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Comment by michaeldoron | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate my elders' experience, but do note that contemporary AI researchers and enthusiasts often feel similarly about AI advancements:

We watch AI models become better each month, not in ads, but in blogs and posts. While not making cover stories, new models do make the news. I was so excited when Dall-E first came out, I even hosted a guess-the-prompt party four years ago with what seems now like prehistoric-level generated images. The AI industry may face more scrutiny and criticism than the computer hardware industry of the olden days, but we even have a semblance of open source communities who are trying to democratize this for everyone.

All this to say, similar sentiments still exist in the frontier, it's just that the frontier moved.

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In the 80s and 90s, most of the enthusiasm I saw was from nerds who just wanted to make cool stuff and share it with people. It felt like magic to make computers do things.

Much (but not all) of the enthusiasm I see with AI today seems to be from people who think it will make them rich, powerful, and freed from the apparently intolerable burden of having to interact with other humans in order to generate and consume media.

It's not the same.

I agree with the earlier part of your comment, but am not clear about this part:

>and freed from the apparently intolerable burden of having to interact with other humans in order to generate and consume media.

Can you explain it?

Things like:

* A comment I saw on HN once where some dude was excited about AI video because it let him play at being a filmmaker without having to deal with actors, camera operators, etc.

* The large number of tragic souls who install chatbot apps on their phones and have virtual relationships with them instead of actual relationships.

* Spending an evening scrolling through TikTok or other social media which is increasingly AI-generated images and video instead of summoning the willpower to call a friend or get out of the house.

* Music producers who use AI vocal generators instead of finding a friend who can sing.

Etc.

got it, thanks. interesting.

I've seen things like that too, among my friends and acquaintances.

e.g.: a few months back, i was hanging out one evening in the office of a friend who works in the filmmaking field, who i saw creating a presentation to promote an upcoming film course they were going to conduct shortly.

i somehow could detect, by the words and tone, that it was probably ai-generated. he said yes.

then i told him what i intuitively felt, that using such a tool once in a while may be okay but if you use it a lot, your skills will atrophy.

same thing happened with another friend in a different field some days later.

There are a lot of nerds out there who just want to do cool things with AI and share it with people. They're just incredibly outshouted by the people who want to get rich off AI. One of the big problems with the modern internet is that the person trying to make money off something is always going to put far more effort into self-promoting than the person doing something interesting.

I definitely enjoyed the phase of AI stuff where it wasn't actually useful yet more than the current one.

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