"AI", code gen, etc. have only amplified my creativity and output, soooo if you are feeling mediocracy creeping in, it always was. Sorry.
If anything this has only highlighted something I have said for 40 years. Ideas are a dime a dozen, everyone is mediocre(including me), execute.
Now, we will see who has the real ability to produce...
Seems like @dorkwood is the artist (creator), and you are the critic. :)
I also fail to see why it is relevant to point out that the OP lacks artistic skill - it was the vision that was valuable to them; putting a paintbrush to a paper is simply a medium that they were able to circumvent with a simpler solution.
Large orgs and high level execs are seeing an opportunity to produce cheaper, lower quality product more quickly.
These same orgs seem largely blind to the fact that while they are working to make their staff redundant to surge profits, those same staff have been massively empowered with leverage that would allow them to build competing products that would be more competitive.
Work at an org as a backend engineer? Know enough domain to build a competing product, but have no design or frontend knowledge? AI to the rescue.
In tech the biggest threats to large orgs has always been small teams with drive and vision, those teams can be smaller now and likely made up of former employees.
The article touches on a more philosophical (and some cases actual [1]) negative feedback loop: these tools are trained on human output, explodes into popularity, and–greatly boosted by seedier, low rent content farmers and the likes as well as mind boggling scale and speed–is fed back into the same input stream: akin to the “photocopy of a photocopy of a…” effect. I recall years ago scoffing at talks about how the Internet will soon be an unusable torrent of detritus that drowns out actual useful or interesting information and looks at Google search results here we are.
When it comes to generative tools, sure, there are defenses and mechanisms to mitigate this effect to a certain extent, but it also has a likewise effect on humans and society, which doesn’t, not really. We are constantly driving the bar lower, both from the business and consumer perspective.
A parallel: Look at mass produced, cheap consumer goods. I’m not ancient, but I’m old enough to watch my era of cheap goods (which my betters lamented over compared to “their time”) also become replaced by notably worse quality products than before. We don’t even seem to care if the thing meets some minimum threshold of functional in its purpose, it only matters that it’s immediately available and cheap enough to dispose of if it sucks especially bad. This is an excellent proposition for economies that have been working extremely hard to push society in this direction. It’s awful for everything else. This is a drain-circling race to the bottom with disastrous ecological and human implications.
Of course, you can dismiss this as shouting into the void, technological old man yells at the Cloud… which it is. The ram has touched the wall, Pandora’s box has been opened, the genie is out of the bottle. But when I compare it to other technological disruptions in human history, “AI” products and services are impinging upon widespread sociopolitical and economic stressors and challenges resulting from just the regular-ass Information Age. Since we are increasingly a technological society[2], and our most trusted but flawed quantifier for value and worth is money, profitability is the predominant motivator from big tech. Not so much its benefit to humanity or whatever delusion VC sociopaths and techno-narcissists are on about. AI is a tool. I’m not afraid of tools. I’m afraid of a race who has a difficult relationship with its tools and is prone to squander them on stupid or awful things.
I think the confluence of hyper capitalism, nascent technology, and human nature will make slowly boiled frogs of all of us, cut off from our true potential emotionally, intellectually, physically, artistically, morally, and ethically.
[1] https://futurism.com/ai-trained-ai-generated-data [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Technological_Society
Just like a milling machine can be used to produce wasteful widgets destined for consumer trashcans, so can the same machine be used to create high quality parts used in airplanes... my point is, YES, in the wrong hands any tool can be miss used.
You have no idea how or what Im doing with code gen, or statistics... and you paint it all "generative AI", yawn.
My argument isn’t that “consumer rubbish is good as long as it wasn’t made with AI”, if that’s what you’re getting at.
Using your example, I am concerned that humans are losing what little ability they had to discern which widgets belong in the bin and which are high quality, that’s not an accident and AI is just one of many tools used by the wrong hands to that effect. To be clear, that isn’t AI’s fault, it’s a human problem.
I made no comment on your work, because quite frankly I don’t care. I agree that mediocrity isn’t some new fangled thing that appeared because of AI, but I think it’s pretty naive to dismiss its impact on the issue.
Edit: I just realized that I made a typo in my original comment that I apologize for because it most certainly did sound personal. Unfortunately I can no longer edit.
> that doesn’t mean it can’t be mediocre