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Comment by eric_cc | Hacker News Reader

> People are robbing themselves of the joy that can only come from putting yourself through hardship in pursuit of a goal.

This is such an old man “I used to walk uphill both ways” take.

Not everybody has the TIME COST to pursue being an expert in art or code or whatever. But if they have an amazing idea and can now use AI to produce the idea then that is a beautiful thing!

For example: Having an idea for a cartoon used to be a dead end. It would die in your head because most people cannot stop their life and dedicate a substantial amount of time, effort, and sacrifice to produce the single cartoon idea.

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>Having an idea for a cartoon used to be a dead end.

What's the point in having an idea for a cartoon in your head if an LLM can just write an infinite amount of cartoon ideas in a heartbeat, and probably a better one than you came up with.

Because it's your own? And previously that creativity of yours was hamstrung by your lack of ability in another domain (drawing), that the AI can help you with.

>> Having an idea for a cartoon used to be a dead end

But drawning a cartoon isn't very challenging. Most of my peers could draw someone from South Park in a junior school.

The hardship in making cartoons is the amount of choices you need to make and the amount of knowledge how those choices would impact a viewer. If you delegate all of that, the cartoon wouldn't be simply blunt, it would be self-contradicting. And we already had a way of making cartoons, that allow your writing to shine through bland animation – since flash, actually. It might actually be even faster then using generative AI

I agree. Toil itself is not valuable or noble. We, as a society, should work towards reducing the training, skill level, and manual effort needed to achieve things. There is no need to artificially gatekeep activities behind needless toil.

This kind of mentality would ban Star Trek replicators, should they be invented one day. "In my day, you had to actually make things, we didn't get to replicate them, so we shouldn't, even if it's possible!"

I disagree re toil. The original idea that brings a creative work into existence is only a tiny part of how that work evolves with every step. For example absolutely no writer starts off writing their final draft. They write & through writing their ideas are clarified & new ideas form, that they did not previously have, all due to the 'toil' of writing the previous drafts. Skipping all the steps that are required to create significant work leads to shallow work born from instant gratification, exactly like the Ghibli slop. It's not 'gatekeeping' that something requires time & effort. All that Ghibli slop is already forgotten, despite saturating social media only a few days ago, because it so shallow. The story & characters & intent is what gives Ghibli films meaning & human resonance.

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