Did you learn to play guitar playing guitar hero?
No, you didn't.
You're straw manning an argument that doesn't exist in the article
No, you didn't.
You're straw manning an argument that doesn't exist in the article
Sure, it’s all gamified and fun and even addictive, but at the end of the day no outside, transferable skill accrues to the player. To do that, you have to set the controller down, pick up an actual guitar, and start another, entirely different journey. And perhaps some Guitar Hero player did or will, which is awesome. It means at some point they were not satisfied with pretending to play the guitar, following someone else’s rules and set-up. They still started, effectively, at zero. There was a whole new skill tree to be learned that had very little to do with the game, outside of the shape of the controller.
I'm not aware of any studies proving or disproving that this gives beginners a head start, but it would be an interesting thing to investigate.
A categorical "Nice try, but you've just been wasting your time" seems overconfident.
I actually do sight read for a couple of instruments- nothing in any of those games has literally anything to do with that.
Hell, my (very good) reading for clarinet and double bass has nothing to do with my (very poor) ability to sight read on piano.
Whatever gets folks interested in stuff is great, but to me it's like saying "I watched 10K hours of MTV in the 80s and that was very helpful in my career playing jazz"...
The same thing is true with writing and other skills replacements- much of my ability and desire to write comes from the experience of using it as an adjunct to thinking.
Having to figure out how I should connect ideas and state them in a way others will understand clarifies my own thoughts, so the idea that I am somehow gaining idunnowhat by adding a bunch of verbal noise to my writing misses a lot of the reasons why I like to write.
I'm happy to use LLMs to draft things like the contracts I need for the mechanical royalty payments I make when I record other folks material, but that's only because I am not trying to learn how to think legalistically.
And further, creating documents via might spark an interest in legal language and how it get used, but it's not going to help me understand the underlying reasons for what's going on any more than watching a whole lot of porn is going to help me be a better lover...
I got my start in drumming from playing on Rockband. When I mentioned it to the folk that I bought my first e-kit, they rolled their eyes. Fine, whatever, I expect musicians to be pretentious.
But yanno what? I still learned a lot. The controller itself was midi-capable so I was able to hook it up to my kit and play the game while practicing my form and timing. Was it perfect? Fuck no; it sucked. But it guided me into recognizing that I wasn't as good as I wanted to be, which led to lessons and many many hours of practicing.
I owe a lot to rock band because it opened a world of play beyond the game itself.
I'm sorry you had folks rolling their eyes at you when you got your instrument. That's an exceedingly common thing to happen. Especially with singing. But it doesn't make it okay or correct or nice.
But the lessons and the practicing aren't the same thing as playing a video game.
In the same way that no matter how good I get in Fallout it will never have anything to do with how I am able to deal with folks in my real life.
For instance, I enjoy Fallout and it's very validating to play it and be the "good" guy. For a quite a while I considered that maybe there was something ethically useful in that kind of "education".
As I have gotten older I have come to feel that it's actually closer to some kind of ethics porn: none of the choices have material consequences for me or my community and I can go back and do things from a save game. I have total control over the situation in ways I never have in real life.
And further, I have come to think that this way of thinking ethics might actually be harmful to my practical ethics: because I'm not forced to make choices that actually impact me or anyone else, that game might start to erode the parts of that process that deal with the often-negative outcomes of those decisions.
So, like, sure: Fallout made me more interested in how my ethics function. But it's so far removed in how we actually move through the world that it might actually mess up how I do things.
I used to have an octapad back in the oughts, and if that was the only way I was interacting with the drum kit it would have done a lot of harm to my playing. If I played the video game drum set like I played my real kit, it would get destroyed in short order.
I am certain that you know what I mean when I say that the specific techniques around stick/beater control have virtually nothing to do with the mechanics of that kit, and further I am equally certain that you understand that the timing involved in these games has little or nothing to do with the strictness (and often looseness/feel/dragging/etc) of the timing when we play drums with other humans.
My point isn't even about the specifics of these games, but about how folks seem to abuse AI so easily these days.
I -don't- think there is anything pretentious about buying an instrument you don't play and then doing whatever you do. That's not pretense, that is the process of learning to play music- that's what it is in itself.
But I also don't think that is the same thing as playing a video game, and I think the distinction is important to make because there is much in our world that asks us to pretend we are doing things we aren't doing.
In the same way that I have to think about how to respond and think about why you have a negative reaction to what I wrote, I also have to struggle with a reasonable way of communicating why I think you don't understand what I wrote.
I have to come to terms with the limitations of my ideas and how I can state them-- if I crapped "fuck your strawman and the fleshlight version of music and thought that is generated by an LLM" into an LLM, then I wouldn't really be getting anything at all out of these kinds of interactions.
So when I read and write, I often struggle. But I think that having those difficulites and sitting with them is what is different than dropping half-baked reactions into an LLM or playing Guitar Hero.
