it is fucking priceless that an innovation that contained such simplicities as “don’t use 32-bit weights when tokenizing petabytes of data” and “compress your hash tables” sent the stock exchange into ‘the west has fallen’ mode. I don’t intend to take away from that, it’s so fucking funny 
This is not the rights issue, this is not the labor issue, this is not the merits issue, this is not even the philosophical issue. This is the cognitive issue. When not exercised, parts of your brain will atrophy. You will start to outsource your thinking to the black box. You are not built different. It is the expected effect.
I am not saying this is happening on this forum, or even that there are tendencies close to this here, but I preemptively want to make sure it gets across because it fucked me up for a good bit. Through Late 2023–Early 2024 I found myself leaning into both AI images for character conceptualization and AI coding for my general workflow. I do not recommend this in the slightest.
For the former, I found that in retrospect, the AI image generation reified elements into the characters I did not intend and later regretted. For the latter, it essentially kneecapped my ability to produce code for myself until I began to wean off of it. I am a college student. I was in multiple classes where I was supposed to be actively learning these things. Deferring to AI essentially nullified that while also regressing my abilities. If you don’t keep yourself sharp, you will go dull.
If you don’t mind that or don’t feel it is personally worth it to learn these skills besides the very very basics and shallows, go ahead, that’s a different conversation but this one does not apply to you. I just want to warn those who did not develop their position on AI beyond “the most annoying people in the world are in charge of it and/or pushing it” (a position that, when deployed by otherwise-knowledgeable communists, is correct 95% of the time) that this is something you will have to be cognizant of. The brain responds to the unknowable cube by deferring to it. Stay vigilant.
Completely agree. AI should be just another tool to easy the life of the workers.
I’m not so sure I even like the idea of AI like ChatGPT or Deepseek or the countless others, mostly because I avoided it till now and don’t really know much about it, so I need to further investigate to actually form an opinion, tho I would be lying if I said I’m not intrigued by it. The only times I used one of these AIs have been recently to translate a few sentences with Gemini since Google already forced it on my phone. And honestly, with search engines going down the sewer, maybe Deepseek with it’s search function could be useful.
One thing I can’t really understand tho is generative AI. I don’t want to sound like a Luddite, but I really can’t see the use of it. Like, it’s one thing to have a very specialized AI tool for parts of the creative process, but generating whole images and voices? Just, why? It’s depressing. You’re removing the human part of these creative works and stealing in the process just to automate it for profit or for the sake of it. I already saw some AI generated ads here in Brasil from some big companies, including Coca-cola, and it just makes me mad knowing they did it just to cut costs by not paying actors, artists, designers, etc. It’s fucked up.
And not only that, but artists literally have the ability to draw, paint, sculpt, voice act, etc, whatever they want in their own style and process. Why would they want to generate their whole work for them removing themselves from the process? It just sounds completely dystopic to me.
The argument I could see is for people who want low-stakes imagery on a very low budget.
I used some of the Stable Whatever models to generate some wallpapers for my PC. I’m not talented, so I can get maybe 30% of what I want by hand from a blank page, but if you roll the gacha a few times, I can say “this is 70% what I wanted, and I can clean it up and tweak it to 75%.” If you use it that way, there’s still some personal effort. Sure, it’s still fairly soulless tat, but no more than the prepainted live-laugh-love signs in illegible cursive that clutter our thrift stores.
Yes, if I’m not willing to increase my skills, I should just throw commissions at actual artists, but I’m still way too self conscious to say to someone in person “can you make the vampire prince look 15% more like Liu Kang, and have him carrying a chocolate gateau?”
It also seems real common for blogs and low quality news sites where they need a header image but you don’t need high quality stock photos (how many different photos of traders gesticulating at a display board do you need for economy articles?) Again, low stakes, low budget.