Like read the ad copy of old apple or HP or xerox and see how they wanted to help make tools that help you think. Today everyone wants to make tools that help you make money. I just don’t see why my life needs to be optimised for making money compared to engaging in interesting ideas and creating peace and happiness in the space around me.
With generative art/writing, well honestly - the author is very very limited in what he can command the NN do and particularly if the author has a string vision.
Same for music - I wouldn’t let AI arrange my Renoise tracks, I’d love to do it myself. Is love to create the VCV patches by carefully tuning each knob. And particularly when I actually know/imagine/envision how it should sound.
It takes understanding of underlying tech and love for the work. Love - very important.
For people lacking vision and creativity, those in a hurry, those under pressure to do shitjobs they hate - it idées may be better to use AI. But not for the real artist.
This means your are rich, and you can afford the luxury of such mindset.
It's not some morally superior attitude to "engage in peace and happiness" blah blah you're just rich congrats
(And there are probably quite a few people here who are pretty comfortable who still look at a lot of activities through the side hustle lens.)
People need meaning in their life and work that mistreat you is not that.
The people I know that are focusing on "engaging in interesting ideas and creating peace and happiness in the space around [them]" are the "poorest" I know of.
They chose to have a part-time job (if they have one at all), they chose to live a simple life (from Western standards)... to do what they care about.
The only luxury they have is living in a society with enough solidarity to allow them to live this way.
The goal was never to get rich as I realized early on that was improbable and I focused on other things.
It's not the default human condition to be consumed by greed any more than it is any of the other deadly sins.
I just don’t see why my life needs to be optimised for making money compared to engaging in interesting ideas and creating peace and happiness in the space around me.
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This hit me hard! Thanks a lot mate for this comment.
I feel the same way. But I think this is kind of forced on us nowadays. For example, I might want to write a blog post to share my ideas/work/whatever. But it will be used to make money. It will be used to feed my competition. Maybe not necessarily my content, or not necessarily directly compete with me. But as a class of people, by creating more content we are feeding our competition and some minority will make a lot of money out of it.
Maybe I was not doing it for the money in the first place, maybe it was being read by 5 humans in total anyways. But still, I have no escape and I personally find the whole idea disgusting. I will take no part in it.
You can just admit you made a mistake. It's fine.
i think this part gave people the impression that you meant that doing something "for nobody" (eg. for your own joy) was somehow bad/malevolent
You can just admit you communicated poorly. It's fine.
In startup land, the world of innovation accounting for organizations is one attempt to better understand that.
That said I have also found myself writing less, but not because I think it’s less worthwhile than it was 15 years ago when I started, it’s that the internet feels like it has become less deep. Probably not because the internet has changed but because I’ve learned more so fewer and fewer things tickle that curious part of the brain and feel worth writing about. The things that do feel worth it are so off the deep end that there are fewer and fewer readers who are interested.
There's this Spider Man quote I like: "If you help someone, you help everyone". I think it's not comic canon but just from the PS4 game. So getting meta here, that random line a writer for a random video game came up with had a big impression on me.
It's a typical programmer fallacy to avoid redundancy. If somebody else already wrote about something, why would you? Yet in communication, redundancy and repetition is actually quite key. We need to hear ideas multiple times and from different angles before they land.
But after the last few years with the proliferation of “AI” tools and the increasing amount of noise on every level I just don’t like feeding the “grey goo of information”. It might be unreasonable but I’ve felt it for over a year now and it’s not going away. Instead I value interpersonal conversations a lot more again. I hang out in discord voice chats with a few people at a time. Text communication feels soulless and low signal to noise in general now.
Anecdotally almost every text chat server I’m on has less active users writing than I’ve ever seen in 25+ years of using the internet. Might be a coincidence but I wouldn’t be surprised if people’s behaviours are changing. Just like knowing you’re being watched changes your behaviour, knowing text content may or may not be fed to or generated by a slop machine algorithm probably changes how you view text as well.
If your voice isn't spoken then it will go unheard. It is of course up to you but I think that blogs and websites run by real people are invaluable (and I'd love to see what AI makes of that word!)
This is the bigger issue at the moment: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1008897/bbe01d846ec5e9cd/
Where I think that post failed is poisoning the well of anyone ignoring Robots.txt is arguably a moral imperative. That post was concerned with wasting kWh, but ensuring that bad actors don’t profit discourages people from being bad actors.
You wrote your comment in English but used French style quotation marks and made a few minor grammatical errors in your first sentence (won't instead of isn't, by instead of from). Your second sentence beautifully paints a gloomy image with just nine words and your final flourish has just the right level of "fuck it".
If you can deliver that amount of character in a single line in a second language then please do feed the beast. We are all the product of what we eat. The beast needs to eat its greens and suck up some vitamins.
I don't feel like giving free inputs to an AI company. They will use it and once they have domination they will abuse their position.
