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0 pointsmargalabargala8mo ago0 comments

I still don't think that's true. It's just the medium that changes here.

A better analogy than the printing press, would be synthesizers. Did their existence kill classical music? Does modern electronic music have less creativity put into it than pre-synth music? Or did it simply open up a new world for more people to express their creativity in new and different ways?

"Code" isn't the form our thinking must take. To say that we all will stunt our thinking by using natural language to write code, is to say we already stunted our thinking by using code and compilers to write assembly.

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miltonlost8mo ago

AI for writing is not like a synthesizer. It's a player piano, and people act as if they're musicians now.

margalabargalaOP8mo ago

I totally disagree.

Importing an external library into your code is like using a player piano.

Heck, writing in a language you didn't personally invent is like using a player piano.

Using AI doesn't make someone "not a programmer" in any new way that hasn't already been goalpost-moved around before.

caconym_8mo ago

> Heck, writing in a language you didn't personally invent is like using a player piano.

Do you actually believe that any arbitrary act of writing is necessarily equivalent in creative terms to flipping a switch on a machine you didn't build and listening to it play music you didn't write? Because that's frankly insane.

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biophysboy8mo ago

That's why I made a caveat that AI is only bad if it limits your creative development. Eno took synthesizers to places music never went. I'd love for people to do the same with LLMs. I do think they have more danger than synthesizers had for music, specifically because of their flexibility and competence.

leptons8mo ago

A synthesizer is just as useless as a violin without someone to play it.

You could hook both of those things up to servos and make a machine do it, but it's the notes being played that are where creativity comes in.

I've liked some AI generated music, and it even fooled me for a little while but only up to a point, because after a few minutes it just feels very "canned". I doubt that will change, because most good music is based on human emotion and experience, something an "AI" is not likely to understand in our lifetimes.

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