andyfilms1

It has always baffled me how quickly, and how voraciously, people started to rely on privately owned AI systems.

AI is not something discovered by scientists and plucked out of the ether. It's engineered and controlled, for profit, by corporations which have demographics and KPIs. These companies don't owe you anything, and they make no promises.

If you're running a business that deeply relies on AI, you might as well add Sam Altman to your board of directors--because he has just as much control over your company as you do. If they have a bad quarter and need to increase rates by 1000%, your choices are to pay up or shut down.

This Mythos situation is just the beginning. Not only do they have everyone hooked, but they've actively stalled the personal skill growth of millions of people who fell into vibe-coding rather than genuinely learning. And now they have that choice: Pay up, or shut down.

And while we're at it, stop with the popups and notifications.

I don't care about the new features in a browser update. Ideally, nothing at all has changed.

I don't want a "tour" of the software I just installed. I, presumably, installed it to do something, and I just want to do that thing.

I don't want to have to select a preference for how a specific action is performed in your software. If it's not what I expected, I will learn it.

And for the love of GOD, nobody wants to subscribe to your newsletter.

I work in a creative field, and we've started to get a lot of clients using AI to generate initial concepts for us to build upon. The problem is, they're not actually thinking about these concepts, they're just generating until they see something they like.

Then, we have meetings where we will ask a basic but specific question about what they want us to make, and we're just met with blank stares. They have no answers, because they've never actually thought about it.

And then everyone else needs to do the thinking for them.

Except, calling it a "tool" is exactly why OP feels bad. Simply phrasing it another way, I.E. "OP paid for a service to implement a feature he wanted," would completely remove the guilt and be more technically accurate.

IMO, the way we talk about using AI leads to a lot of confusion and needs to change.

Another calculator with no backlit keypad. Am I the only one that wants to use a calculator after the sun goes down?

If I see a company using an AI generated image or video for their product, my first thought will always be, "What are they trying to hide?"

I've been wondering if a diffusion model could just generate software as binary that could be fed directly into memory.

I understand the frustration but I don't understand the logic. The businesses who paid the tariffs (who were literally sent an invoice that they paid) should be the ones refunded.

How would the government even be able to determine if a business increased product prices due to tariffs vs other factors, or even if the business increased prices at all? What if the product is a loss leader and the company was fine just eating the expense? Or what about a nefarious company who manufacturers their stuff in Canada but used "tariffs" as an excuse to increase prices? What would they be refunded from?

At what point does this just wrap all the way back around to being genetic algorithms?

I'm also reminded of the old software called Formulize, which could take in a set of arbitrary data and find a function that described it. http://nutonian.wikidot.com/

I love the idea that this guy was easily able to scrounge up a florescent bulb in a beer coozie, but a desk fan is somehow unobtainable.

For a given calculation on given hardware, the 100th digit of a floating point decimal can be replicated every time. But that digit is basically just noise, and has no influence on the 1st digit.

In other words: There can be multiple "layers" of linked states, but that doesn't necessarily mean the lower layers "create" the higher layers, or vice versa.

I feel like we're both in similar minds of opposite sides, so perhaps you can answer me this: How is a deterministic AI any different from a search engine?

In other words, if you and me always get the same results back for the same prompt (definition of determinism,) isn't that just really, really power hungry Google?

I don't think he's missing the point at all. A band saw is an immutable object with a fixed, deterministic capability--in other words, a tool. An LLM is a slot machine. You can pull keep pulling the lever, but you'll get different results every time. A slot machine is technically a machine that can produce money, but nobody would ever say it's a tool for producing money.

I've never understood this train of thought. When working in teams and for clients, people always have questions about what we have created. "Why did you choose to implement it like this?" "How does this work?" "Is X possible to do within our timeframe/budget?"

If you become just a manager, you don't have answers to these questions. You can just ask the AI agent for the answer, but at that point, what value are you actually providing to the whole process?

And what happens when, inevitably, the agent responds to your question with "You're absolutely right, I didn't consider that possibility! Let's redo the entire project to account for this?" How do you communicate that to your peers or clients?