* To be fair, nostalgia around many off these communities can be misleading. Many were never designed to sustain realistic growth nor the inevitable pressures to monetize them. They were naive and ignored human nature, a product of the mentality of their creators or perhaps their participants or both. We know better now. Community building is tricky and worthwhile, rarely a matter of formulaic scaling.
I guess our gmail content has been fed into an AI of sorts since many years ago. I would surely hope, however, that Google would not use it for any sort of non-private LLM training data.
So it’s not ok to be bothered by it because it’s been happening a long time?
Your problem is the scale at which knowledge and ideas are being appropriated, but my point is that it was already happening a lot but it was far more implicit; now it's just explicit that it's happening because we see the process laid bare.
I saw a hint of it with crypto and NFT hype cycles, but this is on another level.
I was enjoying the discussion until the parent broke it of with a comment that sounds like a SJW refusing to "educate" us.
ideas are there to inspire and to freely go from one to the next and evolve.
this ownership fantasy people have of knowledge and ideas is a deteriment to human progress.
its a new thing. not an old thing. and its only there for people to take money of others.
do you realy think its a good thing? its a large part of what makes so many people poor and hungry in the world.
This could in theory still apply to machines but I would have to think about it first. It might require a different format.
I can't see how it's protecting creative risk; it protects the infrastructure for some to take risks, but that infrastructure isn't being used anywhere near its potential.
It's still too much of a reach to expect regular people to want to contribute personal knowledge for free, into an opaque corpus that rewrites your words, sends them to someone else and arbitrarily decides whether you are to be credited with them.
Much the same way I benefit from Google indexing the internet, and summarizing news articles.
>I would also point out the social connection between reader and writer does come with some expectation of a reward. Whether it is to be paid in cash or respect is beside the point. People often expect some reward for their efforts and they are not wrong to want that. People are often uncomfortable to put it so bluntly because that would compromise the quality of the relationship, but upending this relationship is really a perversion of logic carried out for purely selfish reasons ("I want what you are making, and I will give nothing in return").
I often ask Chat GPT to cite anything it comes up with that I want to repeat, and if it cant cite it I ignore it.
I have been reading blogs, books or whatever for free for years often (99%+) of the time without payment or attribution. I have never considered myself to have a relationship with an author, and often wonder about people who have parasocial relationships.
I dont understand how a new tool that can chew on the data for me before presenting it hurts peoples feelings tbh. I would be honored if anything I have ever done was worthy of inclusion.
wow there. You do note the big difference between AI regurgitating someone's content and Google indexing it?
If I put effort into creating something digital and people find it through Google's massive index of the internet, at least they'll see who its by, enjoy it within its context and have the whole thing before them. This is way different from some algorithm mashing what it scraped from a creator's work into its own rehash of a bunch of content.
You can understand why someone might detest the one and appreciate the other?
If I create, I might want you to benefit from it, but I might also want you and others to know it came from me. Not just consume it as an undifferentiated part of some parasitic corporation's AI slurry.
Even if you write primarily for yourself (vanity, marketing, client acquisition, there is nothing wrong with that) and not for other people, I’d still recommend you publish your stuff. Not publishing will have always <= effect than publishing, even if AI slurps it up.
Just one quick reference: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-blo...
i really dont think its such a big deal. If you enjoy blogging, then enjoy it. Maybe its an excuse, AI, for something that was already in the making.
That is exactly the right approach. Most of the posts on my blog have low 3 figure hit rates after being up for a decade (the long tail is a joke) - that averages to maybe 20 hits a year. But that is not that point. I enjoyed writing the posts and just maybe somebody, somewhere enjoyed reading my hot take on The Last Jedi or whatever.
I don't really understand the people who blog for "exposure" or money - it seems like such an effort for very little material gain.
for the writer, id hope like you it gives them joy, because that usually is something which gives it some spirit and joy to read also. its not important at all how things are worded if there was fun to be had!
Not even coherent, really. That's not why I write at all. It's also not why I read.
Things started off okay, me writing about my projects, etc on a small self-hosted site with zero analytics, keeping things small and manageable in my free time. But the lack of feedback sort of left me I limbo. Was I writing in an engaging way? Were my subjects interesting to more than just me? I had no idea. Eventually, that iteration of the blog got deleted.
And I made another. And another. And so on.
Til I landed on the current version, which is basically me just faffing about with a editorials about tech for fun since I have little time for actual projects anymore, let alone the accompanying writeup.
I still want that writing job, but I realize how much of a pipe dream it is, now. Tech bloggers were already a dime a dozen before I showed up and genAI only saturated that market even further. That, and I still have no interest in working for or hosting a site that is hostile to my reader by being a bloated sludge of scripts and sloppy use of frameworks, which limits my market for a writing career in disappointing and obvious ways.
When I see discussions like this pop up about writing online in today's landscape, it seems to always come down to "write what you find interesting or fun, but keep your eyes expectations near zero" which seems so self-defeating considering how much work it often takes to maintain a blog while you also have to tend to real life. As much as I loath places like Medium or Substack for asking for money up front, I do understand why those writers choose to go there instead of walking my lonely path.