I was thinking about starting a new creative project recently. But then I thought - with how quickly AI is advancing, in just a few years an AI will probably be able to do this in just minutes. So it made me feel kind of apathetic and think, “Why should I bother starting this big project now if an AI could do it for me in a few years?”
I’m curious if others feel this way or if the advancement of AI is making people less motivated to start big, creative projects since the work could just be automated by an AI soon anyways. It could increase apathy and make people feel like “why bother?” Am I overthinking this? Does the possibility of AI taking over certain tasks in the future make you less motivated to start projects and learn new skills? Would love to hear others’ thoughts on this!
Somewhere out there there is someone better than you at what you do. There’s a company with more resources to do what you do. There are both that can do it quicker, more efficiently, and for cheaper. I say this not to make you feel worse, but hopefully better as all of this was true way before AI and its never stopped anyone before. Think of AI as a tool to extend yourself, not a replacement.
Yep. I use it to check my code, summarize boring meetings, as a rubber duck that talks back, and as a way to break down personal projects into easy to digest portions.
It can be a super useful tool for regular folks that can’t just pay someone to do that kind of stuff for them.
Quite the opposite, actually. Because of AI, I got back into web development for the first time in 20 years. I’d never be able to figure out the new stuff like HTTPS and DDoS protection on my own if it weren’t for ChatGPT’s help. It got me up to speed on HTML5, and helped me remember how PHP and Javascript work, all within a couple of days. Would have taken months otherwise.
You should be using AI as a tool to expand your creativity, not feel hindered by it.
The machine doesn’t create anything of value on its own. It’s a power tool. You can automate aspects of creativity, but ultimately all art is the study of choice. What you choose to make, how and why, that is the more worthy aspect. If a movie has something predictable and cheap in the story, I don’t care how well it was acted or how fancy the effects were. It will still be a bad movie.
AI only makes it less effortful to generate creative output. Using AI or not is just another choice to evaluate as part of your creative work. What does that choice mean to you? Make that choice deliberately as part of your vision, and you will have done well.
The whole generative AI thing bums me out as someone who dabbles in writing, but for more philosophical reasons than the ones you listed. Storytelling is supposed to be something humans do to connect with one another. Art and culture are windows into our psyches. This, to me, is why art makes life worth living. It’s why we go through the hassle of maintaining our dreary and tedious obligations, because when all that is done and over with we can sit captivated and spellbound by a good tale from a talented writer.
This? This makes little sense to me. You’re telling me they made a computer program that uses pattern recognition to write and draw for us? Okay, why? This goes against what I always assumed art was for. There’s more to storytelling than just pattern recognition. There’s themes, emotions, metaphor, allegory, messages, politics, and so much more. A computer program doesn’t understand any of that, it just follows it’s programming.
Tech bros insist that AI is not going to take our jobs, but as long as we live under capitalism I don’t buy it. A lot of the people who work in publishing or producing are just doing it for the money. They don’t give a shit about whether the stories are good, only that they are profitable. If you don’t think that they are going to jump at the chance to create product without paying anyone for it, then I have a bridge to sell you. Creators need to eat too. The phrase “starving artist” exists for a reason.
We were supposed to create robots that would handle manual labor so that we could all be free to pursue our passions. Now they have robots creating art while we continue to do manual labor. It’s not the future I wanted to live in.
There will always be a market for human-made creative products. AI will never take it away. Just like there will always be a market for manual transmission cars/regular bicycles (non-electric), or cellphones that aren’t smartphones, or physical video games.
Production of creative products is in the hands of every human alive, so the only time it will stop being produced is if every human decides to stop being creative. Which will never happen.
I get what you’re saying and there is a market for all that but it’s getting smaller by the day.
Physical game copies are only wanted by collectors and for many it makes more sense to just emulate as you can tweak settings, save any time, swap controls/controllers etc.
Bikes? Less and less. Gone are the days, in my town when you would see droves of youth biking from home to home visiting friends.
Who rides bikes around my area now? Tbh mostly wealthy suburbanites with free time and money. I live in the “sticks” so guess that’s by default, but it’s rare to see a bicycle in our big cities right now too. I travel to one of the biggest cities in the country quite often and it’s all E-scooters at the moment, a bike is seldom seen.
