Generative "AI": The Guitar Hero of Creativity(whatever.scalzi.com) |
Generative "AI": The Guitar Hero of Creativity(whatever.scalzi.com) |
Spoken like someone who never actually played the games. GH developed my interest in music as a kid, and Rock Band actually taught me how to drum in real life. It also garnered my interest in picking up and learning real guitar.
Those who forget that Rock Band not only a) existed and b) did everything GH did but a thousand times better + created by real musicians (Harmonix) do the genre, industry, and this article, injustice.
This article is written by someone stretching and reaching to relate two unrelated things. I'm offended by this.
No, you didn't.
You're straw manning an argument that doesn't exist in the article
He is rapidly coming to define himself through opposition, rather than promotion. Which is a dangerous and fruitless game.
Throughout human history there has never been a still useful technology that we as a species chose to stop using, and AI very much is. Maybe we'll come to regulate it, but the genie will never go completely back into the bottle and folks are going to need to get used to the new world.
I think that someone who's radically opposed to any use of AI is simply a poor developer.
You said it yourself - you have the knowledge and ability to know what to ignore and keep what makes sense, but that's because you spent years actually writing and understanding code.
The magic wand of AI is absolutely wreaking havoc with juniors engineers' ability to understand complex code bases and software engineering fundamentals. How will the engineers of tomorrow know what to keep and what to reject if all they've ever known is "you are a principal engineer. read this Jira ticket and build a solution. ultrathink".
Absurd. Scalzi fans are not going to stop reading his works because LLMs exist. If anything, established authors are the ones with the least to fear.
This talking point that when people dislike something it’s because it affects their personal finances is getting really tired. Not everyone is a greedy selfish prick who only thinks of themselves, people are allowed to dislike things for other reasons. That’s normal, it’s not an anomaly.
> but the genie will never go completely back into the bottle and folks are going to need to get used to the new world.
And apparently we’ll never share another original idea, either. “Genie is out of the bottle”, “you’re going to get left behind”. Apparently the people who called LLMs parrots got it wrong, they instead turn people into them, mindlessly repeating whatever the labs want them to.
Being rude about it doesn't make you right about it.
It sounds like people are repeating themselves because they have to keep repeating the obvious in every one of these threads:
The tools are useful, people are going to use them. Cope.
It's a new, and potentially very lucrative, technology. Given time the cost will go down, not up. The way that will happen is increased efficiency.
Do I know HOW that will happen? No, but I know that it will. It always has, and there are huge motivations for making it happen.
I don't know how to play guitar, yet I can play guitar hero. My friend who plays guitar cannot play guitar hero. I'm not interested in playing guitar and I don't find GH to be a "shortcut" to learn it. In fact, I play the piano and I'm okay like that.
So you are good at different things. Maybe not at a real guitar but perhaps at reaction times.
I say this as someone who had one of those plug-in guitars but never knew how to use it, hah.
> Guitar hero is not harder or easier than guitar.
Ladies and gents, peak dunning krueger moment.
Boring people use it in boring ways, interesting people use it in interesting ways.
The rest is old man yells at cloud, like how people criticized "laptop music" or photography.
But AI actually does something unlike Guitar Hero. There is a real output that can be used tomorrow even if AI "goes away".
You say AI helps you learn no skills, essentially. I don't know about you, but AI helped me understand Linux better in a way I didn't feel confident I would be able to before AI. I have created code with AI that I can maintain, and understand without it.
AI can go in conjunction with learning manually and can be helpful. Just because many examples exist of AI being unhelpful does not mean the whole technology is unhelpful.
Has anyone ever claimed otherwise?
What are your thoughts on games like Keyboard Hero?
And yet, I am still quite good at mathematics.
I explored this idea with ChatGPT, asking it to make some reference images. I also asked for some prompt generation. I have weak sketching abilities (it's on my list to improve), so this is how I "storyboard".
To be cheeky, I asked Claude to make balloon simulator from which I could eventually drop into Fusion360 to muck with and 3D print. CamelKoons was born! [1]
I wanted a Golang backend and web frontend. Fable pretty much one-shotted the step-one scaffolding: Golang physical simulation of a single balloon, streaming geometry to a Web application. Vibed through various issues and then step two was multiple balloons with twists (which were just choke points).
In the world of disposable, hyper-focused software, this tool remained static to Dromedary Camel topologies. A generalized topology feature is left as an exercise for the reader's LLM.
I like empowering my agents to loop [2]. So, I used Claude-in-Chrome to do some loops where Claude positioned the Camel and could screenshot it. I also gave it an HTTP endpoint to position the camera for itself and me.
Eventually, I wanted to push views and comments from the Web page, so I added a comment box. Claude Code used its new-to-me "monitoring" feature to watch for that action and react to it in the session. Claude made itself a "look-at-camel" skill, so cute! [3]
While the balloons were looking interesting, I noted it wasn't very Koons-like and Claude reminded me that Koons was art and we were doing physical simulation. So then we started distorting the physical model. Of course we also added model export, etc.
After tokenmaxxing, I ended up with something that was a cross between a poop emoji and an alien dildo.
I'm now learning the Forms feature in Fusion360 and following a great balloon-dog tutorial on YouTube. I think this guitar approach will win out over my Guitar Hero approach.
[1] https://github.com/cameltopia/CamelKoons
[2] https://github.com/ConAcademy/WeaselToonCadova
[3] https://github.com/Cameltopia/CamelKoons/blob/main/.claude/s...
I cannot ask the video game why my real guitar is out of tune, or diagnose why I'm holding the fret wrong.
Don't worry, there's still room for paintings in human culture, even though photos outnumber them billion to one.
