There are people I once respected who, apparently, don’t actually enjoy doing the thing. They would like to describe what they want and receive Whatever — some beige sludge that vaguely resembles it. That isn’t programming, though.

> I glimpsed someone on Twitter a few days ago, also scoffing at the idea that anyone would decide not to use the Whatever machine. I can’t remember exactly what they said, but it was something like: “I created a whole album, complete with album art, in 3.5 hours. Why wouldn’t I use the make it easier machine?”

When you're a beginner, it's totally normal to not really want to put in the hard work. You try drawing a picture, and it sucks. You try playing the guitar, and you can't even get simple notes right. Of course a machine where you can just say "a picture in the style of Pokémon, but of my cat" and get a perfect result out is much more tempting to a 12 year old kid than the prospect of having to grind for 5 years before being kind of good.

But up until now, you had no choice and to keep making crappy pictures and playing crappy songs until you actually start to develop a taste for the effort, and a few years later you find yourself actually pretty darn competent at the thing. That's a pretty virtuous cycle.

I shudder to think where we'll be if the corporate-media machine keeps hammering the message "you don't have to bother learning how to draw, drawing is hard, just get ChatGPT to draw pictures for you" to young people for years to come.

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pjc50 ◴[] No.44461693[source]
More fundamental question: if everyone can generate an album in an afternoon, why would anyone else listen to any of those? It turns into dust in the long tail.
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ninetyninenine ◴[] No.44461906[source]
The things that were revolutionary in the past all eventually become common place and boring. It's happened to almost everything and continues to happen to anything new that comes out.

LLMs will accelerate the pace of this assimilation. New trends and new things will become popular and generic so fast that we'll have to get really inventive to stay ahead of the curve.

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this15testingg ◴[] No.44462170[source]
ahead of what curve? intrinsically human endeavors are drowned in noise. what is the point? if even drawing/writing/singing are not worth doing anymore both because effort and the experience itself is worthless, I might as well step in front of a tesla taxi so I can escape this world. human ingenuity is amazing, but this whole mess is embarrassing
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1. ninetyninenine ◴[] No.44469601[source]
Most human endeavor is drowned in the noise of other human endeavors. It was like this before AI. And with AI the noise becomes even larger. Noise is what I mean by "curve".

Basically most of it is all noise but eventually something blows ahead of the curve and shines for a couple of seconds before the curve/wave catches up and engulfs it again.

Most of what "goes" ahead of the "curve" is achievements of other people. You, I, and most other people are just watching other exceptional or lucky individuals shine for a couple of seconds. We are all watchers. There's no difference from our perspective if the people we are watching are humans or AI. It's not us anyway.

If you are an exceptional genius who regularly achieves things that go past the "curve" then you will be affected. You will watch AI achieve things faster than you, do better than you, etc. In this case you are affected.

Keep in mind that this "curve" I talk about is both global and has many many localized instances. Like a superstar at a start up is a localized example of an individual blowing past a localized curve, and Einstein is a global example of an individual excelling past a global curve.