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by dang 34 days ago
What if it wouldn't get done otherwise?

(Genuine question as we're all trying to figure this shit out)

5 comments

It wouldn't have. I put this off for 11 years, the joke wasn't worth the manual effort required

AI is amazing at jumping into an unfamiliar codebase, it was probably 20 mins total work

I think this is false dichotomy. It's been a while since actually empowering and encouraging humans was considered normal and attempted at scale. But not that long. How quick we forget. I think it's worth getting back to.
I think we can agree that this is not something anybody will actually use, but rather an homage to "They Live", and IMHO, letting this be done by AI is in contrast to the basic premise of the movie.
The joke wasn't worth 10+ hours manual work
That argument could be taken to any extreme at the end of the day. They Live, at its core, is a commentary on unrestrained capitalism. You could fault OP for using a Google browser. You could fault OP for using a Microsoft cloud repository. The line may be blurrier than one thinks...
Any argument can be taken to any extreme. This is why it's a popular rhetorical tactic, called "appeal to extremes".
So, why did you use it in this case?
So you consider calling something "ironic" an extreme position? On a more general note, you will find that many people are uncomfortable with the idea that AI will replace human work, especially when it relates to art, which this project in question references.
But there are many more tech things we take for granted that could be seen as ironic as well. I think I never saw this movie but being a young adult and an Internet nerd in the late '90s early -00s I remember perfectly how many people were negatively discussing it because it was dehumanizing, destroying personal relationships in flesh and a long etc. And while the future turned out to be not so good as some early adopter thought, it also never turned into something so bleak as detractors said it would.

And I think the same will apply here, with GenAI.

What's the premise of the movie? I thought it was about psyops.

(Also interdimensional shapeshifting reptilians.)

We'd all be better off for it. I don't want you to take a shit on the table and call it dinner. Even if you don't cook.
That sounds like you're denying that anything valuable can be produced with these tools. That would be an extreme position.
When people burn down their neighbor's houses to roast marshmallows, I think that it's worth taking a strong position against them.

If you listen to what effects the companies building this claim their products will have, you conclude that either they're going much farther than burning a few houses, or they're lying through their teeth. Neither of which lead me to thinking that the harm of empowering them is outweighed by having more low-effort software.

So, yes. As someone that has to live in the world those assholes are building, they can go fuck themselves. I want nothing to do with their creepy, infantilizing, bleak, dystopian future.

Maybe that's an extreme position, but I'm very glad I don't have children; I don't think I could look them in the eyes and tell them they had a bright future.

Why should anybody be interested in using software nobody was interested in making?
This is the labor theory of value

Why should anybody be interested in using software nobody was interested in...

Writing their own assembly for? manually allocating their own memory for?

By that argument no software would ever exist.