[andybak]

AI seems to elicit a different response from people than any other debate I can remember. It's different to blockchain (which had a similar level of "will you all just shut the fuck up about it?")

It's different to culture war stuff (which was very toxic and hard to have sensible discussions about - but in a different way).

It's the only topic in my lifetime where I have to remember not to even mention it to several close friends. And these are geeky people I have a lot of shared interests in common with.

I'm over 50 and I remember a lot of controversial topics - but this one is weird in a different way.

[vouaobrasil]

It is because it is a direct attack against human creativity. It separates people into two very disparate classes: those who want to use and develop it to become more efficient and rich, and those who hate it with a passion because for them, it takes away the beauty of humanity at the forefront of creativity.

Unlike blockchain, the philosophy and morality of these two classes, one represented by efficiency and one represented by human passion, are diametrically opposed in every respect.

[andybak]

OK - so I deeply value human creativity and I disagree with your first statement. At least I think we don't currently know whether it will work out this way.

My hunch is that human creativity is incredibly resilient and will route around damage. (But employability in creative professions? That's a slightly different topic - an orthogonal one strictly speaking)

[vouaobrasil]

I think we already do, at least for many people. AI-generated stuff reduces the value that humans put on human creation because human-only creation is harder to find. AI takes the joy of discovery out of many processes and activities. It's of course harder to get jobs in creative fields now such as translation and graphic design. It's a devaluing of creativity and it's discouraging to quite a few creatives. The very fact that many artists already feel depressed about AI is already itself a huge negative impact on creativity.

I can't tell you how many people have told me how depressed they are about AI and how they have less impetus to create things. Although one can certainly do it still for joy, it's harder for many in an environment that is so ruthless.

[PaulHoule]

On top of "hard to find" I think it also displaces the market for real art, there are lots of blogs (or splogs?) like this one that are full of AI slop art, like this one

https://zxonline.net/from-bytes-to-billions-how-the-zx-spect...

maybe the whole article is AI generated, but the second image from the top is just awful. If people get the idea that crap like that is acceptable, how can anybody sell real work?

This blog post is legit

https://frankonfraud.com/sms-blasters-the-fraud-machine-anyo...

so far as I can tell and the AI generated image on it is actually pretty funny and it really problematizes the idea that you could sell art to that kind of market.

[gsf_emergency_2]

How about "schglop?"

Fair bit of slop indeed with half-buried side (rather a main?) of unsolicited schlep request

That'd make frankonfraud a golps

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44641575

https://archive.today/latest/frankonfraud.com/sms-blasters-t...

My 2s helping frank go full .org :)

[000ooo000]

Good luck finding much of that creativity you value so much when those creative types are preoccupied with meeting their basic needs.

[PaulHoule]

I find the "vibe coding" idea offensive because I've often been on projects where somebody junior thought he did 80% of the work and then I have to do the other 80% of the work and it's been a very expensive and extensive project of figuring out all the little things and sometimes all of the big things they did wrong.

I really like working with the AI Assistant in IntelliJ IDEA in that it's like pair programming with a junior who is really smart in some ways but weak in other ways. I get back an answer within seconds and can make up my mind whether it is right or wrong or somewhere in between.

Things like Windsurf and Junie on the other hand seem to be mostly a waste of time as they go off and do stuff for 5-20 minutes and when they get back it is usually pretty screwed up an a lot of effort to understand what's wrong with it and fix it... It's very much that "do the last 20% that is 80% of the work" experience.

There is a lot of discourse around creativity and LLMs that I find really annoying on lots of levels.

There are the people who don't have any idea of what creativity is which leads to ideas like: "LLMs (by definition) can't be creative" (comes across way too much like Robert Penrose saying he can do math because he's a thetan) or the many people who don't get that "genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration." There are also the people who are afraid of getting "ripped off" who don't get it that if they got a fair settlement for what was stolen from then it would probably be about $50, not a living wage. [1] They also don't seem to get it that Google's web crawler has been ripping people off since 2001, and just now they're worried. Maybe I have 50% sympathy for the ideas that visual art is devalued by LLMs since I feel that my work is devalued when people are seduced into thinking that the job is 80% done, not 20% done by the LLM.

[1] arrived by dividing some quantity of money that is input or output from the AI machine by the number of content pieces that are put in to it

[vouaobrasil]

> There are the people who don't have any idea of what creativity is which leads to ideas like: "LLMs (by definition) can't be creative

It's not that LLMs can't be creative. It's that we shouldn't allow them to because creativity is more than just about output. It's about human expression. End of story.