In the same way that I have to think about how to respond and think about why you have a negative reaction to what I wrote, I also have to struggle with a reasonable way of communicating why I think you don't understand what I wrote.
The only people who are saying that way are people who have negative feelings towards the game in the context of music. To me, that's pretentiousness because it assumes the thoughts of the people who play the game. It reminds me of people talking shit about Chicago who've never been to Chicago.
But ultimately I think my point is that people are going to flail, but we shouldn't immediately assume that people don't get anything out of them. You seem to have an absolute position that it's all or nothing -- surely you don't actually think you've learned NOTHING from playing Fallout? Nothing about yourself? Nothing about game mechanics? There's much more to learn than what's "formally" presented and each person gets something different.
Like, I've been playing with cipher mechanisms with LLMs... and after getting frustrated with all that, I'm now learning how to draw so that I can make my own similar cryptographic puzzles. Wouldn't have gotten there if I hadn't stumbled blindly for a bit. So in the same way that you wouldn't invalidate my path towards music, I'd hope you wouldn't invalidate my path towards drawing. There's a middle point somewhere in between that you seem hesitant to intellectually venture towards.
Well, I did write out a couple of paragraphs about what I thought I learned.
I did indeed "learn how to play fallout". Which is pleasant. Like learning to play Rock Band or Sing Star or Guitar Hero was also pleasant.
And although I initially thought that maybe all those "ethically good" decisions I found gratifying might improve my ability to make ethically good choices in the larger world, I believe I was incorrect.
And further, because of the highly contrived nature of the game and it's uncanny closeness to the material world, it might be actually harmful: it encouraged me to pretend I am ethical when in fact it has brought me to do literally nothing with other people.
My point is probably getting hung up on the mechanics of drumming, which I have struggled with off and on for the last 30 years now.
So instead, I'll say what I have to say about writing and general LLM usage and be done:
The real difficulties of writing are a positive adjunct to my thinking, and I believe that almost all of the intellectual things I have struggled with (from learning to read the log files in Linux to predicting what is wrong with the engine in my car) all benefit from the same struggle.
Removing that effort by crapping half-formed thought in and out of an LLM might not be a big deal or even improve the work of folks who have already learned how to think through these complex systems.
However, that flailing certainly doesn't help people get better at thinking in the way that writing or troubleshooting complex systems might.
Further, unlike Guitar Hero an LLM might encourage folks to just "play the game" instead of actually breaking out of the bounds of that game. Because it produces tangible output (from poetry to PLC code), the folks using these "ways of thinking" often feel that they are "doing the same thing" in the same way that I can "bench press" 2-tons-of-steel with a front end loader.
And that intentional confusion between "getting better at doing stuff" and "a lot more crap got done" isn't a good thing to me.
That is the point: a lot of folks do in fact think that creating with an LLM is the same as the process of learning to create.
My point isn't to say that if your motivations for drawing or drumming or whatever come from XYZ, then they aren't valid. I'm also not claiming that picture books about airplanes are bad because they encourage children to become bomber pilots.
People have all kinds of strange and complex motivations, some better than others.
I'd trade your "enjoyment of video games" for "my parents' failures as 'professional' musicians" any day of the week.
My own reasons for going out tonight and playing double bass with my jazz band are way more sus, weird, dumb, illegitimate, whatever and have way less to do with my (very real) love of playing music with my people than anything I think some rando on the internet is going to divulge.
Rather, the point is that struggling and sucking at drawing until you figure out how to do it in a way that feels good can easily get short-circuited by midjourney or whatever.
The hidden midpoint that you think I am hesitant about might be all the pedagogical materials in-between: the scales, drum rudiments, gesture drawings, forum postings, low-rent bar gigs, half-assed bug ridden toy PHP scripts, bizarre sophomore manifestos, bad poetry, broken song lyrics, iffy recitals, lessons with bored teachers, incorrect tableture. Those things are all "pretensions" in your sense: those are all on spectra where folks flail as they approach "doing the thing". And they are all a-okay.
The limit on that spectrum, though is the LLM and the Guitar Hero, where folks are barely even "flailing". Like all parts of a spectrum are on the spectrum, but which is to be avoided if the other end of the spectrum is "good". And I probably wouldn't bother writing that out if there weren't LLMs didn't have literal cults forming around them...
> And further, because of the highly contrived nature of the game and it's uncanny closeness to the material world, it might be actually harmful: it encouraged me to pretend I am ethical when in fact it has brought me to do literally nothing with other people.
I think you're underselling the second paragraph here as not learning something! "what I thought I learned" includes this lesson.
> I'd trade your "enjoyment of video games" for "my parents' failures as 'professional' musicians" any day of the week.
My dad used to be a traveling musician before he joined the army for reasons he won't tell me until I'm older (he told me that in my 30s so hmmmm), so, I totally get this.
Anywho, great chat. I appreciate the heck out of your perspective.
Jam on!
What is that?
Arrested development?