Apple's AI will erode human creativity one prompt at a time | Hacker News Reader

Apple's AI will erode human creativity one prompt at a time

fastcompany.com

30 pointsgnicholas32 comments

As an indie developer - sometimes I need a logo. I cannot afford 10-50k USD to hire a studio to make me a logo for an app. I had experience with websites like 99designs. Used it 5 times. Only once I got something OK out of it, I mean it was simple, and it was ok to use it for my needs. Every time the process was a week or two. I tried to explain what my business does, what an app will do, but the results were very plain. And I understand why, if at the end this designer will get only $500-1000 for his job, and only if I choose them, what the point of so much investment.

Currently, I am able to use AI, I can spend 2 hours of my time to get something out of it that I like, spend another day in Photoshop/Designer to fix some glitches, and at the end I can get a logo that I can use.

In this workflow, I can only see how AI can improve things. (a) designers on 99designs can use AI to generate some ideas for me without spending much of their time drawing, if they are creative, they can write their thoughts, and provide a "low-quality" idea but nicely made with AI, and I can continue to work with them, so they can transform this idea to vector (b) I can use AI to brainstorm ideas I like, and after that hire not so creative designer, but knowledgeable in tools to create for me a vector.

My point is, this is not the first time things have changed. Those are just new tools we can use. Sure, somebody might get affected. But I don't see how creativity will erode. You still need to be creative to generate a picture.

I feel like if you were going to make a business hunting down ai generated content, a great name would be “blade runner”

Deep thoughts, by Jack Handy.

Will AI erode human creativity, or will it provide example solutions to us so we can learn how to be more creative than ever?

Imagine looking over the shoulders of the greatest workers in every field and learning from them. Imagine their having decades of experience as teachers, and infinite patience.

I am growing as I use AI. If you are not growing as you use AI, you are doing it wrong. Any use of AI as a crutch because you can not do it yourself and you do not want to learn is immoral and probably doomed. We all see stories about idiots turning in wrong answers they got from AIs.

If you are using AI to learn and grow, then you are doing it right.

How are you using AI to learn and grow?

Learning a new domain or programming language for example

I use it for creative inspiration. I'm bad at working without constraints, but I can take a rough idea or design and run far with it, learning a lot in the process of doing. I wouldn't get quite as many chances to without a template, however bad.

> How are you using AI to learn and grow?

An AI chatbot’s chat window is its short-term memory. If anything in the chat window is wrong, start a new chat window to get away from the incorrect premise.

I use ChatGPT most of the time, but you can use any AI chatbot.

I get a quick introduction to a topic by asking an AI "What do you know about..." Here is an example where I asked “What do you know about the IRF540?” https://chatgpt.com/share/fc313c34-e66f-4881-a2b1-421258eb76...

I get motivation by telling an AI about myself and then asking it "Why should I be excited about..." Here is an example where I asked “I teach college computer classes. Why should I be excited about cybersecurity?” https://chatgpt.com/share/43acb37d-0beb-45da-b2f9-eb547ca0d9...

I use AI as a writing coach. This is a multi-step process that involves many revisions:

1. After I have my outline, I open a new chat window and ask an AI to also create an outline. I take a few ideas from the AI's outline while documenting the AI as a source. Here are failed examples because they are totally different than what I wanted: https://chatgpt.com/share/e9e0807e-9598-4bfc-829e-7ba6d00961... and https://chatgpt.com/share/e2973a8f-e19b-41db-a8af-2f1f3aacdb...

2. I explain what I am doing, then paste in a copy of what I have written so far. Then I ask the AI to give me bullet points on how to improve it without rewriting any of it. This is the part many people miss. You do not have to take the output of an AI in its entirety or not use it. You can ask an AI for suggestions on how to improve your writing and then implement those suggestions or not. You are writing, the AI is just making suggestions.

3. I ask an AI to rate what I am writing from 1 to 100 and do not use my writing until I have improved it enough to earn a 90 or better.

4. After I finish writing something, I stay in the same chat window where I am working with the AI to create the document (with the AI giving me suggestions, not with the AI writing it for me) and ask the AI to write the whole thing. Then I might copy an idea or two from the AI’s version, while documenting my source.

Here is an example of revising this post using AI as a writing coach: https://chatgpt.com/share/cbc0dfbf-43aa-42d4-8759-4b77e229b8...

I never did get this up to a 90. I’m sorry; I did the best that I could, but I am not an English professor.

Aside from trying to capitalize on WWDC buzz by including "Apple" in the title, I don't see anything that couldn't have been said a year ago.