[gsf_emergency_2]

We can allow LLMs if .. insurers pay out to institutional bag holders who employ folks like PaulHoule

(With premium deposited by OpenAI to the tune of billiards. I'll happily take their internal slacklogs (schlogs?) as payment, dunno bout u)

Beneficial, revolutionary, viral. Choose 2.

[AudiomaticApp]

I have been an artist since I was a child and I disagree with you. Some of my favorite works of human creativity have made use of AI, or been inspired by the field.

[vouaobrasil]

Yes, there will always be exceptions, especially at the beginning. But economically, human-only art will suffer in the long term as AI becomes more sophisticated and fewer people have the opportunity to make a living from art.

But one or two exceptions, especially on HN (where people are highly addicted to technology), does not make a case for AI.

[jplusequalt]

There's also the topic of labor that ties in here. Creators (and I'd argue most computer related jobs) are now having to compete against technology for wages.

[vouaobrasil]

Absolutely right, which will make it harder to make a living from creativity. A lot of people do, such as graphic designers, who will have to turn to other jobs to keep eating. And that is discouraging, even if they can do art in their spare time.

[happytoexplain]

Agreed - with one caveat: "Discouraging" is an understatement, to put it lightly. I think the top 25th percentile of people in software tend to underestimate how difficult it is to switch careers for the vast majority of all people, and what the consequences of that are.

[vouaobrasil]

Agreed on that. Discouraging is indeed an understatement :(

[jplusequalt]

I think for many people, the real debate taking place has nothing to do with the specific technology, and instead has everything to do with labor.

Depending on who you speak to, AI presents itself as the biggest automation risk to the largest number of workers in human history. This has spurred a new wave of conscious thought about labor among many people, particularly young workers trying to enter the workforce, and creatives who are seeing their art turned against them.

This is a big moment in the west, as for the last 50+ years, the powers that be have done everything in their power to suppress labor movements and erode class consciousness among their populations. Therefor, many people are not used to dealing with the fact that we're all expendable, that the American Dream never existed, etc., and it's a raw topic that makes certain people (understandably) frustrated to grapple with.

[andybak]

Maybe it's because it's threatening people that aren't used to being potentially powerless in this way. And those are the kind of people I tend to interact with. I didn't spend much time chatting to people working in heavy industry in the 80s or manufacturing in the 90s.

Maybe I should have done.

[mdaniel]

IMHO, if bitcoin mining had given some people $10MM and debited other people $10, but each one at random, no matter what --temperature= was provided to the mining CLI, you'd have likely seen the same discussion

> It's making me rich! It's making me poor! Well then you're holding it wrong! Well you're spending electricity on senseless compute! Well you're just living in a fiat past!

(nod)

[andybak]

One thing I think is pertinent - I don't think many people currently have been made poorer by AI. I'm not disputing many people think it's an imminent risk - but I think the number of people directly affected financially in a negative way is currently vanishingly small.

[mdaniel]

That's only true if one or both of these things is true in your experience:

1. opportunity cost isn't real

1. the ${whatever amount}/${some time} subscription cost to any one of the 15+ of the AI offerings isn't financially affecting

That latter one is of especial interest to me because quite a few of the "you're holding it wrong" arguments devolve into "well, you just don't have the Platnium X99 Plus latest awesomesauce, and if you did then it'd solve the P-NP problem for you, too"

[mirekrusin]

It made stack overflow poorer.

[crazygringo]

Completely agreed. Also literally the only topic I've ever had to avoid with friends. It's not just that we can good-naturedly agree to disagree (like we can with religion, politics, etc.), but they are allergic to even the mention of it. It is something they very actively want to not talk about, which I've never experienced before.

You're right that it's weird in a different way, and I still can't quite put my finger on why.

[happytoexplain]

To oversimplify: Because it's real.

[tines]

More like, because it's pleasurable enough that people will accept it as a substitute for the real. Delusional people are marrying their AIs, for example.

[queenkjuul]

Based on my experience with Claude Code so far, my coworkers mostly use it because they think it's fun, or cool, not because it writes great code or saves tons of time, because i can attest it isn't doing those.

I'm not saying it isn't useful, I'm just also seeing lots of crappy output that gets totally rewritten, and useless docs people keep creating for some reason, that is eating all the time they supposedly saved by relying on it in the first place.

[amelius]

This technology promises to turn us into human cows. What do you expect?