Reminds me of Baudelaire:
"the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies"
> A tool is something you wield.
> Control, sensory feedback, intention, intimacy, continuous direction, expertise etc are all missing from LLM use. LLMs are not wielded. LLMs are automation.
Cameras do indeed have sensory feedback, intention, intimacy, contentious direction, expertise, etc. So TFA would indeed describe a camera as a tool, not as automation.
Note also that TFA is not romanticizing effort, rather it is putting value to expertise:
> The continuous application of technique and energy, and sensory feedback, are essential to the buildup of expertise.
Yes there exists a type of expertise where the value is not realized by whichever arbitrary metric you use to assign value. However having expertise is more likely to result in value added compared to not having said expertise.
For example, I am learning the guitar, I am not an expert, but the more I practice the more I approach expertise, then I can play more songs, I can play them better, resulting in me and those around me having more fun = value added.
"You have traded working with the world to working for a capricious robot."
This is what i'm a critic of not having more fun. This reads to me that some people are charlatans and i'm an expert. That type of sentiment is prevalent in all sorts of creative persuits. Aside from it being factually wrong, it's just different not worse or better.
What exactly are you a critic of? Why is this statement factually wrong (and why is the fact that it is wrong just an aside)? Why do you say trading your expertise for automation is neither better nor worse. For me—if I care about the craft—it is obviously worse.
I could have simply turned on the radio if I wanted to hear the guitar played, instead I spend an hour or more a day to acquire the necessary skills to satisfy. The latter is obviously better.
Thats great you care about the craft. There are many kinds of craft, but just because you do your craft in a certain way doesn't make others way invalid. The latter is not obviously better, better depends on your definition of value. The definition i'm reading from the article is whether it provides value to world or to you personally and I'm just saying who cares how that is accomplished. Defining how a craft "should be done" is the trap i'm pointing out. If the making is the important part to you aka the process and the journey, thats awesome and I agree that many wonderful things are created in the way you practice guitar with your hand eye coordination, auditory processing, etc... however I find it counterproductive to label ways of creating more or less valuable, they are just different. If I was to program a machine to play the guitar for me it might be different but not inherently better or worse just because you practice every day with your hands and I program a robot to do it. Maybe I have cerebral palsy and I can't play guitar the way you do, does that make my art lesser? It just makes my constraints different and thats at the core of what i'm getting at.
If all you wanted was a reasonable facsimile of a family member, then photography made attaining that object dramatically cheaper. Prior to photography, almost all of images of people are of fabulously wealthy and powerful people because they were the only ones who could afford a skilled painter making their portrait. After photography, most people could afford a daguerreotype.
The impact on fine art is much more complex. I think probably all you can say definitively is that the timeline where photography exists produces very different fine art paintings because the incentive structure and the implications are different in a world with photos. But better or worse? Impossible to say.
Yet vibe coders and people that delegate the creation of software through English prose to an LLM are still called software engineers or programmers. That is my major problem with the whole thing.
I think comes from a natural feeling of ownership over your profession. There's nothing wrong with that feeling that the title of engineer must be earned but in reality titles means nothing, what you do with it is whats important.
Do DJ's make music? Why don't they play all the instruments themselves and become "experts"?
Judge the product, not how difficult or easy it was to create it.
Anyway this is getting a little too involved for a HN thread and it's unlikely I'll move your position but I appreciate the dialog.