Manual transmissions? It’s rare to see those as well. I work in the automotive field and from what I can see, automatics have taken over. The only sticks I’ve seen in years have been on older work/farm vehicles/equipment and that’s only because the owners can’t afford to upgrade. When I have seen them upgrade, it’s almost always automatic when applicable.
What I’m saying is, sure, maybe these things aren’t officially dead yet but they’re not really thriving either.
Just like these things, give it 20 years and AI will be the default. Those who make “real” art will be a small minority, like a person still receiving calls through a landline or something.
Or maybe it won’t? But this is how it’s usually gone in my lifetime. I’ve yet to see much stop the winds of change, but people do still read paperbacks even though kindles exist so who knows. Just seeing a big push for AI rn and the only way it won’t take over is… well I can’t imagine what would stop it. People are paying to use it, and I’ve yet to see something that’s profitable not be expanded upon.
Physical game copies are only wanted by collectors
I buy physical and I am not a game collector. I like to be able to lend my games to friends. Also, used game sales are impossible with digital. Publishers will never allow used digital sales because it eats away their precious profits.
Bikes? Less and less.
Not sure where you live, but where I live it seems the people and government want to outlaw all cars pretty soon and force everyone onto bikes or trains. Spend any amount of time on Reddit or even here on Lemmy and the users will not shut up about how cars are evil and bikes fix every problem of society.
Manual transmissions?
I’ve been a mechanic for more than 10 years at Hyundai, Kia, and Jaguar Land Rover dealerships. Manual transmission vehicles wwre pretty common, I would say it was about 45% manual transmissions and 55% automatic across the three. I also worked next to a Jeep dealer and they had manuals all the time.
AI will take over. It will not be a bad thing. Human creativity will still exist and will always exist. People will always desire creativity from humans, even with the existence of AI tools.
No one’s saying creativity will completely die, but experience tells me that when a function isn’t completely necessary, many people forget.
When the internet came, libraries became less necessary.
When print came, cursive became unnecessary.
When kindles came, physical books lost value.
We can be optimistic about it, but it will have an impact.
Bad thing? Who knows. Major changes in life? Absolutely.
It’ll make life easier, at the cost of losing certain skills we have, that’s how it’s been happening for a while now.
Give a man a calculator, why would he do math in his head?
Teach print, why write in cursive?
Give me a library on my phone, why have a physical building?
All of these things exist, sure, but to say that all change is positive is… not good. People make mistakes, not all modern advancements are for the good of humanity, or the individual.
Use the AI as a productivity tool, not the final product. Let it write where creativity is not a value - tech doc, contracts, porn, but you use it as a starting point to get more of your ideas out faster
Writing is way more than creating outlines or checking the plot for problems. It’s more than even writing a first draft. In fact, it starts with the first round of edits, when characters awake and find their voices etc.
People who think writing with AI is just pushing buttons underestimate the complexity of the process, and using AI for things you’d usually use other writers’ feedback or betas or developmental editors for is just an evolution of tools, the same way we don’t scratch on stone tablets anymore today.
I understand that AI is a complex program and not just pressing buttons. That’s not the issue I have with it. My issue is, what happens when the technology improves significantly? It’s my understanding that LLMs keep improving themselves by continuing to train on (often unethically) acquired data. In its present form, sure, maybe we don’t have to worry. But give it 10 years or so, how much more competent will it be?
Let’s look at just the film industry for a second. We already have a huge problem with Hollywood churning out franchise films at the expense of everything else. But even these cash cows are made via the vision of someone whose name is attached to it. Somebody got paid to write Halloween 36: The Final Halloween for Real This Time. That person may or may not have gave a shit about writing a good story, or they may have just wanted a paycheck. Either way, that paycheck could be used to fund something they care about much more. Once AI reaches the point where it could spit out a passable script, what incentive does Mr. Bigshot the Hollywood producer have to involve a writer at all? And because no writer is receiving a paycheck, less risks are taken in general, because risks don’t guarantee profit
I might just be letting my anxieties get the better of me, and I really hope I am. I just can’t seem to move past the bad feeling I’m getting from this.
