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I had this moment when we designed shirts for the marathon we ran as a group. Instead of Brainstorming something funny, we just prompted ChatGPT and chose one o

by annnoo 4mo ago

I had this moment when we designed shirts for the marathon we ran as a group. Instead of Brainstorming something funny, we just prompted ChatGPT and chose one of the results. I felt lost immediately. All the creativity, the humanity, the endless hours of putting soul into something. Gone For one hour or so I had some kind of existential crisis. Just because of a funny slogan on a shirt. And sometimes I still feel empty on new projects. You can produce so much things so fast, but if it should be something original - it is hard to get it generated by AI while still feeling that it is something that you came up with

ryandrake 4mo ago
Ever since I started experimenting with AI coding, I've totally lost that feeling of accomplishment. For projects I actually developed by typing in the code, it feels like I actually did something--like here's something I built and am responsible for bringing into the world. When I finish an AI-built project, I feel...nothing. Just that empty: "Code now exists where it didn't exist before, but I didn't really do anything." Without any sense of ownership or attachment whatsoever. If someone DMCA'ed one of my GitHub projects and made me take it down, I'd be pissed. But if someone DMCA'ed an AI-coded thinggy, I'd probably delete the repo and never think about it again in my life.
- culopatin 4mo ago
  AI is like cheap void calories. Writing by hand is calories from a good home cooked meal with all the nutrients and love, AI code (unless maybe you worked on putting together an AI system and the harness is your build), feels like calories from a Sprite. Also I’ve been thinking that ai code is like cheap amazon furniture and hand crafted is well… hand crafted.
  - boringg 4mo ago
    Your analogy is apt. The challenge is that most of the world runs on cheap calories and cheap furniture and that seems to be growing more and more.
  - number6 4mo ago
    Will there be a point where hand crafted does end you somewhere like the Toaster Project [1] [1]https://www.thomasthwaites.com/the-toaster-project/ https://www.thomasthwaites.com/the-toaster-project/
    - gmueckl 4mo ago
      Wr are already there, in a sense: the amount of basic software in a box that is required to produce more software is already huge. And so is the supply chains behind it.
    - SpaceNoodled 4mo ago
      The idea of having all of those steps generated so unreliably is haunting.
- sushshshhs 4mo ago
  If your project contained original thought does it matter if the IFs and the ELSEs were generated? I sometimes wonder if people get into this to create an actual working something or they just enjoy sorting colored blocks for the heck of it. I am on the other extreme end: I don’t give a rat’s ass about the code itself. The spec, the intent, the architecture, the contracts are what I find interesting. All the “file handling” and “logging” and syntax wrangling and caring if some “variable” is on the “stack” or the “heap” I can live without very happily. It’s not that they are uninteresting in and of themselves but I find it hard to justify keeping my focus on these microscopic issues again and again and again and again.
  - TakeItToTen 4mo ago
    I have landed here myself. I have always enjoyed writing code, but I find lately that I am getting so much more satisfaction from the process of exploring and designing systems more, and code is simply the substrate. I am becoming a better architect with AI, because I am spending more mental energy in that lane, getting less embroiled in the nitty-gritty of the code.
    - ryandrake 4mo ago
      There was a thread[1] about this the other day! People have different goals, motivations, and reasons for developing. I guess I just like sorting colored blocks. I'll agonize over the code... I really will go back to a class I wrote months ago and ask "Do I really need this member variable?" and "Does this really need to go on the heap or can it live on the stack and be automatically cleaned up?" "Can I use a pImpl C++ pattern here and reduce the number of headers that this header file includes?" 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48316056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48316056
    - dgellow 4mo ago
      I had that the first few months, but that feeling doesnt stay forever. I think a difficulty with that discussion is that some are still in the honeymoon stage, while others are at the “wtf is the point” stage of the relationship with coding harnesses. In my case that took ~1y from using tools like Claude code daily to the point where I lost interest and motivation once I understood the technology contributed negatively to my personal growth.
- kccqzy 4mo ago
  That’s why fully AI written projects are only interesting to those who care only about productivity (i.e. business use cases) rather than the developer’s enjoyment and satisfaction. For my own sanity, I never allow AI to do everything. Either I write some code and turn to AI for debugging help and code review, or I let AI write the initial draft and I debug the AI-written code.
  - shrubby 4mo ago
    Meaning, purpose, essence. Instead of void shit, empty pleasure.
  - shrubby 4mo ago
    The current state of humanity, not only AI.
  - ryandrake 4mo ago
