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Didn't they cut a huge deal with Disney just 3 months ago?

https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/

This already happened. When deindustrialization first hit in the US it devastated the black community. The result? A litany of pundits decrying Black criminality, bad family structures, cultural pathologies. It's no coincidence that The Bell Curve came out around then.

A decade or two later, all of sudden the same phenomena are happening in working class white communities. Drug addiction, family dissolution, abject poverty. So clearly the people of the US finally realized that what was happening was due primarily to material concerns, and that people need to be able to earn a living in order to live. Right?

No. Instead we got right wing populism, scapegoating of immigrants, further concentration of wealth, and no end in sight.

I may be a pathologically agreeable person, but this essay just reads as misanthropic to me.

It's the instant gratification problem, and I suspect it's dependent on temperament. Some people are more sensitive to having their tolerance for distress eroded by instant gratification. Once I start looking up answers to crossword puzzle clues, I can't stop, and then I don't consider that I've really solved that crossword.

Maybe you aren't like this, but I suspect that the artist in question is. She is self-aware enough to know that she would have a hard time drawing boundaries, and eventually it would be all AI and very unsatisfying. That's why she specified that she would consider using the technology in a very circumscribed way.

Yeah I think we basically agree.

And yet, I can't leave well enough alone. I want to clarify that I wasn't assuming anything about your emotions. I was being even ruder. I was assuming underlying psychological motivations.

Though, to be fair, I was trying to diagnose a trend, not accuse you individually of anything. There seems to be a lot of resentment directed towards artists that bothers me. It predates the AI boom, but it's been supercharged. People seem gleeful about artists being taken down a peg by AI. It's hard not to read into that. Again, to be clear, as a broader trend and not reflective of you as a person, who like you said, I don't know at all.

True. I think that's why my second point is much stronger. The main issue is not delegation, or human vs machine intelligence. It's the instant feedback.

Human collaboration has always been slow and messy. Large tech companies have always looked for ways to speed up the feedback loop, isolating small chunks of work to be delegated to contractors or offshore teams. LLMs have supercharged that. If you have a skilled prompter you can get to a solution of good enough quality by rapidly iterating, asking for output, correcting the prompt, etc.

That is good in that if you legitimately have good ideas and the block is execution speed. But if the real blocker is elsewhere, it might give you the illusion of progress.

I don't know. Everything is changing too fast to diagnose in real time. Let's check back in a year.

There are two major mistakes here.

The first is equating human and LLM intelligence. Note that I am not saying that humans are smarter than LLMs. But I do believe that LLMs represent an alien intelligence with a linguistic layer that obscures the differences. The thought processes are very different. At top AI firms, they have the equivalent of Asimov's Susan Calvin trying to understand how these programs think, because it does not resemble human cognition despite the similar outputs.

The second and more important is the feedback loop. What makes gambling gambling is you can smash that lever over and over again and immediately learn if you lost or got a jackpot. The slowness and imprecision of human communication creates a totally different dynamic.

To reiterate, I am not saying interns are superior to LLMs. I'm just saying they are fundamentally different.

And, if we're being honest, the way people talk about interns is weirdly dehumanizing, and the fact that they are always trotted out in these AI debates is depressing.

I think you are incorrect in assuming that the reason she doesn't want to use AI is because of democratization. She is pretty clear about her reasoning; she enjoys the effort of her work, and removing the effort removes the joy.

In fact if we're being honest, there is some weird unprompted bitterness in your response that is pretty common in the AI space. Creatives who don't like AI are always haughty elitists who don't like that the peasants can now create works as brilliant as them.

In reality, most artists I know wouldn't use AI because the friction is part of the joy of creation for them. Or maybe they want to feel like the work truly emerged from their own brain. Or they find their art practice both productive and meditative, and those are equally important to them. Or numerous other reasons, mostly compelling.

I'm not an artist, or even particularly creative, but the only reason I would undertake any hobby is because I enjoy the process. I like building Gunpla models, which seems irrational if you are only thinking about output. If someone were to say to me, "You know, they sell plastic toys of the RX-78-2. You could just buy one if you wanted it," I would stare at them blankly.

It's too bad nobody likes Freud, because all the discourse around pro- and anti- natalism reveals a rich vein of sexual and other anxieties that are the true content of the "debate" outside of the handful of David Benatars of the world making rigorous (if niche) arguments.