I think your right that corporate stuff (including mass market blockbuster stuff) will increasingly be done by AI. But given a lot of it is currently “written by committee” it’s not really that different. The writer of Halloween 47: The Last Killening might have been an indvidual, but it probably got redrafted by another bunch of writers at different times, and studio execs made changes, etc. It’s unlikely the work of a single visionary.
But I believe that parralel is with industrial food. Living through the mid twentieth century, watching people go from cooking at home to buying frozen, freeze-dried and other processed meals. Or eating in fast food chains where all the food is packed full of additives in some factory a thousand miles away. Some of it was good (being able to get certain ingredients year round, or easy access to food from far away) but a lot was pretty depressing, and easy to imagine a time where we forget how to cook and eat real food entirely.
But that’s not what happened. Sure, some people only eat processed crap, but also people have become more and more obsessed with local, handmade stuff, or authentic or fusion recipes from around the globe. In the 80s/90s it felt inevitable that there would end up being basically 3 beers to pick from. Now there’s an endless wave of craft beers, etc, etc.
So with AI. It will take us a while to get used to. Corporations will use it to make money and make our lives worse. But it will also be a useful tool for help actual people be creative and make things for other humans. And in the end, there will always be a demand for the best, or unique, innovative stuff, and that will probably mean human created, not AI.
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Definitely not. The more I use LLMs, the more I realize how error prone and unreliable they are. They’re good for generate flavor text, I would never rely on them for anything critical. Context size and nothing verifying correctness of the output are two big ones where they’ll never replace humans. They’re a useful tool to augment productivity, they’re no where near replacing humans yet.
They definitely have a place in creative work. As an engine not a driver. For example, when writing songs I use them to help me try and rephrase things or find different words to convey what I want. I’ve also used them to give me ideas for variations to explore on game mechanics, or generate sample data with a loose set of parameters, or create some reference material for drawing. But every time I’ve used them they have pretty much never gotten it right the first time. Always there’s revisions, always there’s at least some massaging I have to do on my part to make it coherent. And why wouldn’t there be? If I could write a prompt so precise that it gave me something exact, I would need to already know precisely what I want and maybe wouldn’t even need the AI at all. For creative stuff at least, it has to make some garbage otherwise it’s not really creating enough variation to be useful.
Read some existentialism, no joke. I don’t agree 100% but I read a bunch of Beuvoir over the weekend and one thing I did like was it made me internalize the idea that coming up with a project I care about and achieving it is worthwhile in and of itself regardless of if it “could” be done by someone/something else.
Think about it this way, there are mathematicians from 500 years ago who did a lot of stuff by hand for hours that I could work out with a calculator in seconds today. But does that mean all their work was worthless? If I create a fairly shitty drawing, but I’m proud of my having created it, am I wrong to be proud simply because my friend who is a great artist could make a better one in half the time?
It’s not just about the journey, but it’s not just about the destination either–its about the journey to the destination, and placing value only in one of those things will cause you to be at a loss for the rest of your life.
Depends on why people start projects.
When projects are only started to ‘just get them done’, then AI can be seen as a tool to get them started or even do all.
When projects are started to learn something, I personally would ignore AI completely, as I want to learn something other then how to hand over projects to AI.
I am lazy, but not that lazy. I automate IT tasks myself when I have to do it more then once. I automate with Puppet for own use, script at work and Ansible when I can’t avoid it. (The market wants easy partial automation, not total control)
A creative person does creative things because they want to create. If you feel like there is no point to being creative just because someone else could “do it better/cheaper/faster,” then I would recommend looking at the reason you want to create. AI “competition” is a non-factor for a person whose reason for being creative is “because I want/like to.”
No. True AI is still a while away. What is getting traction are Large Language Models which I don’t classify as AI because the systems are not creating anything new, they are appropriating what already existed and saying it in another way.
they are appropriating what already existed and saying it in another way.
Isn’t this humanity in a nutshell? Standing on the shoulders of Giants, etc.
Not really. The LLMs use tokens instead of actual words to understand the words. There’s a layer of disassociation. That’s different to taking pre existing knowledge, understanding it, and using it to divine more knowledge.