    I feel AI is interesting if the purpose is utilitarian, but not if the purpose is artistic or expressive. I've thought to myself: If AI could create a bicycle, would I ride it? Probably, yes. If AI could create a bed frame and matching bedside cabinets, would I outfit my bedroom with them? Maybe, maybe not. If AI could paint a picture on canvas (it probably can), would I hang the output in my house? Hell no!
  - gmueckl 4mo ago
    Welcone to Management - AI Edition: everything bad about technical management except for the people problems.
  - krd8ssb 4mo ago
    I think this is completely dependent on the person building it and why they love building software. Some people got into software development because they love to code. Others got into it because they love bringing ideas to life and coding was the only means to do so. I am of the latter. I love software development because it allows me to bring my idea to life. Yes, I love to code but it's a means to get to my ultimate goal. I don't have a lot of time outside of work and family to work on my ideas. They usually just sit in my head until I forget about them. Being able to use AI to assist in feature planning while I'm on the go, break everything down into organize phases, put those phases into the structured tickets, work on architecture design, and have things come to life around my requirements and within my constraints has been a complete game changer.
- nurettin 4mo ago
  Learning some schmuck's framework, IDE, language or OS never felt rewarding to me. It was always like playing with broken toys. Hear me out. There was always some subtle quirk, a bug that irks me once every so often, something I'd never want to unleash upon masses and although these people made their work available through various channels, paid or unpaid, for some reason I felt more of a grudge than gratitude. And I tried to fix things I did. It was a breathless, thankless exercise of working through someone else's code line by line for decades while hardly being able to lift my head because of actual work I had to do to support my life. And thus a villain was born. I am so glad it is over. It is all ingested into neural network weights and high-pressure sprayed to the masses through RNG. I am finally free. I don't have to learn your stupid aws commands, your helm configs, your systemd antics, your http api. I don't have to care about your life times, your gc params. I tell the computer and it clinks and clanks and eventually gets the job done like gene rodenberry intended.
sushshshhs 4mo ago
Endless hours of putting soul into your shirt? I mean, good for you, but it sounds like your team wasn’t so stoked about that as you are. So I’m not sure you can blame AI for that one. Give it time. This is a skill (and tooling) issue. AI enables so goddamn much creativity. You literally don’t know what to do with it, but once society adapts and we all calm TF down we are free to create in whatever capacity we like. Your shirt? Go to town! Draw something yourself and let AI patch up some rough edges. Do some style transfer. Or don’t use it. That’s still an option. As you said it is hard to create with AI without losing your soul but that’s not inherent to the tech. It’s a massive skill and tooling issue. Instead of choosing between “do it fully myself” and “let someone else do it” you get a slider now. You get to pick! How awesome is that?
- dominotw 4mo ago
  [dead]
- cstever 4mo ago
  > Endless hours of putting soul into your shirt? I mean, good for you, but it sounds like your team wasn’t so stoked about that as you are. So I’m not sure you can blame AI for that one. I think you may have misread the parent comment. And currently AI has no creativity nor does it enhance a human's creativity. It simply regurgitates and at best the human user can lie to themselves that they did it. Look at the "rinse and repeat" of animated movies. Humanity has been in a cycle of regurgitation for quite some time and AI is only going to make it worse.
  - sushshshhs 4mo ago
    How did I misread? They chose to use GPT? There is a multitude of options that range from an empty piece of paper to choosing ChatGPT outputs. That is a very black and white view you got there mate. I’m not sure I agree. Creativity does not need to be in the AI nor does the human need “enhancing”. We can just be creative in new and to me interesting ways. Just like how synthesizers enabled new sounds but you still need to be a musician to get anything good. Society is still adapting. I say give it time.
  - 4mo ago
dominotw 4mo ago
> so I had some kind of existential crisis realization was that you had been generating slop all this while before ai and somehow convinced yourself that it was original and human ?
jimbokun 4mo ago
The only reason to put a funny slogan on a shirt is as a reminder of an in joke or the shared process of coming up with the slogan. It's like we no longer understand the purpose of language itself: to get thoughts out of our head and share them with other people.
jrumbut 4mo ago
We need to invent new reasons to be together. I love people, I love spending time with them. Even though I am married, a parent, and living near to several relatives I still get lonely because of a lack of some forms of interaction. At the same time, the form of interaction I'm missing is not "debating which font to use on a t shirt." I'm glad a robot can do that for me. We need some genuine human creativity (or hell, use an AI if it gives you a good answer) for ways to get people to interact in joyful ways rather than over shared drudgery. Let's go running together and let the computer make a t shirt to commemorate it.