>That particular AI models have their own bias and are eager to inject it is among the reasons why a skilled user and an unskilled user will have very different results, not a reason why that isn’t true.

Not quite what I mean. If you and I both take a photo of the same controlled scene with the same camera, the result will be essentially identical. If you and I both type the exact same prompt into Nano Banana, we will both get very different images. So, how is one supposed to know what parts of the AI image are intentional or incidental? If the AI image is "good," is it good because of or despite the prompter?

>Is oil paint on canvas a set of tools or a medium? In art, a tool ot set of tools often characterizes, or even defines, a medium

Agreed, and this is basically what I'm saying. I'm fine with siloing AI art into it's own category and I'm sure some cool work can be done there. But it's fundamentally odd to think that AI will, for some reason, replace or displace other art.

A key difference is that each of the mediums you mentioned are deterministic and unbiased (to a certain degree.) The the work created can therefore be inferred to be a "pure" expression of the artists intent. A pro photographer and my mom will get wildly different results even with the same equipment. Not so with AI, which very much has it's own bias and is eager to inject it.

The other question is, is AI a tool or a medium? I often hear people say "Well EDM was looked down on when it first came out," but EDM is not a tool, it's a genre. I think most artists wouldn't really care about "AI" becoming a genre of art, but it's silly to think that all future art will be AI just as it would have been silly to think EDM would have replaced all future music.

Honestly I'm okay with "AI art" becoming a category. The issue is when it's presented as handmade, causing confusion.

Digital artwork being presenting at an oil painting conference would cause similar confusion and outrage for the same reasons.

People will argue that if a shortform video is human made or AI generated it doesn't matter, it's domamine-triggering filler either way.

But I do think that the parasocial relationships and discovering new influencers is a big part of the hook for many people, and taking that away may cause many to have a "what the hell am I even watching" moment.

It's easier to justify the addiction when it feels like you're "hanging out with a friend." When content is AI generated from concept to production, it's just...talking pixel soup.

I mean, humans didn't need to read billions of books back then to think of quantum mechanics.

The purpose of eating is to ingest nutrients, but that's not why most chefs enjoy cooking, or why people pay more for nicer meals.

With chess, there is a known, specific end goal, and the "creativity" comes with how you arrive there. With an artwork, the end goal is entirely decided by the artist, there is no "win state" to reward.

While I appreciate your positive experience, if you were unable to write, storyboard, and communicate your idea before AI--than AI is not going to be "the thing" that suddenly turns you into a filmmaker.

You're writing anyway, you just call it prompting. If you feel that the AI is giving you back more than what you're putting in with that writing, you have to ask yourself who's vision the result really is.

A video of an ocean (or anything) is not, inherently, art, or creative. But also...if you're taking a video of the ocean, it's probably because you want to capture/share a video of the ocean, which an AI generated video is not.

Yes, that's exactly right. It's why I, and many other creatives I know, are not worried about AI. Our annoyance comes more from it dominating the conversation rather than actual perceived risk.

Doesn't seem to work in Firefox. :(

Nothing, but after becoming reliant on an LLM they may simply become overwhelmed and give up once they outgrow it's capabilities. I've seen this happen to several people I know.

It is a bit of a catch-22, a plain english wrapper opens up the tool to be more widely used by novices, but also prevents those novices from actually learning the tool.

I'm terrified for the future this rhetoric itself will cause. Young people are being told not to go into certain fields because they're going to be replaced by AI by time they graduate.

What happens in 4-5 years when we suddenly have no new engineers, scientists, or doctors?

Young people don't have the life experience to know how unrealistic these claims are, all they can do is act on the information as it's presented. It's irresponsible at best, and evil at worst.

Lululemon benefits humanity just as much as AI. For different reasons, of course.

I've said this before, but the only thing that will convince me that these companies are actually laying people off due to AI will be when they start replacing their leadership staff with it.

Until that happens--IMO it's just an excuse to reduce the overhired workforce without tanking their stock.