What we see over and over is that generative AI is promoted by people who literally can’t tell good from bad. People who can’t write or read promote ChatGPT. People who don’t know a good image prom…
In a way, it reminds me of the wave of entirely fixed/premade loop-based music making tools from years ago. Where you just drag and drop a number of pre-made loops from a library onto some tracks, and then the software automatically makes them fit together musically and that’s it, no further skill or effort required. I always found that fun to play around with for an evening or two, but then it quickly got boring. Because the more you optimize away the creative process, the less interesting it becomes.
Now the AI bros have made it even more streamlined, which means it’s even more boring. Great. Also, they appear to think that they are the first people to ever have the idea “let’s make music making simple”. Not surprising they believe that, because a fundamental tech bro belief is that history is never interesting and can never teach anything, so they never even look at it.
There’s something to be said here about the general disconnect between craft and productivity; craft being the art of doing a thing well and productivity being the act of creating a product efficiently. Craft is innately satisfying, particularly when the task is difficult or finicky. However, those same circumstances are toxic to productivity because working through problems takes time and effort. It requires craftsmanship. But if you cut out the need for craftsmanship by sanding off those finicky bits you can increase productivity massively, at the cost of replacing skilled and satisfied craftsmen with immiserated labor drones. This may be economically valuable in terms of raw GDP but I don’t know that it’s spiritually or societally sustainable and I honestly suspect that the current reactionary moment is tied to this at least in part. So naturally the moneyed classes are using generative AI to push even farther down the productivity path as though that’s going to solve the underlying problem. Like, in my sci-fi version of this story it either ends with apocalyptic revolution or the extermination of the human need to have a soul or whatever. And I’m pretty sure that the a16z crowd would unironically prefer the latter.
This is true, but also importantly this only works if you carefully redefine productivity to mean something else than a craftsman would consider productivity. You need a simple metric that’s easily cheated.
For example, a software engineer who cares about what he does would define productivity fuzzily, as general growth of functionality for the consumer of the application, with the implied “actual working well-crafted functionality”. If you’re an idiot who wants to hack productivity, you define it as something straightforward and stupid, e.g. lines of code added. Suddenly you can claim that an “AI software engineer” is more productive than a human.
This exists even in something seemingly all about quality, such as research. One of the many problems with the current state of academia is the obsession with “number of papers published” to the disregard of rigor, and so you’ll get people who are more interested in hacking the metric than actual research. Hence the seemingly annual scandal where someone is caught completely fabricating data, or the even more frequent sham experiments in psychology that never replicate. The replication crisis falls into the same category – it’s good science to replicate, but journals are not interested so it doesn’t grow the sacred metric by which every academician is judged.
Unfortunately we’re in an age of hacked productivity. The productivity metric for our markets is line going up, which has long been disconnected from actual productivity, as in providing a product to customers that willingly buy it. It’s hard to keep focus on actual productivity when seemingly everyone around you, and especially everyone hierarchichally above you, cares only about the hacked metrics. Art is one of the few mainstays where you alone can be the judge of your own productivity and whether you’re happy with your output, since at the core the only metric that matters in art is “does it feel right to me”. This must be untenable to promptfondlers because they never experienced actual artistic fulfillment, so instead they need a hacked metric to feel good about improving – how many images can we churn? how long of a video can Sora output before killing itself? how many seconds of “music” can our box generate?
A generous interpretation may be that writing music in the context of the modern music industry may indeed be something that’s creatively unsatisfying for composers, but the solutions to that have nothing to do with magical tech-fixes and everything to do with politics, which is of course anathema to these types. What dumb times we live in.
So much wrong with this…
In a way, it reminds me of the wave of entirely fixed/premade loop-based music making tools from years ago. Where you just drag and drop a number of pre-made loops from a library onto some tracks, and then the software automatically makes them fit together musically and that’s it, no further skill or effort required. I always found that fun to play around with for an evening or two, but then it quickly got boring. Because the more you optimize away the creative process, the less interesting it becomes.
Now the AI bros have made it even more streamlined, which means it’s even more boring. Great. Also, they appear to think that they are the first people to ever have the idea “let’s make music making simple”. Not surprising they believe that, because a fundamental tech bro belief is that history is never interesting and can never teach anything, so they never even look at it.
There’s something to be said here about the general disconnect between craft and productivity; craft being the art of doing a thing well and productivity being the act of creating a product efficiently. Craft is innately satisfying, particularly when the task is difficult or finicky. However, those same circumstances are toxic to productivity because working through problems takes time and effort. It requires craftsmanship. But if you cut out the need for craftsmanship by sanding off those finicky bits you can increase productivity massively, at the cost of replacing skilled and satisfied craftsmen with immiserated labor drones. This may be economically valuable in terms of raw GDP but I don’t know that it’s spiritually or societally sustainable and I honestly suspect that the current reactionary moment is tied to this at least in part. So naturally the moneyed classes are using generative AI to push even farther down the productivity path as though that’s going to solve the underlying problem. Like, in my sci-fi version of this story it either ends with apocalyptic revolution or the extermination of the human need to have a soul or whatever. And I’m pretty sure that the a16z crowd would unironically prefer the latter.
This is true, but also importantly this only works if you carefully redefine productivity to mean something else than a craftsman would consider productivity. You need a simple metric that’s easily cheated.
For example, a software engineer who cares about what he does would define productivity fuzzily, as general growth of functionality for the consumer of the application, with the implied “actual working well-crafted functionality”. If you’re an idiot who wants to hack productivity, you define it as something straightforward and stupid, e.g. lines of code added. Suddenly you can claim that an “AI software engineer” is more productive than a human.
This exists even in something seemingly all about quality, such as research. One of the many problems with the current state of academia is the obsession with “number of papers published” to the disregard of rigor, and so you’ll get people who are more interested in hacking the metric than actual research. Hence the seemingly annual scandal where someone is caught completely fabricating data, or the even more frequent sham experiments in psychology that never replicate. The replication crisis falls into the same category – it’s good science to replicate, but journals are not interested so it doesn’t grow the sacred metric by which every academician is judged.
Unfortunately we’re in an age of hacked productivity. The productivity metric for our markets is line going up, which has long been disconnected from actual productivity, as in providing a product to customers that willingly buy it. It’s hard to keep focus on actual productivity when seemingly everyone around you, and especially everyone hierarchichally above you, cares only about the hacked metrics. Art is one of the few mainstays where you alone can be the judge of your own productivity and whether you’re happy with your output, since at the core the only metric that matters in art is “does it feel right to me”. This must be untenable to promptfondlers because they never experienced actual artistic fulfillment, so instead they need a hacked metric to feel good about improving – how many images can we churn? how long of a video can Sora output before killing itself? how many seconds of “music” can our box generate?
A generous interpretation may be that writing music in the context of the modern music industry may indeed be something that’s creatively unsatisfying for composers, but the solutions to that have nothing to do with magical tech-fixes and everything to do with politics, which is of course anathema to these types. What dumb times we live in.