- jimbokun 4mo ago
  > "debating which font to use on a t shirt." The AI wasn't picking the font, it was picking the words.
- jollyllama 4mo ago
  I suppose we won't need to take pictures of ourselves together then either. Just let the AI remember it for us wholesale. No, I reject that. If there are to be pictures and shirts, let them be real, or let us forego them. If it's acceptable to offload something like this to AI, maybe it wasn't really that important anyway.
- causal 4mo ago
  > We need to invent new reasons to be together. People are so accustomed to their community and purpose coming from their job that AI doing work on our behalf threatens not just our income, but our entire social identity.
socratees 4mo ago
In general, AI is as impactful as any technology can be. However, for those of us who like to enjoy the process (the act of gathering the info, structuring them and editing them), whether it be writing code, or writing in general, there's a joy in the act of building - straight up finished pieces of work handed over to you, robs you of this space to think and formulate your own views. I do agree on the "existential crisis" part of it. At work, every time I see someone sign-off of something AI generated without much edits, I feel this fear that we're on to slippery slope where there's no turning back.
- layer8 4mo ago
  As an aside, “impactful” doesn’t necessarily imply that the impact is strictly positive.
saltcured 4mo ago
I salute your introspection. In my mind, it is better than the alternative cope. My wife has an ongoing frustration with a colleague who has adopted the mindset, "I reviewed it, so I wrote it". I guess he must sleep well at night, and probably votes in the "AI gives me superpowers bloc", but it is pretty apparent he doesn't really review it much either, because it is full of flaws and absurdity.
doug_durham 4mo ago
It really depends on your goal. If your goal is to spend the evening coming up with funny things to say with your friends, then you shouldn't use AI. If your goal is to finish the t-shirts so that you can move on to the next topic in organizing a very complex event like a marathon, then perhaps you should use tools. Using AI tools isn't a problem. It's lack of care and thoughtlessness. That is the problem. That's always been the problem. AI didn't create it, nor is it making it worse.
- MostlyStable 4mo ago
  I think this is part of the issue. Most activities can be divided into two categories (obviously this is only one of many different ways to categorize): 1. Things which are done primarily to accomplish a specific goal 2. Things which are done primarily for the joy of doing them. Many tasks have aspects of both of these things. Automation, in all it's forms, is a way of maximizing the first, often at the expense of the second. When a new category of task first falls to automation, I think it takes a while for us to figure out how to pursue it solely for the second, but the two can co-exist. Backyard gardening and industrial agriculture both have their place. Right now, coding and tech is, seemingly, in the middle of that transition. It's going to take a while before people learn to separate the two kinds of goal I think.
  - abustamam 4mo ago
    I enjoy playing with Lego. I would never use automation to do that for me. But, I wouldn't look down on someone who just wants pretty finished lego sets on their shelf without having to build them, and used automation (or hired someone or whatever) to build them. I don't have patience for stuff like sewing or needle work. If I could automate that I would. But I know people who could spend hours on needle point or cross stitch or crocheting. I also don't have patience for cooking or meal prep, even before AI. I'd batch cook protein and veggies and rice and we'd eat that for several days. AI has actually helped me streamline this in this regard, and it even helped me plan a special meal once a week that isn't just "eat for sustenance." So I guess my point is. Automate the stuff you don't love. And spend more time on the stuff you do love.
  - 4mo ago
ignoramous 4mo ago
> ... we just prompted ChatGPT and chose one of the results ... Notice how the blogger simply calls it "Chat". and feeding them into Chat or Gemini or Claude.
- alkyon 4mo ago
  Poetic licence, it's poetry or poetic prose and not some random blog post about LLMs
- csh0 4mo ago
  Friends and family who are largely non-technical have referred to ChatGPT as Chat for at least a year. I admit I was struck when I first heard someone use that shorthand in conversation at a party. It was the moment I knew that for better or worse LLMs use had permeated deep into regular life.
giancarlostoro 4mo ago
I kind of have a process with Suno, where I have Claude or a different model generate lyrics for me, then I generate a song, and tweak the lyrics when they sound off, eventually I have a song that's more "me" than "Claude" with lyrics that make sense, but sometimes Claude has some petty sleek lyrics. I mostly do this for fun, but I enjoy doing it a lot. On that same spirit, Suno is why I bought a midi keyboard last December, and I'm experimenting with actual DAWs as well. I always loved music, and used to make beats with FL Studio (which was shunned by people much like AI for ages) and even within the Suno community I see people shunning others if they have AI writing lyrics for them, its really weird to me. I do feel weird if I try to make Suno make songs I personally cannot 100% relate to, or experiences I've never been close to living through, like I love gangsta rap, I would never feel comfortable making and releasing gangsta rap since it doesn't define who I was.