I would say that the healthy response is to promote human autonomy alongside policies that show that a society cares about its most vulnerable, but what do I know.

I'll admit, I bought Stand on Zanzibar based on a recommendation from my Dad, but I only got a few pages in before getting distracted by something else. I should give Brunner another shot.

I would love to read the Philip K Dick story about this, but I'm not enjoying living in it.

It's funny that for all the complaints people have about the accuracy of The Social Network, the aspect that has aged the worst is that Larry Summers is depicted as clever and witty.

Fraud as governance. Cool.

The problem with these theories is that they fall apart as soon as you start adding or modifying the types. Because they aren't actually correct, just simple and flattering.

This is what happens when a field of inquiry is dominated by engineers rather than scientists. "Shut up, it works" is the answer to every question.

They're getting downvoted because they are a miserable misanthrope, and it is our responsible as people in a society to punish obviously antisocial behavior.

I think a lot about the scene in Minority Report where a machine scans the main character's eyes in order to serve him targeted Gap advertising. It is even funnier because I assume Gap paid for that product placement, with seemingly no awareness that the movie would depict the ad as dystopian.

AI advertising is far more terrifying than that. Imagine using everything that has been gleaned from a person's psychology to pressure them into purchasing certain products.

Well if you will turn your attention to my Straussian reading of the most popular comic books and anime, you may find that...

I guess we could all forgive trying to destroy western civilization under the guise of saving it, but drew the line at poor media literacy when it comes to One Piece and Watchmen.

(This is a joke in case that wasn't clear)

I highly recommend reading Ethnic Options by Mary C. Waters. It's a fascinating work of sociology that defines this exact phenomenon and explains its origins.

I know that I'm both pretentious and inarticulate. It's a rough combo. But I resented the idea that what I was saying was inauthentic. I legitimately love Kant, even though reading him is like trying to hammer nails through my skull.

Ok, so what were they saying?

But what were they actually saying? They just used the phrase "college-educated" and several synonyms as an insult to put themself forward as just some working class Joe who has no time for rich people and their hoity toity high and mighty philosphizing.

If I was to be charitable, I guess maybe their argument was that Kant only believed in subjective universality because he was rich, but that doesn't make any sense. Both Kant and Hume grew up middle class, and ended up in academia, and had very different conclusions about what "taste" is.

It's just a knee jerk reaction to dead white men philosophers and anyone who is interested in them as a bunch of elitists. That's not an argument, that's some kind of misplaced class resentment masquerading as an argument.

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I'm addicted to HN comments in a way that's almost certainly bad for me. I skim the articles (if that) and then hop into the comments section to pontificate about whatever topic is marginally related to the article I didn't read. Maybe my attention span has entirely eroded, or maybe I lack an outlet for the never-ending torrent of racing thoughts that keeps me up at night. But either way, here we are.

Taste is not subjective. It's intersubjective. Subjective experiences are totally located within a particular subject. For example, "I'm hungry. I'm tired. I'm sad."

Judgements of taste, on the other hand, implicate all other humans when they are made. They implicitly demand consensus in a way that is unlike any other subjective claims. This is the only possible explanation for why people will in one breath say, "it's a matter of taste, it's all subjective" and then argue about whether or not The Last Jedi is a good Star Wars movie for hours, if not days, on end. Because the truth is, we are constantly seeking consensus and we usually resort to "that's just your opinion man" when we give up and disengage. But we don't believe that, not really.

According to Kant, "a judgment of taste involves the consciousness that all interest is kept out of it, it must also involve a claim to being valid for everyone, but without having a universality based on concepts. In other words, a judgment of taste must involve a claim to subjective universality." Unfortunately, it's Kant we're talking about, so trying to understand what he meant by subjective universality is a huge headache. Still, his reasoning reflects the way people actually talk about taste better than anybody else I've read.

I don't think you understand how taxation works.

I've seen the exact same post on HN maybe a dozen times. The psychology of people posting this sort of advice is more interesting to me than the advice itself.

Can't wait for the movie! Luca Guadagnino, don't let us down.

Look, I thought the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was great when I learned about it, too. I love the movie Arrival (and the Ted Chiang story it's based on). But if you aren't a social scientist, it can be very appealing (and self-defeating) to latch onto a specific concept you heard about and try to create some grand theory of the world. This is fine, but it's sophistry, not deep thinking.