I remember when I suggested that I shouldn’t learn to write in 1998, because you can just type on the computer, I was laughed at. I was told that at best I’d still need to learn to write, and at worst computers can turn out as a fad due to them requiring electricity to work, they can crash and go bad, etc. Pease note that my dislike of writing was heavily influenced by likely having dyspraxia, and a lot of cheaper pens/pencils being mildly painful to hold.
However, the very same people are now disencouraging anything that the AI is promised to replace. Don’t draw, just use Dall-E. Don’t code, just use ChatGPT. Don’t play music, just use Suno. Don’t make movies, just wait until it can do it good enough. The music one is even often being pushed by those who absolutely despised electronic music for “not requiring any talent, just pressing buttons”, all while AI music is literally what ignorant rock/metal kids thought electronic music production was. Even one person, who criticized me for using amp sims on my PC instead of a wall of tube amplifiers is more favorable than not towards AI music.
I wonder if those who now disencourage art classes in favor of a short lesson on how to prompt an image generator will also disencourage writing due to speech-to-text technologies. Maybe the problem is that they don’t use LLMs, but often a more primitive version of neural networks.
And I’m not 100% against new tools. I even use Neural Amp Modeler, sometimes even two instances with one having a Boss HM-2 response for that Swedish chainsaw tone. But these prompt machines are barely more than toys for real professional work, due to the lack of actual control beyond prompting.
My personal view (and prepare for a long ass text with no TLDR) is that paired with smarter marketing/manipulation schemes from these corporations, and a fast medium to proliferate these schemes (which is social media), the same people that criticized those technologies back in the day realized their bitter and obsolete opinions, formed on a tiny sample size and a lot of assumptions and predictions, didn’t resonate or have any substance (such as in saying electronic music wasnt real music).
Since now we’re so interconnected it’s much easier to corroborate things, so they realize (but won’t admit) their bitterness from back in the day and, perhaps to overcompensate, try to do the opposite and nowadays adopt a posture of being hip with the cool kids, hopping on the newest trend. But since we’re so interconnected, corporations are also getting smarter, and getting a bigger insight into the inner workings of the human mind, and how to resonante with one’s weaknesses. Edward Bernays’ legacy fyi (nephew of Sigmund Freud).
All that, along with the unforgiving age that doesn’t regress, makes people just say fuck it and embrace this new technological milestone that is being pushed which is AI and, so they don’t get left behind yet again, they start defending with their bodies and souls (going so far as to even insult you if you don’t hop on the trend) something truly despicable and twisted, that they don’t have the slightest clue on what it encompasses, that was manufactured (or shall I say synthesized) by these money-hungry corporations, getting a grip in even the most purists. I’ve seen this happen in Hip Hop, where the most purist figures who defended that the culture should be strictly this or that and there was no space for nothing else, that it was something manufactured with sweat, tears and love by us for us, now defend AI slop and generative bullshit on the basis that it is “another tool, like a computer, or an MPC”
Adding to that there’s also a lot of ingenuity, as people think that some generative AI is the same as those face swap softwares from back in the day, and in general don’t know the implications in the usage of AI. “It’s a cycle, when PC’s were invented people said that it would be the doom. When calculators were invented people said that it would be the doom. When games were invented people said that it would be the doom.” and of course corporations also ride this wave and appeal to the ingenuity of people.
It’s just what happens when a startup gets to the level of a corporation. An initiative that seems promising at first gets corrupted by the corporatocracy, that at the end of the day exists for one reason only. Domain over the masses by the elites, the rule of the fittest, kill or be killed, let the world burn, “I shall step on whoever as long as it saves my skin”.
Excuse my long rant and absence of TLDR, I wouldnt even know where to begin wrapping this in a tidy manner. I guess TLDR: It’s all synthesized by the elites for domain over the masses in order to protect their ass. They just have a better social engineering and social literacy nowadays because we’re so interconnected
Also only realized now this post is from last year… Oops. Still found it relevant to talk about