- causal 4mo ago
  I think you're hinting at an interesting distinction in how AI interaction can play out. Sometimes it makes you feel like you have been cut out and are now an outsider on your own project, other times it introduces you to something and helps you get started in a world you could not access on your own.
  - beering 4mo ago
    AI makes the good students better and the bad students worse.
    - giancarlostoro 4mo ago
      This is really the best way to put it. On the other hand: In terms of building software using agents I wouldn't call developers students, specifically when it comes to letting AI write the code, but its a similar concept: Good developers know how to architect and guide the coding agent, bad ones keep asking it to do the work they don't understand, or even if they do understand it, they don't take the time to stop and architect the problem. I've had amazing output from Claude Code, but apparently a lot of devs feel it is inadequate, some people it seems want the AI to code it perfectly in one shot, I go back and tell it what to fix, to add tests, to not change existing tests, etc.
zouhair 4mo ago
You have this feeling only because you have something to compare it to, the new generation don't have that "problem", they will only know AI. The future is bleak.
andai 4mo ago
I was randomly generating ideas (and stealing them!) long before AI existed. And I remember in group projects at uni we'd use a "cool company name generator", back in the early 2010s. All the ideas it gave us were shit and we came up with one on our own.
kogasa240p 4mo ago
Had a similar experience with one of my classes where my classmates decided to use chatgpt to brainstorm a group project. Felt very disconnected with my peers and the group project itself for the rest of that class.
happytoexplain 4mo ago
Yup. A part of us is dead forever, and future generations will not feel the change. That doesn't mean AI isn't a net positive (I won't comment on whether or not it is), but this is probably the most visible, simple, undeniable downside.
midtake 4mo ago
Examples like yours and the author's don't convince me. It seems like a lot of what people are "missing" from the AI process is the social aspect which is largely a side effect in these examples. For instance, finding out that someone's relative had cancer after asking for help with a recipe. Getting an internet recipe from AI doesn't stop you from reaching out to your friend and finding out if they are going through anything, if anything it frees you up to do exactly that. Same with this t-shirt slogan example. What you miss is the group activity and the spontaneity. But you can still do this without it being a side effect of a business objective. You can still talk to your friends, and with AI making everything faster you can talk to them even more now.
_DeadFred_ 4mo ago
It's called AI induced loss of meaning. It's hitting all aspects of human creativity. There are two aspects, with one being products/end results no longer has meaning/intention behind them, and two being human creators are lost when it comes to a sense of meaning from continuing to create human works and no longer feel meaningful fulfillment from creating (it feels almost pointless). If I got an AI shirt for an event it would cheapen the entire event and make it feel more soulless.
functionmouse 4mo ago
Our society does not value originality. We value predictable cogs that, more importantly than anything else, are easily replaced. Far as I can tell the billionaires are modeling us something like a termite colony to work for them.
xtracto 4mo ago
All this happening with Mobile phones, and now AI reminds me of "Solarians" in Isaac Asimov universe: https://asimov.fandom.com/wiki/Solaria https://asimov.fandom.com/wiki/Solaria They were a race of humans that hated contact with other people. Each of of them lived in estates separated by acres of space. We keep pushing our culture/society towards that sort of thing. We keep writing into to this "social" media (including what I am just writing) which is not social at all (but more akin to shouting opinions the middle of a mall).
zingababba 4mo ago
Find satisfaction doing something else. What is this soul vs machine obsession?
kcplate 4mo ago
For me the rule now is…use AI to analyze and summarize (but check it like a hawk). However, after some initial experimentation to see capabilities, I refuse to use it to create anything new. It’s certainly on the surface impressive, but when I dive into the details of what it creates, the slop becomes so apparent I cant unsee it and it distracts me.
rcdwealth 4mo ago
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tga 4mo ago
You did not do the work, why should you feel any ownership of it? You asked someone else to do it, they did it, and you used the result. You could have just as well used Fiverr. But you're right to have an existential crisis if you're in the creative industry, we all have that capable someone else on our phones now for $20/month.
neop1x 4mo ago
It also feels like stealing. You prompted it but the result is not yours. Likely also because AI was trained on data stolen from others.