Well in this case, Apple is going to avalanche the slop to an unprecedented degree.

How? Aside from their tacky generated images, the only real gen AI thing they're doing is providing a quick interface to ChatGPT.

Yes? Count the number of iPhone users alone. Now they have quick and unlimited free access to junk generation tools. There’s no generative image tool that’s nearly as available as this will be.

Probably it won’t make a dent in text generation since ChatGPT already has millions of users, but for images that’s different.

It will be a step increase for sure, but remember (If I understand correctly) it's only iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max owners to start. Any number of other players (Google, Microsoft, Meta) could jump in with prominent image generators by the time Apple rolls out more broadly.

+ MacOS + iPadOS

You say this like people weren't already generating endless slop "content" with their phone cameras of food, selfies, vlogs and other brain rot. You also say it like a lot of what gets posted on social media by normies isn't just fantasy anyway.

Excellent point, but slop takes brain rot to new heights of mindlessness.

Very true, but it isn't really that much of a leap from where it's been at for a long time—especially since face altering "filters" became the norm.

Aren't Google, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn deep into this already?

I think this is about the scale of it. This is going to be running on every iPhone and Mac, rather than a 3rd party app or website you buy or go to.

It’s now built into the operating system.

New update comes with an app dedicated to generating AI images and email and notes have features that generate and summarise text.

Yes, this is going to accelerate the transition to a world where:

• X drafts a set of bullet points for an email

• X uses AI to make it into a full-blown email, with various pleasantries and appropriate padding

• Y has an email client that uses AI to distill the message to its essence

• Y reads a set of bullet points not unlike the ones that X originally drafted

The more people that don't exercise their creative muscle the less competition.

or, the less future training data

I assume that the training data post 2021 is probably far less useful as, like post-WW2 steel and radiation, it is contaminated with previously AI generated content.

The obvious thing people seem to be missing is that the process of creating something is fun to creative people, that's why we do what we do. It isn't a chore to enjoy yourself.

Trying to prompt something that expresses yourself and is fun? Lol. Yeah nah.

> The obvious thing people seem to be missing is that the process of creating something is fun to creative people, that's why we do what we do. It isn't a chore to enjoy yourself.

Yeah, the AI sales pitch usually doesn't highlight that they really want to take the fun out of a lot of stuff and replace it with drudgery.

Automated development with AI! Spend all your time doing code reviews instead! Fun?

The quality of the average pull request has really started to go downhill since LLMs went mainstream, especially following GitHub CoPilot. I can't think of anything worse than reviewing PRs of code generated by LLMs from other people. Total waste of time, IME.

I sincerely doubt getting AI help in scheduling our next dental cleaning appointments are going to do much to our creativity.

What a relief, my creativity will not be affected since I do not use Apple products. I am safe

1453: Printing press will erode human creativity one pressed page at a time. Every copy of every page in a book was unique reflecting the humanity of the scribe copying the work. Now we will just get mass produce pressed drivel.

1822: Photography will erode human creativity one plate at a time. A human creatively chose every color in a painting for portrait. Every form every line was creative. Now we just let light hit chemicals.

The truth is that when you automate a tedium a new art form emerges.

> and compose bedtime stories to read to your child complete with AI-generated illustrations.

One thing about AI stories is the ease of change. Imagine not just reading a bed time story but composing one together and changing it to explore new possibilities. Imagine changing major elements such as plot and characters and villains and heroes and have the story and illustrations reflect that. Imagine the creative fun you and your child can have!

If you can’t see such possibilities, the lack of human creativity is your fault, not technology’s.

Mad libs is not an argument.

> One thing about AI stories is the ease of change. Imagine not just reading a bed time story but composing one together and changing it to explore new possibilities. Imagine changing major elements such as plot and characters and villains and heroes and have the story and illustrations reflect that. Imagine the creative fun you and your child can have!

What the hell? You do not need an "AI" to do that. You need to use your imagination.

> If you can’t see such possibilities, the lack of human creativity is your fault, not technology’s.

I think you seeing "such possibilities" is evidence of an erosion of human creativity, or just a lack of it.

> Imagine not just reading a bed time story

Instead of trying to imagine that I'm just gonna have chatGPT tell me what it would be like.

Did Fast Company have a similar version of this for Google I/O, OpenAI’s conference, Microsoft’s Copilot+ unveiling, Alexa’s last big presentation?

Apple — all alone — is a threat to human creativity? Really? They’ve caught up to & exceeded the competition (or signed deals with some of them) and are now on the verge of clobbering creativity as we know it …

Mkay.

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