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VCFundedGenYer 2 hours ago [-]
"But, like Guitar Hero, no outside creative skill has been acquired or developed."
Spoken like someone who never actually played the games. GH developed my interest in music as a kid, and Rock Band actually taught me how to drum in real life. It also garnered my interest in picking up and learning real guitar.
Those who forget that Rock Band not only a) existed and b) did everything GH did but a thousand times better + created by real musicians (Harmonix) do the genre, industry, and this article, injustice.
This article is written by someone stretching and reaching to relate two unrelated things. I'm offended by this.
trescenzi 1 hours ago [-]
The point being made isn't that it cannot inspire someone to then go on to learn but that mastery of the game alone does not convey creative skill. Of course someone can be inspired to go out and learn the skill being modeled but use of the model doesn't teach the skill even if it might make someone really excited to go learn.
1 hours ago [-]
1 hours ago [-]
sumeno 2 hours ago [-]
Did you learn to play guitar playing guitar hero?
No, you didn't.
You're straw manning an argument that doesn't exist in the article
chaps 1 hours ago [-]
Not the argument you're looking for, but I've been playing drums for over ten years now because of Rock Band. Even used the sticks that came with it on my first e-kit. The game didn't teach me how to drum, but it taught me that I had a much deeper interest in playing drums than I'd ever imagined. That led into years and years of practice and I've actually become pretty good.
latexr 1 hours ago [-]
And that scenario is covered in the post, in the seventh paragraph. Nowhere in it is Scalzi saying Guitar Hero can’t give you an interest to pick up the Guitar, quite the opposite. The point being made is that when you do pick up the Guitar, you’re starting to learn from scratch, your years of playing Guitar Hero don’t really give you a head-start.
chaps 14 minutes ago [-]
The paragraph in-question:
Sure, it’s all gamified and fun and even addictive, but at the end of the day no outside, transferable skill accrues to the player. To do that, you have to set the controller down, pick up an actual guitar, and start another, entirely different journey. And perhaps some Guitar Hero player did or will, which is awesome. It means at some point they were not satisfied with pretending to play the guitar, following someone else’s rules and set-up. They still started, effectively, at zero. There was a whole new skill tree to be learned that had very little to do with the game, outside of the shape of the controller.
I get the point, but I think it's not great. A lot of what's said here can also be said about cover bands or learning to play other peoples' music.
mapontosevenths 2 hours ago [-]
Scalzi has developed an almost religious sort of dogmatic hatred of AI. He seems to acknowledge none of the benefits, even those that are obvious. Likely because he feels it's harmful to the way he earns his living.
He is rapidly coming to define himself through opposition, rather than promotion. Which is a dangerous and fruitless game.
Throughout human history there has never been a still useful technology that we as a species chose to stop using, and AI very much is. Maybe we'll come to regulate it, but the genie will never go completely back into the bottle and folks are going to need to get used to the new world.
glimshe 56 minutes ago [-]
I use AI to code review my personal projects. There's no downside - I ignore what I don't like and take the suggestions that make sense. Most of the suggestions are good and it found a ton of little bugs over time.
I think that someone who's radically opposed to any use of AI is simply a poor developer.
ryandvm 15 minutes ago [-]
There's no downside for you.
You said it yourself - you have the knowledge and ability to know what to ignore and keep what makes sense. But that's because you spent years actually writing and understanding code.
But the magic wand of AI is absolutely wreaking havoc with juniors engineers' ability to understand complex code bases and software engineering fundamentals. How will the engineers of tomorrow know what to keep and what to reject if all they've ever known is "you are a principal engineer. read this Jira ticket and build a solution. ultrathink".
latexr 1 hours ago [-]
> Likely because he feels it's harmful to the way he earns his living.
Absurd. Scalzi fans are not going to stop reading his works because LLMs exist. If anything, established authors are the ones with the least to fear.
This talking point that when people dislike something it’s because it affects their personal finances is getting really tired. Not everyone is a greedy selfish prick who only thinks of themselves, people are allowed to dislike things for other reasons. That’s normal, it’s not an anomaly.
> but the genie will never go completely back into the bottle and folks are going to need to get used to the new world.
And apparently we’ll never share another original idea, either. “Genie is out of the bottle”, “you’re going to get left behind”. Apparently the people who called LLMs parrots got it wrong, they instead turn people into them, mindlessly repeating whatever the labs want them to.
mapontosevenths 3 minutes ago [-]
> Apparently the people who called LLMs parrots got it wrong, they instead turn people into them, mindlessly repeating whatever the labs want them to.
Being rude about it doesn't make you right about it.
It sounds like people are repeating themselves because they have to keep repeating the obvious in every one of these threads:
The tools are useful, people are going to use them. Cope.
scotty79 28 minutes ago [-]
Nobody even started to seriously write books using AI. But at one point there will be AI books on "most read" lists. And a more than one of those will have readership higher than anything by John Scalzi. And he's not bad, I liked what I read of his.
