Fuck AI

Hot take: it's reasonable for a comics student to use AI for script-writing and for a screenwriting student to use AI for concept art, not because machine can generate meaningful artistic work at these fields but because these are not the fields they are trying to learn.

In a way, this can be used to level the field. The comics professor can use the same LLM to generate scripts for all their students. It'll be slop script, but the slop will be of uniform quality so no student will have the advantage of better writing and it'd be easier to judge their work based on the drawing alone.

And even if AI could generate true art in some field - why would it be acceptable for a student to use it for the very field they are studying and need to polish their own skills at?

AI only seems good when you don't know enough about any given topic to notice that it is wrong 70% of the time.

This is concerning when CEOs and other people in charge seem to think it is good at everything, as this means they don't know a god damn thing about fuck all.

The breadth of knowledge demonstrated by Al gives a false impression of its depth.

bingo! it also explains why tech bros consider AI good for everything - they are not really good at or familiar with anything themselves.

on a serious note: to put this in a specific example i will use programing. management/PO/business will have a vague ideas about what needs to be done. they have to explain them to someone in plain human language and let them figure out details of how to turn it into an algorith that does that. that someone has to fill in all the blanks, make many decisisions about unspecified details and implement it. but, in addition to that, they also have to make sure the code is delivered on time, on budget, it will remain easy to maintain and doesn't break anything important. those later details are not something the original stakeholders (business/management/POs) normally have to deal with. it's someone's else's responsibility. it's just annoying to them that they have to deal with another temperamental human and that human can take weeks to make even "simple changes" to their code (because they have to care about all those other things like maintainability)... so when a salesman comes over and offers them they can instead explain the problem to a chatbot and get the code in minutes the proposition sounds irresistible!

And managers think it's good for everything except being executives and management. Except that's probably the one thing AI can do just as well as a manager who thinks AI is good for a bunch of stuff.

Facts!!

let's not confuse LLMs, AI, and automation.

AI flies planes when the pilots are unconscious.

automation does menial repetitive tasks.

LLMs support fascism and destroy economies, ecologies, and societies.

It's why managers fucking love GenAI.

My personal take is that GenAI is ok for personal entertainment and for things that are ultimately meaningless. Making wallpapers for your phone, maps for your RPG campaign, personal RP, that sort of thing.

It's the dilbert approach

The only good AI I've come across is the one I use for denoising cycles renders in Blender3D, as that's something that a human cannot reasonably do.

That's the only scenario something like AI has any use as a "tool"; doing things humans cannot reasonably do.

AI has been excellent at teaching me to program in new languages. It knows everything about all languages - except the ones I'm already familiar with. It's terrible at those.

So Gen AI is like Dan Brown, the more you know about the subject the more it sucks

It's the same with all automation. Processed food is not as good as homecooked food, tailored suits are better than massproduced ones.

In my experience everybody (myself included) is prone to the Dunning-Kruger Effect in domains outside their expertise.

It doesn't mater if you're a outstanding expert in any one domain: you just look at a different domain and go "yeah, that looks easy".

I'm actually a lot more generalist than usual because of my personality and still have that same tendency to underestimate the complexity of different domains, but because of being a generalist I sometimes for one domain or another go down the route of genuinelly practicing it professionally, and one or two years later I'm invariably thinking "This shit ain't anywhere as simple as I thought!".

And, lo and behond, generative AI is just about good enough to handle the entry level stuff in a domain - the ultimate Junior Professional (not even a very good one) with just about enough "competence" to look capable for domain outsiders or even hobbyists whilst at the same time being obviously mediocre for domain experts.

As most people don't really think about their own knowledge perception in these terms and thus don't try to compensate for it, the reactions described in this post totally make sense.

IDK about that I'm a professional slop maker and I think it could replace me easily.

they’re both wrong, and they’re both right

an AI can create concept art for a writer to better visualise their world to generate ideas in a pinch, but it shouldn’t ever be what you use to show anyone else: you still need real concept art

an AI can also create writing for their art so that they can flesh out a back story to make their visual art more detailed, but it’s not going to write anything that you’d want anyone to read as a book or act in for a movie

both things can be used for the described purpose, and both things are inadequate for quality output

we’ve had this juxtaposition for a while: “redneck X”… they’re scrapped together barely functional versions of the thing you’re trying to do, on the cheap, with home-made tools. you wouldn’t sell it, but it’s kinda fine for this 1 situation with many many asterisks

professionals often don’t like when someone can hack together something functional because they know the many many places where that thing falls down when you talk about long-term, and the general case… but sometimes a hack job solves a specific problem in a specific situation for a moment for cheap and that’s all you need

(just don’t try it with electricity or your health: the consequences of not understanding this complexity is death… of course ;p)

That's also why the billionaires love it so much:

they very rarely have much if any technical expertise, but imagine that they just have to throw enough money at AI and it'll make them look like the geniuses they already see themselves as.