RFC1925 6a at it again
The layer of disassociation is present w/ humans speaking different languages too though, right? My point is that once we can understand each other, we are all building on what already exists
Language is not disassociation.
Yeah. We’re all embedded in a context and in a world surrounding us. So are computer language models.
I guess it depends on your motivation for said project.
Do you enjoy the process of working on the project? Do you use it to learn new things and improve the skills required for it? Or all you care about is the end project?
If it’s the last one I can see why you could get discouraged but if it’s the other two then not really.
If I work on something specific I do it because I want to create this thing using my skills, experience and ideas. I also try to do as much of it as I can on my own, without using other’s people assets etc. For me, the work I put in is an important of the process and each step towards completion makes me a little proud and happy that I can create something.
At the same time I’m a weirdo who tends to use less efficient methods if they aren’t as fun to use when working on personal projects. I don’t really care about using AI in the first place so that might skew my view a bit.
There’s also the fact that AI isn’t omnipotent. It makes mistakes just like us and I’d rather fix my own mistakes since this way I know what I did, how I did it and where to look when things go wrong.
Sorry for the word salad. Your post gave me a reason to spew some unfiltered thoughts about an issue I never really thought about.
In the end you will gain new knowledge from doing the project.
And you can try to use AI to speed up the project and see if that works for you, and gain a better insight on what are the current AI systems shortcomings are.
Why should i bother doing something “like this” if someone else has already done it? Because you will gain the experience to go to the next level.
Its never a waste of time but an improvement of yourself.
Not even.
I’m shit on ansible because it’s really cheesy and weak. But that’s how the bills get paid some days.
Now I put the task into chatgpt and even 3.5 will give me a 70% solution I can fuck with and send back “hey will this work” and let it correct my indentation - fuck that - so it’ll probably run.
That’s like 90% of the work there, and it’s only an hour in. I’m not chuffed at ‘cheating’, as I know I could have gotten there without the paper to cheat off, but I would have wasted far too long. And Ansible will die either through its own brontosaurus layout or IBM will snshittify it to the point people need to churn away anyway. Then maybe it’ll be to something that brings me joy and I’ll want to do more and not less.
Everyone’s comments here are right but I do feel you OP, I’ve been wanting to learn Godot and react recently but seeing people just pull code straight from ChatGPT and it’s way better then I can code right now, does feel a bit like “should I really try this path”.
Tbf I do think you can work hand in hand with ChatGPT where it just makes you faster at development, but I still do feel a little sting. And with so much stuff I want to do, I’ve re-prioritised other things instead.
What kind of project were you thinking about?
I only see AI do narrow tasks in the near future. Draw a picture, write a story with very forseeable plot twists, draft computer code… Certainly things that are very useful, especially if AI is used to assist a human. But I don’t see it cough up something really substantial and of value (on its own). Especially the complexity in a creative project. It can draw a nice astronaut on a horse. But not come up with a clever new approach to a subject, know the history and transfer something meaningful into the art piece. Same with the complexity and different roles in computer game development. I think thats too difficult for quite some time to come. But it’ll make you faster at generating assets and write all the boilerplate code.
But if you just do simple things or sell drawings of people in anime style, you probably don’t need to bother any more. Same with a few jobs.
So far AI is pathetic on ideas for things to do, requirements to fulfill, imagination. It’s really not a factor. Your great idea for your needs is still your great idea.
I see AI mainly as a tool to help implement, like documentation, google, stackoverflow. AI is already good enough to help generate templates or boilerplate, so now is the time to get comfortable with it as a productivity tool. Use your great idea to get yourself up to speed on the new tool
Current AI’s ability to augment coding is no joke. I had ChatGPT (not even the latest one) write me a prosody plugin in Lua for some Jitsi integrations I was working on. It got it almost right, but I had to go in and compare its work with other prosody plugins to see where it went wrong. But see, at that point the only thing I knew about prosody was how to install plugins for it. Now I have a good understanding of how it works and also how it works with Jitsi based mostly on ChatGPT’s code and explanations. This all happened over the course of maybe two hours whereas if I just did it by myself I’d probably be banging my head all day cause prosody’s docs are passable but its documentation with regards to Jitsi’s usage of it is non existent.