by annnoo 4mo ago

ryandrake 4mo ago

Ever since I started experimenting with AI coding, I've totally lost that feeling of accomplishment. For projects I actually developed by typing in the code, it feels like I actually did something--like here's something I built and am responsible for bringing into the world. When I finish an AI-built project, I feel...nothing. Just that empty: "Code now exists where it didn't exist before, but I didn't really do anything." Without any sense of ownership or attachment whatsoever. If someone DMCA'ed one of my GitHub projects and made me take it down, I'd be pissed. But if someone DMCA'ed an AI-coded thinggy, I'd probably delete the repo and never think about it again in my life.

culopatin 4mo ago
AI is like cheap void calories. Writing by hand is calories from a good home cooked meal with all the nutrients and love, AI code (unless maybe you worked on putting together an AI system and the harness is your build), feels like calories from a Sprite. Also I’ve been thinking that ai code is like cheap amazon furniture and hand crafted is well… hand crafted.
- boringg 4mo ago
  Your analogy is apt. The challenge is that most of the world runs on cheap calories and cheap furniture and that seems to be growing more and more.
- number6 4mo ago
  Will there be a point where hand crafted does end you somewhere like the Toaster Project [1] [1]https://www.thomasthwaites.com/the-toaster-project/ https://www.thomasthwaites.com/the-toaster-project/
  - gmueckl 4mo ago
    Wr are already there, in a sense: the amount of basic software in a box that is required to produce more software is already huge. And so is the supply chains behind it.
  - SpaceNoodled 4mo ago
    The idea of having all of those steps generated so unreliably is haunting.
sushshshhs 4mo ago
If your project contained original thought does it matter if the IFs and the ELSEs were generated? I sometimes wonder if people get into this to create an actual working something or they just enjoy sorting colored blocks for the heck of it. I am on the other extreme end: I don’t give a rat’s ass about the code itself. The spec, the intent, the architecture, the contracts are what I find interesting. All the “file handling” and “logging” and syntax wrangling and caring if some “variable” is on the “stack” or the “heap” I can live without very happily. It’s not that they are uninteresting in and of themselves but I find it hard to justify keeping my focus on these microscopic issues again and again and again and again.
- TakeItToTen 4mo ago
  I have landed here myself. I have always enjoyed writing code, but I find lately that I am getting so much more satisfaction from the process of exploring and designing systems more, and code is simply the substrate. I am becoming a better architect with AI, because I am spending more mental energy in that lane, getting less embroiled in the nitty-gritty of the code.
  - ryandrake 4mo ago
    There was a thread[1] about this the other day! People have different goals, motivations, and reasons for developing. I guess I just like sorting colored blocks. I'll agonize over the code... I really will go back to a class I wrote months ago and ask "Do I really need this member variable?" and "Does this really need to go on the heap or can it live on the stack and be automatically cleaned up?" "Can I use a pImpl C++ pattern here and reduce the number of headers that this header file includes?" 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48316056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48316056
  - dgellow 4mo ago
    I had that the first few months, but that feeling doesnt stay forever. I think a difficulty with that discussion is that some are still in the honeymoon stage, while others are at the “wtf is the point” stage of the relationship with coding harnesses. In my case that took ~1y from using tools like Claude code daily to the point where I lost interest and motivation once I understood the technology contributed negatively to my personal growth.
kccqzy 4mo ago
That’s why fully AI written projects are only interesting to those who care only about productivity (i.e. business use cases) rather than the developer’s enjoyment and satisfaction. For my own sanity, I never allow AI to do everything. Either I write some code and turn to AI for debugging help and code review, or I let AI write the initial draft and I debug the AI-written code.
- shrubby 4mo ago
  Meaning, purpose, essence. Instead of void shit, empty pleasure.
- shrubby 4mo ago
  The current state of humanity, not only AI.
- ryandrake 4mo ago
  I feel AI is interesting if the purpose is utilitarian, but not if the purpose is artistic or expressive. I've thought to myself: If AI could create a bicycle, would I ride it? Probably, yes. If AI could create a bed frame and matching bedside cabinets, would I outfit my bedroom with them? Maybe, maybe not. If AI could paint a picture on canvas (it probably can), would I hang the output in my house? Hell no!
- gmueckl 4mo ago
  Welcone to Management - AI Edition: everything bad about technical management except for the people problems.
- krd8ssb 4mo ago
  I think this is completely dependent on the person building it and why they love building software. Some people got into software development because they love to code. Others got into it because they love bringing ideas to life and coding was the only means to do so. I am of the latter. I love software development because it allows me to bring my idea to life. Yes, I love to code but it's a means to get to my ultimate goal. I don't have a lot of time outside of work and family to work on my ideas. They usually just sit in my head until I forget about them. Being able to use AI to assist in feature planning while I'm on the go, break everything down into organize phases, put those phases into the structured tickets, work on architecture design, and have things come to life around my requirements and within my constraints has been a complete game changer.
nurettin 4mo ago
Learning some schmuck's framework, IDE, language or OS never felt rewarding to me. It was always like playing with broken toys. Hear me out. There was always some subtle quirk, a bug that irks me once every so often, something I'd never want to unleash upon masses and although these people made their work available through various channels, paid or unpaid, for some reason I felt more of a grudge than gratitude. And I tried to fix things I did. It was a breathless, thankless exercise of working through someone else's code line by line for decades while hardly being able to lift my head because of actual work I had to do to support my life. And thus a villain was born. I am so glad it is over. It is all ingested into neural network weights and high-pressure sprayed to the masses through RNG. I am finally free. I don't have to learn your stupid aws commands, your helm configs, your systemd antics, your http api. I don't have to care about your life times, your gc params. I tell the computer and it clinks and clanks and eventually gets the job done like gene rodenberry intended.

