Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   Liam :fnord: (liamvhogan@aus.social)'s status on Monday, 16-Dec-2024 15:38:39 JST Liam :fnord:

   The thing about commercial AI is that they’re the evil mirror version of the personal computing vision of the 1980s: that ordinary people would be able to personally, reliably, securely, automate their own data, and have control over their own productive processes, and LLMs fail on every count. The promise is now that my own work is in competition with these things

   • Embed this notice
     Liam :fnord: (liamvhogan@aus.social)'s status on Monday, 16-Dec-2024 15:38:37 JST Liam :fnord:

     in reply to

     It’s perverse. We have computers powerful enough to do literally unimaginable tasks with data, tools that can and do create extraordinary things. Tools that the arts and crafts people of the late 19thC would have boggled at, the potential to push creative activity right down to anyone’s personal computer

     And yet the prevailing culture of using them is so bad that even *programmers*, who by rights ought to relish the privilege of making whatever they want, resent computing. This is a culture not a tech issue.

   • Embed this notice
     Liam :fnord: (liamvhogan@aus.social)'s status on Monday, 16-Dec-2024 15:38:38 JST Liam :fnord:

     in reply to

     The promise of LLMs that hope to replace working processes is instead to destroy any link between creative endeavour and worth. Since they’re fundamentally about stealing, who can know what was made with great effort and what was just a prompt and a process? It makes everything low-effort, high-throughput, low-margin work.

     The labour theory of value has been threadbare as a theory for a long time but it’s destroyed now.

   • Embed this notice
     Liam :fnord: (liamvhogan@aus.social)'s status on Monday, 16-Dec-2024 15:38:38 JST Liam :fnord:

     in reply to

     AI, make me a William Morris wallpaper

     [the ghost of the crafts movement reaches out from the past to punch me straight in the testicles]

     alcinnz repeated this.