Fricken 24 minutes ago [-]
Climate Change has accelerated rapidly. We're expecting 3 degrees of warming by 2050 now, 5 degrees by 2100. Betting on the singularity to save us is culty wankery.
Art9681 34 minutes ago [-]
These folks are completely unaware that they have witnessed creative and high quality generative AI content without realizing what it was. Because that's the thing. Good generative AI is invisible per se. And it is a lot more ubiquitous than people think by now.
greggoB 28 minutes ago [-]
> creative and high quality generative AI content
So high quality I can certainly acknowledge because indeed the output from these models can be indistinguishable from human generated content. However, I am curious to know what you mean by creative here, in two senses:
1) Do you have an example of AI generated content being particularly novel or different, and not just a (admittedly highly consistent) rehash of what it was trained on?
2) What do you think it means to describe the output of a model that doesn't possess any agency as "creative"?
suddenlybananas 31 minutes ago [-]
Like what? Can you give me an example?
bonoboTP 27 minutes ago [-]
Bad analogy. In GH you have to press the buttons at the exact time that is prescribed and you're scored on that. With AI there is no such prescribed goal. The world is your oyster. You can use it in boring ways, but you can use it in immensely creative ways too. You can chain together AI agents, image generators, video generators, 3D asset generators, computer vision models, text embeddings etc. etc. and prompt all the orchestration into existence with your ideas, taste and direction. It's the opposite of a constrained game.
Boring people use it in boring ways, interesting people use it in interesting ways.
The rest is old man yells at cloud, like how people criticized "laptop music" or photography.
skeledrew 2 hours ago [-]
And to keep fluffing the control narrative, 0 mention of open weight models were made.
dizlexic 2 hours ago [-]
As a code monkey generative ai helps grow my skills daily, and all I have to do is read the code.
chromanoid 2 hours ago [-]
I don't know enough about DJing, but maybe that is also an analogy to GenAI usage that can work.
hyperadvanced 22 minutes ago [-]
DJing is an interesting art. It’s not creative per se, but can be done creatively. Modern DJ software+hardware in particular allows for a ton of on-the-fly remixing, clever use of fx and stems, and even some custom on-the-fly production setups. But the average DJ (and even electronic music producer) is much closer to Guitar Hero than they are to writing their own songs for guitar.
qarl2 47 minutes ago [-]
Calculators have never improved my ability to do long division.
And yet, I am still quite good at mathematics.
unfocso 2 hours ago [-]
This is a bad analogy by somebody who never played the game. Guitar hero is not harder or easier than guitar, it's just different.
I don't know how to play guitar, yet I can play guitar hero. My friend who plays guitar cannot play guitar hero. I'm not interested in playing guitar and I don't find GH to be a "shortcut" to learn it. In fact, I play the piano and I'm okay like that.
createful 1 hours ago [-]
Guitar Hero is a "rhythm game", perhaps calling it a "guitar simulator" is a bit incorrect. A rhythm game is one where you, for example, push buttons in tune with a song, exactly what Guitar hero is.
So you are good at different things. Maybe not at a real guitar but perhaps at reaction times.
I say this as someone who had one of those plug-in guitars but never knew how to use it, hah.
sumeno 2 hours ago [-]
He's not saying playing Guitar Hero is worthless. He's saying it won't teach you guitar, which is 100% true
skeledrew 2 hours ago [-]
So, given this is all obvious, the article is basically saying nothing.
sumeno 1 hours ago [-]
I don't know how to tell you this, but the article isn't really about Guitar Hero
peakdunningkrue 1 hours ago [-]
> I don’t know how to play guitar.
> Guitar hero is not harder or easier than guitar.
Ladies and gents, peak dunning krueger moment.
spaceywilly 1 hours ago [-]
“ Being a Guitar Hero player did not — and does not! — equal being a guitar player.”
Has anyone ever claimed otherwise?
skarz 52 minutes ago [-]
All of my childhood friends who bragged about being good at GH/RB only ever bragged about being good at the _games_. Never ran in to someone trying to pass it off as being able to play the guitar.
createful 2 hours ago [-]
Except Guitar Hero is a game, and is marketed as such. Guitar Hero is like Bitcoin mining, you are doing useless computations to make some number go up, in the case of Bitcoin, your money, and Guitar Hero, your score.
But AI actually does something unlike Guitar Hero. There is a real output that can be used tomorrow even if AI "goes away".
You say AI helps you learn no skills, essentially. I don't know about you, but AI helped me understand Linux better in a way I didn't feel confident I would be able to before AI. I have created code with AI that I can maintain, and understand without it.
