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Comment by bombdailer | Hacker News Reader

Here you make alike a human to a machine, telling of our times to fail to see the difference.

But what is the difference, in this case?

Humans participate in the human struggle of existence, limited in our time, attention, energy, and host of other various constraining natures. We are limited and finite. To learn from those of greater talent than yourself is to dedicate all of those resources towards its acquisition. AI has no such limitations, and so does not participate in the same category as humans. A human struggles to learn the patterns of an artist, a machine does not. A human tires of learning, a machine does not. A human puts in effort, a machine does not.

It is the humanness that is the difference, that which exists outside the abstraction of the imposed categories. The human cannot compete with the machine which ingests ALL works and renders the patterns easily available. The artist toiled to perfect those patterns, and now is no longer granted the decency of reaping the fruits of their labors. Humans can give, the machine can only take.

This is a lot of purple prose that ultimately doesn’t say anything of substance.

And yet STILL the human being that did the work has value beyond any conceivable and ludicrous attempt by an other to measure it against.

Man is a tool using animal. Language, writing, the printing press, photography, audio recording, computers, the Internet, and now AI -- each of these innovations has fundamentally changed how we create and preserve knowledge, art, and culture.

None of these changes came without losses. Writing eroded our capacity to remember, printing fueled decades of bloody religious conflict, photography harmed portrait artists, audio recordings wrecked social collaborative parlor music, computers fucked up our spelling & arithmetic, and the Internet... don't get me started.

Ultimately there is no going back, we will change and adapt to our new capabilities. Some will be harmed and some will be left behind. So turns the wheel of progress, I don't think anyone can stop it.

... What?

This isn't an answer, this is just incoherent, circular rambling.

Ironically I might have preferred slop to this sort of thing.

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