sushshshhs 4mo ago

Endless hours of putting soul into your shirt? I mean, good for you, but it sounds like your team wasn’t so stoked about that as you are. So I’m not sure you can blame AI for that one. Give it time. This is a skill (and tooling) issue. AI enables so goddamn much creativity. You literally don’t know what to do with it, but once society adapts and we all calm TF down we are free to create in whatever capacity we like. Your shirt? Go to town! Draw something yourself and let AI patch up some rough edges. Do some style transfer. Or don’t use it. That’s still an option. As you said it is hard to create with AI without losing your soul but that’s not inherent to the tech. It’s a massive skill and tooling issue. Instead of choosing between “do it fully myself” and “let someone else do it” you get a slider now. You get to pick! How awesome is that?

dominotw 4mo ago
[dead]
cstever 4mo ago
> Endless hours of putting soul into your shirt? I mean, good for you, but it sounds like your team wasn’t so stoked about that as you are. So I’m not sure you can blame AI for that one. I think you may have misread the parent comment. And currently AI has no creativity nor does it enhance a human's creativity. It simply regurgitates and at best the human user can lie to themselves that they did it. Look at the "rinse and repeat" of animated movies. Humanity has been in a cycle of regurgitation for quite some time and AI is only going to make it worse.
- sushshshhs 4mo ago
  How did I misread? They chose to use GPT? There is a multitude of options that range from an empty piece of paper to choosing ChatGPT outputs. That is a very black and white view you got there mate. I’m not sure I agree. Creativity does not need to be in the AI nor does the human need “enhancing”. We can just be creative in new and to me interesting ways. Just like how synthesizers enabled new sounds but you still need to be a musician to get anything good. Society is still adapting. I say give it time.
- 4mo ago

dominotw 4mo ago

> so I had some kind of existential crisis realization was that you had been generating slop all this while before ai and somehow convinced yourself that it was original and human ?

jimbokun 4mo ago

The only reason to put a funny slogan on a shirt is as a reminder of an in joke or the shared process of coming up with the slogan. It's like we no longer understand the purpose of language itself: to get thoughts out of our head and share them with other people.

jrumbut 4mo ago

We need to invent new reasons to be together. I love people, I love spending time with them. Even though I am married, a parent, and living near to several relatives I still get lonely because of a lack of some forms of interaction. At the same time, the form of interaction I'm missing is not "debating which font to use on a t shirt." I'm glad a robot can do that for me. We need some genuine human creativity (or hell, use an AI if it gives you a good answer) for ways to get people to interact in joyful ways rather than over shared drudgery. Let's go running together and let the computer make a t shirt to commemorate it.

