Because I’m seeing more and more each day people once considered experts now on the same level as an untrained person who knows how to type. And I’m really hoping LLMs reach a tipping point because otherwise, you’re just adding another nauseating element to the rat race.
I’m no stranger to the “adapt or get left behind” comments, and it’s very funny when people tell me this but can no longer tell me how a for loop works or what constitutes an outer join.
lol hate to say it but this shithole needs to humbled by an act of war that brings down the power grid, capitalist realism is quickly turning into economic and technological realism (if it hasn’t already).
I think there’s a “time is a flat circle” aspect to this. Like in the early days LLM’s would spit out useless but entertaining content. Like that early AI art, it was this chaotic jumbled mess with a very surrealistic tether to whatever the prompt was. Neither useful as a product nor decent art, but entertaining in its absurdity. Then it got to the point where, as long as people put at least a little effort into massaging the prompts, it’ll spit something believable at first glance. You’ve got break out the photo tools to tell, and most people aren’t going to zoom in to see if there’s a sudden jump between jpeg and png edges.
But the technical finesse has brought a plasticness. My wife’s boss, absolute walking definition of failing upwards McKinsey brain, uses ChatGPT for everything. She showed me one of his emails, it looks professionally written and all. But good Christ it’s painful to read. It doesn’t look like something a human being would earnestly write, more like a satire of corporate speak that would be considered too obvious to work as satire.
And that’s where the circle comes around, all this AI text, art, movies, etc have this feel to them that makes you aware that it’s AI-generated. That breaks the spell, it makes you aware that it’s a plastic facsimile of creative output, and that devalues it. Which will conversely create a value for creative output that feels distinctly not AI.
I’m not sure if there’s an exact 1-to-1 when it comes to “programmers” who don’t really know how to code, they just know how to ask ChatGPT for a function. But I’d have to imagine that they’re in a position where they’re fine if things are running smoothly, but the moment things get FUBAR’d and ChatGPT can’t spit out a solution, or the solution is so convoluted and messy that it makes more problems than it fixes, that will separate the chaff from those who actually know how to wrangle with the code.
Very spot on, it can be very useful as a way to Google things in a personalized way but that’s pretty much it atm. It’s very good at what an LLM was always designed to do from the beginning, parse and predict a fitting response out of the infinite pile of trash it remembers. Any other use case eventually just highlights how much better a human would do the job, even the things that it is fit to do like first level customer service. I have a special hatred for AI “art”, out of all its use cases this is the one that I really wish could be abolished.
I’m currently working with a small tiktok singer (500k monthly on Spotify) - they blew up at some point (the music is awful), it’s easily the biggest job I’ve had so far as a videographer. The other day I went in to the meeting with their agents, and the marketing team.
They’d chat GPT’d every single idea for me make in a video. Not an ounce of talent or original thought in the room. Just filling social media with slop content. It might as well not exist at all.
Creative media is in a very depressing place right now. Even adverts are a million times worse - they cracked the code that it’s more cost effective to make some flashy short bullshit than it is to try to have any sort of earnest identity.
I think that’s the result of the few transmitters many receivers model being replaced with many transmitters many receivers but with The Algorithm between the two. It all becomes about gaming whatever metric The Algorithm values at the moment. The result is this homogeneous game of “ask this algorithm to spit out content the other algorithm approves of.”
Unfortunately it seems that they keep adding tokens/burning down the environment to ensure that this is never the case. It’s starting to feel like the only option is to adapt because anything else is futile
Also would like to say that this frustration is extremely symptomatic of the fantastical pursuit of endless growth and it’s becoming quite hard to turn this part of my brain off as it just keeps smacking me in the face every damn day
Just layering spaghetti code on top of spaghetti code, hoping nothing ever goes truly wrong because no one is going to be able to figure out how it’s all connected?