Yup.

It’s getting sickening isn’t it.

Which is a good thing.

We shall indeed return to,

(as was put in that star trek movie, something like)

“We believe when you get a machine to do the work of a man you’ve taken something away from the man”

all the faster, having seen where that goes.

… Or we could build skynet and the matrix, 1984 and brave new world, a new, falling into unconscious farmed meatsacks, utterly atrophied of any ability, rendered completely dependent on your abuser. That’s an option too.

How much poison, how fast? Enough to grow insensitive? Enough to get past how sickening it is? Well, many may keep believing it’s all good productivity at their fingertips, at their lips even, upon mere utterances, wishes catered for. Oh, except that bit that was wrong. Oh, and then needing to mend the rest of it too, because none of it was right really. Oh, and then there’s so much more that can be done. Oh, but then none of it is ever done quite correctly too. Oh lets just accept the slop, getting too exhausted by all the extra work. … How soon before we’re all out of the delusions, realising it’s not even fulfilling its marketing’s selling-point claims of helping our productivity.

I got an LLM to help me expedite an idea I had for a text editor written in fish with standard utils, and that was great, really exciting to see it come together, and what a great learning expedition too, as I was reading more lines of [bad] code per day than I had in the entire prior 10 years of using fish. I managed to wrestle the LLM to get it right enough, and incremented my way through it. Though, several times, I burned through over 30 back-and-forth with the LLM, just to get it to do simple things correctly. … Long story short, I burned out, fast, deep, and hard, in a month (and stupidly pushed on for a month yet trying get one more feature completed… which it was even more stubborn on). … How fast could I have accomplished similar, by just learning how to do it myself first, without the extra steps of seeing hundreds of ways not to do it? And how fast would it have felt? (answer: almost no time at all, engaged in the moment). Instead of a very long hard slog. And with all that wax-on, wax-off, I’d have it in muscle memory better too. And, it’s fair progress when you already know how, and can indeed just expedite a tedious portion, and check it’s done right, from your explaining how to do it right. It’s much worse when trying to learn from a teacher who is constantly hallucinating and leading you astray.

And that’s for code… that’s one thing… where utility and correctness are typically easily in a greater ratio to creativity. But pure art…

I tried it once there too.

There’s an image, an idea I’ve had, since around 1999, and have drawn several times in several forms… a sort of meek, mad, maker themed, where there’s a body of a sheep (the meek), a tail of a wasp (the mad), and the wings of a butterfly (the maker)… for a sort of wise humility and gentleness, but with a powerful proactive protective aggressive potential, and a beautiful subtle creative proliferative bounty… idk, words, don’t really do it justice… I’ll just show you… so… Here’s a crappy version I doodled in gimp:

and then, after trying (I think over) 30(?) “AI” image generator tools, several of which, trying again for another 30 times, and failing to get any of them to do the artwork anywhere near right, eventually getting to the point where I was feeding them that version of the image and they were still failing to get it right, so at least another 30 itterations yet, and it eventually, with a lot of bickering and rewording of prompts from me, produced:

… which I still had to lop off the 5th leg from.

And, for all that effort… [remember, faffing through hundreds of completely wrong]

Where’s the expressive nuance?

There’s none.

It’s dead.

It’s so dead. Flat. Empty.

And it’s killing us.

So yeah… [excuse the expressive language, but, vital to express:]

“PLAY FROM YOUR FUCKING HEART!”

and to paraphrase

“YOU’RE FUCKING RIGHT! NOT THOSE FUCKERS ON TV RUNNING AI, TELLING YOU WHAT TO THINK! YOU’RE FUCKING RIGHT!”

Thanks Bill Hicks.

We’ll never find quality parity, and if it ever does, then the nightmare dystopia will have manifest itself fully, far beyond the alarm bell of the atrophying skill and beginning of the acceleration of degeneracy to total collapse, for so long as we chase the money and the reductive and the productive and believe the fairy tale lies of marketers trying to take every last thing from us.

How much already, known and unknown, is our expression curtailed by:

Computer says no.

Time to relax into persistently thrusting ourselves into our own work of art.

(Interestingly, some significant overlap in this as from what I saw this morning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaXNGyqgoMM (crap title, touches on far broader themes). Especially the clip from the writer, starting at 30:52 … Beautiful insight, bolsters the point of the OP).

… Anyway… Let me leave this comment on that friendly rousing note…

PLAY FROM YOUR FUCKING HEART!!!

:)