jimbokun 4mo ago
> "debating which font to use on a t shirt." The AI wasn't picking the font, it was picking the words.
jollyllama 4mo ago
I suppose we won't need to take pictures of ourselves together then either. Just let the AI remember it for us wholesale. No, I reject that. If there are to be pictures and shirts, let them be real, or let us forego them. If it's acceptable to offload something like this to AI, maybe it wasn't really that important anyway.
causal 4mo ago
> We need to invent new reasons to be together. People are so accustomed to their community and purpose coming from their job that AI doing work on our behalf threatens not just our income, but our entire social identity.

socratees 4mo ago

In general, AI is as impactful as any technology can be. However, for those of us who like to enjoy the process (the act of gathering the info, structuring them and editing them), whether it be writing code, or writing in general, there's a joy in the act of building - straight up finished pieces of work handed over to you, robs you of this space to think and formulate your own views. I do agree on the "existential crisis" part of it. At work, every time I see someone sign-off of something AI generated without much edits, I feel this fear that we're on to slippery slope where there's no turning back.

layer8 4mo ago
As an aside, “impactful” doesn’t necessarily imply that the impact is strictly positive.

saltcured 4mo ago

I salute your introspection. In my mind, it is better than the alternative cope. My wife has an ongoing frustration with a colleague who has adopted the mindset, "I reviewed it, so I wrote it". I guess he must sleep well at night, and probably votes in the "AI gives me superpowers bloc", but it is pretty apparent he doesn't really review it much either, because it is full of flaws and absurdity.

doug_durham 4mo ago

It really depends on your goal. If your goal is to spend the evening coming up with funny things to say with your friends, then you shouldn't use AI. If your goal is to finish the t-shirts so that you can move on to the next topic in organizing a very complex event like a marathon, then perhaps you should use tools. Using AI tools isn't a problem. It's lack of care and thoughtlessness. That is the problem. That's always been the problem. AI didn't create it, nor is it making it worse.

MostlyStable 4mo ago
I think this is part of the issue. Most activities can be divided into two categories (obviously this is only one of many different ways to categorize): 1. Things which are done primarily to accomplish a specific goal 2. Things which are done primarily for the joy of doing them. Many tasks have aspects of both of these things. Automation, in all it's forms, is a way of maximizing the first, often at the expense of the second. When a new category of task first falls to automation, I think it takes a while for us to figure out how to pursue it solely for the second, but the two can co-exist. Backyard gardening and industrial agriculture both have their place. Right now, coding and tech is, seemingly, in the middle of that transition. It's going to take a while before people learn to separate the two kinds of goal I think.
- abustamam 4mo ago
  I enjoy playing with Lego. I would never use automation to do that for me. But, I wouldn't look down on someone who just wants pretty finished lego sets on their shelf without having to build them, and used automation (or hired someone or whatever) to build them. I don't have patience for stuff like sewing or needle work. If I could automate that I would. But I know people who could spend hours on needle point or cross stitch or crocheting. I also don't have patience for cooking or meal prep, even before AI. I'd batch cook protein and veggies and rice and we'd eat that for several days. AI has actually helped me streamline this in this regard, and it even helped me plan a special meal once a week that isn't just "eat for sustenance." So I guess my point is. Automate the stuff you don't love. And spend more time on the stuff you do love.
- 4mo ago

ignoramous 4mo ago

> ... we just prompted ChatGPT and chose one of the results ... Notice how the blogger simply calls it "Chat". and feeding them into Chat or Gemini or Claude.

alkyon 4mo ago
Poetic licence, it's poetry or poetic prose and not some random blog post about LLMs
csh0 4mo ago
Friends and family who are largely non-technical have referred to ChatGPT as Chat for at least a year. I admit I was struck when I first heard someone use that shorthand in conversation at a party. It was the moment I knew that for better or worse LLMs use had permeated deep into regular life.

giancarlostoro 4mo ago

I kind of have a process with Suno, where I have Claude or a different model generate lyrics for me, then I generate a song, and tweak the lyrics when they sound off, eventually I have a song that's more "me" than "Claude" with lyrics that make sense, but sometimes Claude has some petty sleek lyrics. I mostly do this for fun, but I enjoy doing it a lot. On that same spirit, Suno is why I bought a midi keyboard last December, and I'm experimenting with actual DAWs as well. I always loved music, and used to make beats with FL Studio (which was shunned by people much like AI for ages) and even within the Suno community I see people shunning others if they have AI writing lyrics for them, its really weird to me. I do feel weird if I try to make Suno make songs I personally cannot 100% relate to, or experiences I've never been close to living through, like I love gangsta rap, I would never feel comfortable making and releasing gangsta rap since it doesn't define who I was.

