There are quite a few distinct intellectual crafts, in which large sections of cognitive labor can now be outsourced to AI:
All forms of writing
Visual art / animation / video
Now, software engineering
It would be amazing to have a true understanding of the transformation in each case, although it’s all so vast and multifarious that it defies orderly description.
But if we were trying to understand, maybe in each case we would look for prototype examples of: 1. how it was done before AI, 2. how it’s done when you leave everything to the AI, 3. how it’s done in intelligent, stylish, non-slop uses of AI.
Because the third category still exists in each case. There are people using AI but still maintaining creativity, aesthetics, and professionalism, along with holdouts who don’t use AI at all, and then the masses who are happy to use cheap and quick AI slop. That three-way division seems to be how it is, in any number of fields of endeavor now.
I worry about that third category. I’ve recently had occasion to say that truck with AI rots the soul. I’m not as sure of that as my blunt statement (intentionally) suggests, but at present it appears to me well within the range of possibility. Whatever care one takes to compose the AI’s standing orders and one’s questions to it, and to never nod along to what it tells you, how sure are you that you are not slowly poisoning yourself?
And even if one eschews their use, others won’t. We now have keep up our guard against all information sources.
There are quite a few distinct intellectual crafts, in which large sections of cognitive labor can now be outsourced to AI:
All forms of writing
Visual art / animation / video
Now, software engineering
It would be amazing to have a true understanding of the transformation in each case, although it’s all so vast and multifarious that it defies orderly description.
But if we were trying to understand, maybe in each case we would look for prototype examples of: 1. how it was done before AI, 2. how it’s done when you leave everything to the AI, 3. how it’s done in intelligent, stylish, non-slop uses of AI.
Because the third category still exists in each case. There are people using AI but still maintaining creativity, aesthetics, and professionalism, along with holdouts who don’t use AI at all, and then the masses who are happy to use cheap and quick AI slop. That three-way division seems to be how it is, in any number of fields of endeavor now.
I worry about that third category. I’ve recently had occasion to say that truck with AI rots the soul. I’m not as sure of that as my blunt statement (intentionally) suggests, but at present it appears to me well within the range of possibility. Whatever care one takes to compose the AI’s standing orders and one’s questions to it, and to never nod along to what it tells you, how sure are you that you are not slowly poisoning yourself?
And even if one eschews their use, others won’t. We now have keep up our guard against all information sources.