Kneading dough sucks if you do it a lot. It's monotonous and tiring. That's why frequent bakers use mixers with bread hooks.
Instruments are designed to be as friction-free as possible, given physical constraints. Friction makes expression more difficult. A violin is the most expressive because it has the least "friction" of valves and hammers and buttons getting in the way.
Sketching similarly is low-friction. That's why it's so much easier than oil painting. You can express yourself hundreds of times more easily, which is why oil painters start with tons of preparatory sketches.
I fundamentally disagree with the premise that friction is desirable. It's not.
I agree that too much friction is terrible.
But what I was saying, and the article seems to be implying, is that too little friction is terrible too.
Using Stable Diffusion is lower friction than sketching or painting. But the latter two are better.
The difference is that there is friction that leads to a good outcome, and friction that does not. Mixers with bread hooks are eliminating bad friction, whereas Stable Diffusion is removing good friction.
And in fact, there's actually more friction when using Stable Diffusion if you have an end in mind; trying to get it to output what you want is high in bad friction.
I just don't buy it.
> Using Stable Diffusion is lower friction than sketching or painting. But the latter two are better.
No, the latter two aren't "better". All three are totally different tools for achieving different purposes. I'm going to use Stable Diffusion to raise engagement on my blog with a hero image and a relevant thumbnail, I'm going to sketch to explore visual ideas and improve my skill of seeing, and I'm going to oil paint to carefully craft something designed to hopefully hang on someone's wall for a long time. (Well, not me because I don't know how to oil paint, but you get the idea.) I'm certainly not going to oil-paint something to illustrate my blog. Oil painting isn't "better".
And when I use ChatGPT to ask questions about math or physics or history or culture, the last thing I want to do is to make the process more difficult. I already spend enough time typing a prompt the AI can clearly understand. There's no way in which it would be made better with "good friction".
I mean, I literally don't know what you mean by "good friction". I don't think I've ever encountered it in my life. Life in general is challenging enough without having to add more challenge for no reason.
A violin is most expressive because it is the one that uses friction (rubbing a bow on strings).
Also, moving the bow just right is harder than slamming keys.