So I decided to get my own custom slop. Opened Gemini and it said "video generation is free for a few days, try it out!". I uploaded a copy of Neuromancer and asked it to generate a scene.
MF had Cage inserting a power plug in his ear.
Ah and the time zone curiosity question? It went about it for a a minute or so and said "can't help you with that one, anything else?"
I think we've seen the best these LLMs can do and the race to the bottom has started. It's all cost cutting now, and I am very curious to see what will be of OpenAI and Anthropic. Probably will end up absorbed by MS, Amazon and Nvidia.
edit: https://share.gemini.google/hvH2A3Yva5Uj
First try.
I doubt their attempt failed because they wrote the question poorly. It was probably just the service being flaky.
So high quality I can certainly acknowledge because indeed the output from these models can be indistinguishable from human generated content. However, I am curious to know what you mean by creative here, in two senses:
1) Do you have an example of AI generated content being particularly novel or different, and not just a (admittedly highly consistent) rehash of what it was trained on? 2) What do you think it means to describe the output of a model that doesn't possess any agency as "creative"?
Instead, my goto examples of high quality creative works that are clearly grounded on AI tools is https://andreaciulu.com/projects/ and https://youtu.be/fyZhC2TXgcs
“model that doesn't possess any agency” implies a model acting on its own. Like a paint brush flying around the room painting the walls with no people around. Or a computer spontaneously turning on and publishing images to an online gallery with no on operating it. The creative process of using AI tools is one of exploration, pipelining and editing.
Commentators strawman image generators as magic paintbrush machine guns. But, the process of using them intentionally is more like nature/street photography. You can’t walk into the forest and declare “I will photograph an owl fighting a fox over a mouse today.” But, you can develop a sense for where to go to find good shots. Now imagine instead of walking in a forest, you can pop anywhere in the multiverse. You don’t know exactly what to expect each time. And, the space is infinite in many dimensions. But, you can still learn to navigate.
And, that’s just the process of direct prompting. One step past that gets you configuring pipelines of highly varied generative editing tools like https://www.runcomfy.com/comfyui-workflows/comfyui-product-r...
From there you get into integrations with 2D painting/3D modeling tools and video editors. Generating references which are used to generate style sheets, then characters, sets, blockings, dialog, motion, base renders, upscales, edits.
“Make me a pretty picture. Masterpiece, best quality” is easy to make fun of. And, it’s common because so easy many people are playing around with it. But, it’s tiresome to find all of the discussion assumes that’s all there can ever be.
https://www.dpg-physik.de/veroeffentlichungen/publikationen/...
The successful ones already knew how to write books - which directly contradicts the standard line about "It's just people who couldn't do it without AI."
That's just objectively wrong.
There have been some successful spammers who flood Amazon with tens/hundreds/thousands of titles, but that's more of an exercise in technology and marketing than writing.
Might just be final nail in the coffin for our cultural stagnation
And presumably there would be similarly thousands of posts saying things like "I love my nutri-paste, it lets me skip the boring part of cooking my meals straight to the eating and getting calories and vitamins which is the real purpose of eating anyways"
I think that junior engineers can learn from AI, but the corporate setting isn't the best place for self-learning from AI. There's a lot to be learned from the average advice from the better AIs, as long as they are trying to understand the feedback. Please note that for these engineers, AI is replacing the old copy-and-paste from Stack Overflow. At least with AI they can dig deeper and ask questions.
I'm not aware of any studies proving or disproving that this gives beginners a head start, but it would be an interesting thing to investigate.
A categorical "Nice try, but you've just been wasting your time" seems overconfident.
I actually do sight read for a couple of instruments- nothing in any of those games has literally anything to do with that.
Hell, my (very good) reading for clarinet and double bass has nothing to do with my (very poor) ability to sight read on piano.
Whatever gets folks interested in stuff is great, but to me it's like saying "I watched 10K hours of MTV in the 80s and that was very helpful in my career playing jazz"...
The same thing is true with writing and other skills replacements- much of my ability and desire to write comes from the experience of using it as an adjunct to thinking.
Having to figure out how I should connect ideas and state them in a way others will understand clarifies my own thoughts, so the idea that I am somehow gaining idunnowhat by adding a bunch of verbal noise to my writing misses a lot of the reasons why I like to write.
I'm happy to use LLMs to draft things like the contracts I need for the mechanical royalty payments I make when I record other folks material, but that's only because I am not trying to learn how to think legalistically.
And further, creating documents via might spark an interest in legal language and how it get used, but it's not going to help me understand the underlying reasons for what's going on any more than watching a whole lot of porn is going to help me be a better lover...
What is that?
Arrested development?
Sure, it’s all gamified and fun and even addictive, but at the end of the day no outside, transferable skill accrues to the player. To do that, you have to set the controller down, pick up an actual guitar, and start another, entirely different journey. And perhaps some Guitar Hero player did or will, which is awesome. It means at some point they were not satisfied with pretending to play the guitar, following someone else’s rules and set-up. They still started, effectively, at zero. There was a whole new skill tree to be learned that had very little to do with the game, outside of the shape of the controller.
I got my start in drumming from playing on Rockband. When I mentioned it to the folk that I bought my first e-kit, they rolled their eyes. Fine, whatever, I expect musicians to be pretentious.
But yanno what? I still learned a lot. The controller itself was midi-capable so I was able to hook it up to my kit and play the game while practicing my form and timing. Was it perfect? Fuck no; it sucked. But it guided me into recognizing that I wasn't as good as I wanted to be, which led to lessons and many many hours of practicing.
I owe a lot to rock band because it opened a world of play beyond the game itself.