causal 4mo ago
I think you're hinting at an interesting distinction in how AI interaction can play out. Sometimes it makes you feel like you have been cut out and are now an outsider on your own project, other times it introduces you to something and helps you get started in a world you could not access on your own.
- beering 4mo ago
  AI makes the good students better and the bad students worse.
  - giancarlostoro 4mo ago
    This is really the best way to put it. On the other hand: In terms of building software using agents I wouldn't call developers students, specifically when it comes to letting AI write the code, but its a similar concept: Good developers know how to architect and guide the coding agent, bad ones keep asking it to do the work they don't understand, or even if they do understand it, they don't take the time to stop and architect the problem. I've had amazing output from Claude Code, but apparently a lot of devs feel it is inadequate, some people it seems want the AI to code it perfectly in one shot, I go back and tell it what to fix, to add tests, to not change existing tests, etc.

zouhair 4mo ago

You have this feeling only because you have something to compare it to, the new generation don't have that "problem", they will only know AI. The future is bleak.

andai 4mo ago

I was randomly generating ideas (and stealing them!) long before AI existed. And I remember in group projects at uni we'd use a "cool company name generator", back in the early 2010s. All the ideas it gave us were shit and we came up with one on our own.

kogasa240p 4mo ago

Had a similar experience with one of my classes where my classmates decided to use chatgpt to brainstorm a group project. Felt very disconnected with my peers and the group project itself for the rest of that class.

happytoexplain 4mo ago

Yup. A part of us is dead forever, and future generations will not feel the change. That doesn't mean AI isn't a net positive (I won't comment on whether or not it is), but this is probably the most visible, simple, undeniable downside.

midtake 4mo ago

Examples like yours and the author's don't convince me. It seems like a lot of what people are "missing" from the AI process is the social aspect which is largely a side effect in these examples. For instance, finding out that someone's relative had cancer after asking for help with a recipe. Getting an internet recipe from AI doesn't stop you from reaching out to your friend and finding out if they are going through anything, if anything it frees you up to do exactly that. Same with this t-shirt slogan example. What you miss is the group activity and the spontaneity. But you can still do this without it being a side effect of a business objective. You can still talk to your friends, and with AI making everything faster you can talk to them even more now.

_DeadFred_ 4mo ago

It's called AI induced loss of meaning. It's hitting all aspects of human creativity. There are two aspects, with one being products/end results no longer has meaning/intention behind them, and two being human creators are lost when it comes to a sense of meaning from continuing to create human works and no longer feel meaningful fulfillment from creating (it feels almost pointless). If I got an AI shirt for an event it would cheapen the entire event and make it feel more soulless.

functionmouse 4mo ago

Our society does not value originality. We value predictable cogs that, more importantly than anything else, are easily replaced. Far as I can tell the billionaires are modeling us something like a termite colony to work for them.

xtracto 4mo ago

All this happening with Mobile phones, and now AI reminds me of "Solarians" in Isaac Asimov universe: https://asimov.fandom.com/wiki/Solaria https://asimov.fandom.com/wiki/Solaria They were a race of humans that hated contact with other people. Each of of them lived in estates separated by acres of space. We keep pushing our culture/society towards that sort of thing. We keep writing into to this "social" media (including what I am just writing) which is not social at all (but more akin to shouting opinions the middle of a mall).

zingababba 4mo ago

Find satisfaction doing something else. What is this soul vs machine obsession?

kcplate 4mo ago

For me the rule now is…use AI to analyze and summarize (but check it like a hawk). However, after some initial experimentation to see capabilities, I refuse to use it to create anything new. It’s certainly on the surface impressive, but when I dive into the details of what it creates, the slop becomes so apparent I cant unsee it and it distracts me.

rcdwealth 4mo ago

[dead]

tga 4mo ago

You did not do the work, why should you feel any ownership of it? You asked someone else to do it, they did it, and you used the result. You could have just as well used Fiverr. But you're right to have an existential crisis if you're in the creative industry, we all have that capable someone else on our phones now for $20/month.

neop1x 4mo ago

It also feels like stealing. You prompted it but the result is not yours. Likely also because AI was trained on data stolen from others.