I’ve found that AI has done literally nothing to improve my life in any way and has really just caused endless frustrations. From the enshitification of journalism to ruining pretty much all tech support and customer service, what is the point of this shit?
I work on the Salesforce platform and now I have their dumbass account managers harassing my team to buy into their stupid AI customer service agents. Really, the only AI highlight that I have seen is the guy that made the tool to spam job applications to combat worthless AI job recruiters and HR tools.
Garbage in; garbage out. Using AI tools is a skillset. I’ve had great use with LLMs and generative AI both, you just have to use the tools to their strengths.
LLMs are language models. People run into issues when they try to use them for things not language related. Conversely, it’s wonderful for other tasks. I use it to tone check things I’m unsure about. Or feed it ideas and let it run with them in ways I don’t think to. It doesn’t come up with too much groundbreaking or new on its own, but I think of it as kinda a “shuffle” button, taking what I have already largely put together, and messing around with it til it becomes something new.
Generative AI isn’t going to make you the next mona Lisa, but it can make some pretty good art. It, once again, requires a human to work with it, though. You can’t just tell it to spit out an image and expect 100% quality, 100% of the time. Instead, it’s useful to get a basic idea of what you want in place, then take it to another proper photo editor, or inpainting, or some other kind of post processing to refine it. I have some degree of aphantasia - I have a hard time forming and holding detailed mental images. This kind of AI approaches art in a way that finally kinda makes sense for my brain, so it’s frustrating seeing it shot down by people who don’t actually understand it.
I think no one likes any new fad that’s shoved down their throats. AI doesn’t belong in everything. We already have a million chocolate chip cookie recipes, and chatgpt doesn’t have taste buds. Stop using this stuff for tasks it wasn’t meant for (unless it’s a novelty “because we could” kind of way) and it becomes a lot more palatable.
Preach! I’m surprised to hear it works for people with aphantasia too, and that’s awesome. I personally have a very vivid mind’s eye and I can often already imagine what I want something to look like, but could never put it to paper in a satisfying way that didn’t cost excruciating amount of time. GenAI allows me to do that with still a decent amount of touch up work, but in a much more reasonable timeframe. I’m making more creative work than I’ve ever been because of it.
It’s crazy to me that some people at times completely refuse to even acknowledge such positives about the technology, refuse to interact with it in a way that would reveal those positives, refuse to look at more nuanced opinions of people that did interact with it, refuse even simple facts about how we learn and interact with other art and material, refusing legal realities like the freedom to analyze that allow this technology to exist (sometimes even actively fighting to restrict those legal freedoms, which would hurt more artists and creatives than it would help, and give even more more power to corporations and those with enough capital to self sustain AI model creation).
It’s tiring, but luckily it seems to be mostly an issue on the internet. Talking to people (including artists) in real life about it shows that it’s a very tiny fraction that holds that opinion. Keep creating 👍