AI can go in conjunction with learning manually and can be helpful. Just because many examples exist of AI being unhelpful does not mean the whole technology is unhelpful.
Drakexor 2 hours ago [-]
This seems disingenuous. I can ask a generative AI "explain this ternary operator to me" or "walk me through why this causes a race condition"
I cannot ask the video game why my real guitar is out of tune, or diagnose why I'm holding the fret wrong.
borzi 2 hours ago [-]
That implies that you did more than prompt the AI and actually learned whatever activity it is you are asking the AI about, because otherwise you wouldn't know to ask those questions. A person making music solely with AI won't ask about tuning their guitar because they don't have one and don't intend to use one.
sigseg1v 6 minutes ago [-]
One could also make hotdogs and eat them without developing any skill as a chef, but it's unlikely there would be thousands of blog posts complaining about the downsides of microwaved hotdogs every week.
latexr 1 hours ago [-]
None of that has anything to do with creativity, which is what the post is about.
neomantra 32 minutes ago [-]
I'm making a LED Camel Totem for Burning Man. I had the idea to make a Koons-style balloon animal.
I explored this idea with ChatGPT, asking it to make some reference images. I also asked for some prompt generation. I have weak sketching abilities (it's on my list to improve), so this is how I "storyboard".
To be cheeky, I asked Claude to make balloon simulator from which I could eventually drop into Fusion360 to muck with and 3D print. CamelKoons was born! [1]
I wanted a Golang backend and web frontend. Fable pretty much one-shotted the step-one scaffolding: Golang physical simulation of a single balloon, streaming geometry to a Web application. Vibed through various issues and then step two was multiple balloons with twists (which were just choke points).
In the world of disposable, hyper-focused software, this tool remained static to Dromedary Camel topologies. A generalized topology feature is left as an exercise for the reader's LLM.
I like empowering my agents to loop [2]. So, I used Claude-in-Chrome to do some loops where Claude positioned the Camel and could screenshot it. I also gave it an HTTP endpoint to position the camera for itself and me.
Eventually, I wanted to push views and comments from the Web page, so I added a comment box. Claude Code used its new-to-me "monitoring" feature to watch for that action and react to it in the session. Claude made itself a "look-at-camel" skill, so cute! [3]
While the balloons were looking interesting, I noted it wasn't very Koons-like and Claude reminded me that Koons was art and we were doing physical simulation. So then we started distorting the physical model. Of course we also added model export, etc.
After tokenmaxxing, I ended up with something that was a cross between a poop emoji and an alien dildo.
I'm now learning the Forms feature in Fusion360 and following a great balloon-dog tutorial on YouTube. I think this guitar approach will win out over my Guitar Hero approach.
I was trying to figure out what time of day, by UTC, would most people be asleep. Searching I could only pre-slopped answers in hundreds of random blogs.
So I decided to get my own custom slop. Opened Gemini and it said "video generation is free for a few days, try it out!". I uploaded a copy of Neuromancer and asked it to generate a scene.
MF had Cage inserting a power plug in his ear.
Ah and the time zone curiosity question? It went about it for a a minute or so and said "can't help you with that one, anything else?"
I think we've seen the best these LLMs can do and the race to the bottom has started. It's all cost cutting now, and I am very curious to see what will be of OpenAI and Anthropic. Probably will end up absorbed by MS, Amazon and Nvidia.
Spoken like someone who never actually played the games. GH developed my interest in music as a kid, and Rock Band actually taught me how to drum in real life. It also garnered my interest in picking up and learning real guitar.
Those who forget that Rock Band not only a) existed and b) did everything GH did but a thousand times better + created by real musicians (Harmonix) do the genre, industry, and this article, injustice.
This article is written by someone stretching and reaching to relate two unrelated things. I'm offended by this.
No, you didn't.
You're straw manning an argument that doesn't exist in the article
He is rapidly coming to define himself through opposition, rather than promotion. Which is a dangerous and fruitless game.
Throughout human history there has never been a still useful technology that we as a species chose to stop using, and AI very much is. Maybe we'll come to regulate it, but the genie will never go completely back into the bottle and folks are going to need to get used to the new world.
I think that someone who's radically opposed to any use of AI is simply a poor developer.
You said it yourself - you have the knowledge and ability to know what to ignore and keep what makes sense. But that's because you spent years actually writing and understanding code.
But the magic wand of AI is absolutely wreaking havoc with juniors engineers' ability to understand complex code bases and software engineering fundamentals. How will the engineers of tomorrow know what to keep and what to reject if all they've ever known is "you are a principal engineer. read this Jira ticket and build a solution. ultrathink".
Absurd. Scalzi fans are not going to stop reading his works because LLMs exist. If anything, established authors are the ones with the least to fear.
