Reply To: [unofficial weekender] Back to the mines

[blinky465 17208xp 0]

Just catching up on the thread – I’m still not sure about BabyMetal. I think I like them. But how can the singers have been in a band for around 15 years and still all look like 15-year-old school girls? I’m not sure if the singing in English is an improvement – I think I preferred it when I had no idea what they were singing about!

Can we make anything real anymore? Will we want to?

Interesting to see how we’re all being affected by AI.
In my line of work, it really does feel like the “offshoring to India” thing all over again – when coding jobs were being outsourced and it took the industry around 10 years to realise it’s not really solving anything, just reducing costs for lower quality results. That’s my take on AI in software development, anyway – if we can all survive the next ten years, those of us still standing will have a lot of work to do.

That said, I’m sure experts in every sector look at AI and think “nobody would be willing to accept that slop, surely?” – yet we’re all using it for things we’re not expert in. For example, I love those videos that turn photos of painted miniatures into “live action” videos and even though I can see the errors, they’re “good enough” that I can let the mistakes pass – I’m not an expert in animation and it looks good enough to me. But to an trained animator, they probably shudder at it and see every single flaw.

The biggest fear for me with AI is that we all learn to accept “good enough” instead of striving for excellence.
And I don’t know if that’s why I think we will still want to keep making stuff.
Maybe it’s not even the striving for excellence at all – sometimes making stuff is just fun. There’s no fun in pressing a button and having AI go beep, boop, here’s your thing you asked for.
I make music. It’s not perfect. It’s not even as good as a lot of the stuff I listen to (though admittedly, a lot better than some of the dross that streaming platforms push – and even they are getting swamped with AI slop). But I make it not for the end result, but to enjoy the process.

The same goes for painting miniatures – yes, a nicely painted mini at the end of it is a “nice thing”. But I paint because of the process of painting, not so I can be the owner of loads of armies of painted miniatures.

Hell, even the same thing goes for reading. If you’re only focused on the end result, not the process, it’s easy to ask “why do anything?” when it can all be done for us. Why read a book, when you can get a synopsis of the story in a few sentences?
Yes, I think we’ll keep making real things.
Not because we want those things to exist, but because we love to process of bringing them to life.