J. R. DePriest :verified_trans: :donor: :Moopsy: :EA DATA. SF:Ranting about genAI.
When you are not skilled in a certain thing, you likely have no idea what it takes to be "good" at it.
As a layman, you scarcely even know what questions to ask. And if your interest is only passing or surface level, you won't bother with the introspection necessary to see the depth. The surface is all it will be to you.
When you watch a master, they make it look easy, therefore it must be easy for everyone.
They think, "anybody could do that".
They believe in the American Dream, that talent and perseverance are rewarded with wealth. If you are not well-known, you are not worth it.
I think this is fueling the overreliance on genAI.
Who cares if it was fed the life's work of every writer and artist who ever lived with no recognition or compensation? They should have better protected and monetized their work. The genAI is doing what people do, what any person could do. It's combining and synthesizing, it's creating derivative works. Just like a person.
Do they think any person could sit down and study millions of written words and create something new that shares the same voice, any voice you choose? Do they think they could do it "if they had time".
How much time?
Years? Decades?
If they wanted to, right?
But they just want the output and the freedom to reject it or accept it without consequence, without having "wasted" their own time.
"How did you learn to write like that?" I might be asked.
"I've been writing creatively since I could write," I'd say. "Poems, stories, letters, essays, journals, whatever I could find.
"I never stopped reading books as I grew up.
"I kept writing when nobody else cared, nobody else read what I wrote.
"Even when it wasn't very good, I kept writing.
"Especially when it wasn't very good.
"It all matters. It all teaches me something."
"Oh, I thought you went to school for it."
And I am dismissed as less than. My work, meaningless.
"I could have done that," they think. "I could have done that but I had better things to do with my time and energy."
And that dismissive thought gives them permission to use genAI. Living their lives for something "better" than sitting around actually writing all the time gives them permission because they are "better" than me. They didn't waste time like I did. I should have just been a good writer from the start. It should have been obvious I was a master from the beginning.
I wasted so much time becoming mediocre instead of finding my true talents.
They won't make that mistake.
They will craft elegant prompts for the genAI and it will create something beautiful for them. It will prove that my choices were wrong and theirs were right.
That the genAI would have nothing to regurgitate without millions of people like me, writing and writing and writing, does not matter.
We were all fools and should have known a machine would one day take our works and improve upon them.
It is a lie they tell themselves even as the AI models are already dying from eating their own shit. They are collapsing under the weight of their own spurious garbage because they cannot create. It is illusion, artifice.
A comforting fiction.
To them, it removes the artist from the equation, democratizing creation.
No longer reserved for those with skill.
It is unsustainable. It is already failing.
But it is backed by wealth, by the people who truly despise relying on humans for talent, because humans have wants, needs, desires. Opinions. A human can say "no" or ask for more money or ask for time off to spend with family. A human needs to sleep.
They will ride this steam powered platinum train all the way down, until it derails and bursts into toxic flames, and then blame us for being fooled.
GenAI, the way it is being sold to us today, is a dead end. They know. They know it's devastating to the environment. They know it devalues actual human creativity. They know it churns out lies and fabrications. They know it's being used for massive disinformation campaigns, to build phishing platforms, social networking bots, to inflate news stories, to flood publishers with worthless submissions.
But, today, it makes money.
Today, it makes a prompt engineer feel like an artist.
The people who create should be more important than their creations. The value is in the person who knows how to hold a pen and write or draw, in the artist who paints, the sculptor.
Without creators, we stop growing. We stop seeing ourselves in new ways.
We stagnate and become insular. We look backwards.
We lose our own humanity.
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