This talking point that when people dislike something it’s because it affects their personal finances is getting really tired. Not everyone is a greedy selfish prick who only thinks of themselves, people are allowed to dislike things for other reasons. That’s normal, it’s not an anomaly.
> but the genie will never go completely back into the bottle and folks are going to need to get used to the new world.
And apparently we’ll never share another original idea, either. “Genie is out of the bottle”, “you’re going to get left behind”. Apparently the people who called LLMs parrots got it wrong, they instead turn people into them, mindlessly repeating whatever the labs want them to.
Being rude about it doesn't make you right about it.
It sounds like people are repeating themselves because they have to keep repeating the obvious in every one of these threads:
The tools are useful, people are going to use them. Cope.
So high quality I can certainly acknowledge because indeed the output from these models can be indistinguishable from human generated content. However, I am curious to know what you mean by creative here, in two senses:
1) Do you have an example of AI generated content being particularly novel or different, and not just a (admittedly highly consistent) rehash of what it was trained on? 2) What do you think it means to describe the output of a model that doesn't possess any agency as "creative"?
Boring people use it in boring ways, interesting people use it in interesting ways.
The rest is old man yells at cloud, like how people criticized "laptop music" or photography.
And yet, I am still quite good at mathematics.
I don't know how to play guitar, yet I can play guitar hero. My friend who plays guitar cannot play guitar hero. I'm not interested in playing guitar and I don't find GH to be a "shortcut" to learn it. In fact, I play the piano and I'm okay like that.
So you are good at different things. Maybe not at a real guitar but perhaps at reaction times.
I say this as someone who had one of those plug-in guitars but never knew how to use it, hah.
> Guitar hero is not harder or easier than guitar.
Ladies and gents, peak dunning krueger moment.
Has anyone ever claimed otherwise?
But AI actually does something unlike Guitar Hero. There is a real output that can be used tomorrow even if AI "goes away".
You say AI helps you learn no skills, essentially. I don't know about you, but AI helped me understand Linux better in a way I didn't feel confident I would be able to before AI. I have created code with AI that I can maintain, and understand without it.
AI can go in conjunction with learning manually and can be helpful. Just because many examples exist of AI being unhelpful does not mean the whole technology is unhelpful.
I cannot ask the video game why my real guitar is out of tune, or diagnose why I'm holding the fret wrong.
I explored this idea with ChatGPT, asking it to make some reference images. I also asked for some prompt generation. I have weak sketching abilities (it's on my list to improve), so this is how I "storyboard".
To be cheeky, I asked Claude to make balloon simulator from which I could eventually drop into Fusion360 to muck with and 3D print. CamelKoons was born! [1]
I wanted a Golang backend and web frontend. Fable pretty much one-shotted the step-one scaffolding: Golang physical simulation of a single balloon, streaming geometry to a Web application. Vibed through various issues and then step two was multiple balloons with twists (which were just choke points).
In the world of disposable, hyper-focused software, this tool remained static to Dromedary Camel topologies. A generalized topology feature is left as an exercise for the reader's LLM.
I like empowering my agents to loop [2]. So, I used Claude-in-Chrome to do some loops where Claude positioned the Camel and could screenshot it. I also gave it an HTTP endpoint to position the camera for itself and me.
Eventually, I wanted to push views and comments from the Web page, so I added a comment box. Claude Code used its new-to-me "monitoring" feature to watch for that action and react to it in the session. Claude made itself a "look-at-camel" skill, so cute! [3]
While the balloons were looking interesting, I noted it wasn't very Koons-like and Claude reminded me that Koons was art and we were doing physical simulation. So then we started distorting the physical model. Of course we also added model export, etc.
After tokenmaxxing, I ended up with something that was a cross between a poop emoji and an alien dildo.
I'm now learning the Forms feature in Fusion360 and following a great balloon-dog tutorial on YouTube. I think this guitar approach will win out over my Guitar Hero approach.
[1] https://github.com/cameltopia/CamelKoons
[2] https://github.com/ConAcademy/WeaselToonCadova
[3] https://github.com/Cameltopia/CamelKoons/blob/main/.claude/s...
So I decided to get my own custom slop. Opened Gemini and it said "video generation is free for a few days, try it out!". I uploaded a copy of Neuromancer and asked it to generate a scene.
MF had Cage inserting a power plug in his ear.
Ah and the time zone curiosity question? It went about it for a a minute or so and said "can't help you with that one, anything else?"
I think we've seen the best these LLMs can do and the race to the bottom has started. It's all cost cutting now, and I am very curious to see what will be of OpenAI and Anthropic. Probably will end up absorbed by MS, Amazon and Nvidia.
edit: https://share.gemini.google/hvH2A3Yva5Uj
First try.
I doubt their attempt failed because they wrote the question poorly. It was probably just the service being flaky.
Don't worry, there's still room for paintings in human culture, even though photos outnumber them billion to one.