> What’s the point in generating writing or generating art if it gives next to zero feelings of accomplishment?

That's how I feel with programming, and sometimes I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I see so many of my colleagues using AI not only for their job, but even for their week-end programming projects. Don't they miss the feeling of..... programming? Am I the weird one here?

And when I ask them about it, they answer something like "oh but programming is the boring part, now I can focus on the problem solving" or something like that, even though that's precisely what they delegate to the AI.

Weird times.

> I feel like this will get missed by the general public. What’s the point in generating writing or generating art if it gives next to zero feelings of accomplishment?

It depends on what you're trying to do. I mean if the point of doing anything is a "feeling of accomplishment" why hire anyone to do anything you could do yourself. Why hire a builder to build your home? Why hire a mechanic to fix your car? Why pay a neighborhood kid to mow your lawn? Why hire a photographer for your wedding? Why hire a cook to make a meal? People hire others because even if they could do it themselves, they don't enjoy it but they need or still want the outcome for some reason or another.

Would you want to hire someone to write your blog for you? No you probably wouldn't if its a personal blog, so likewise you probably wouldn't want to use an AI for it either. But if it's a marketing blog like almost every business seems to have on their website these days full of listicles and vague "did you know" marketing? Sure, it's probably already outsourced anyway, so why not use an AI.

You probably don't want to be using an AI to generate artwork if you're aiming to make a painting that expresses your inner feelings. But if you're making a game and you suck at painting or drawing, you might hire it out, using an AI in that case isn't any different.

It reminds me of one of my dad's favorite dad jokes: "While you're up go to the bathroom for me." It's tough to delegate the catharsis of writing.

> What’s the point in generating writing … if it gives next to zero feelings of accomplishment?

Getting promoted, getting a better job, generating sales leads, things of that nature. A depressing number of blogs or LinkedIn posts exist only because the author is under some vague belief that it’s part of what they’re supposed to be doing to get ahead in their career.

Yeah, sadly few people write or make art or music in order to fulfill their inner need to communicate. It's not like 99% of people who churn out "creative" work do so just to earn likes and followers and make money, but it's definitely way more than 50%. The thing is, what they do churn out is garbage, it's barely read by people who may themselves be garbage (or bots), it can be written by bots, and it, well, it just degrades the whole experience of writing and painting and playing music. Or rather, it pollutes it. But then, the rest of the world don't care either. Creatives themselves are a tiny portion of the population, and most of the population could not be bothered to read a book or a story, or find out who wrote a piece of music or painted a painting or designed the web page they're looking at. We call those people "consumers", but the truth is, lots of the people who currently strive to be "creators" are actually "consumers" who have very little to say and very little talent (but lots of tools to say it with).

At some point, society and culture does separate the wheat from the chaff, but it takes a generation.

For some, having an instagram profile with many followers is the accomplishment.

I guess, the sense of accomplishment is very person dependent. I enjoy programming a lot, but it is easy to find people who would challenge themselves to scale the said website to a million users/X view per day. I don't know the why, probably there is no fixed meaning to existence and nature likes diversity.

For me, the fun in programming also depends a lot on the task. Recently, I wanted to have Python configuration classes that can serialize to yaml, but I also wanted to automatically create an ArgumentParser that fills some of the fields. `hydra` from meta does that but I wanted something simpler. I asked an agent for a design but I did not like the convoluted parsing logic it created. I finally designed something by hand by abusing the metadata fields of the dataclass.field calls. It was deeply satisfying to get it to work the way I wanted.

But after that, do I really want to create every config class and fill every field by myself for the several scripts/classes that I planned to use? Once the initial template was there, I was happy to just guide the agent to fill in the boilerplate.

I agree that we should keep the fun in programming/art, but how we do that depends on the what, the who, and the when.

> What’s the point in generating writing or generating art if it gives next to zero feelings of accomplishment?

Within the social milieu of industrialized society, mass-production is the point. It's harder to see that when the goods are essentials like clothing or food, where we obtain some utility and any artfulness is secondary to that utility. But, when we switch that around, and the artfulness of the good is the primary quality, it becomes very obvious that 10 trillion nearly-identical pictures of cake is just production for it's own sake.

> I could generate some weird 70s sci fi art, make an Instagram profile around that, barrage the algorithm with my posts and rack up likes.

It seems to me that it still takes a significant amount of luck to end up actually racking up likes that way.

Doesn't it depend how you use AI? Sometimes the imagination of gluing things together is the goal and is better than the sum of the parts, and if you don't know how to put the pieces together, AI can help support you there.

If you agree with that, then like they say about prostitutes, it is just a matter of cost, appearance and complexity.

> What’s the point in generating writing or generating art if it gives next to zero feelings of accomplishment?

$$$

> What’s the point in generating writing or generating art if it gives next to zero feelings of accomplishment?

You answered yourself: to get something else than feeling of accomplishment.

Not realizing there can be some is a failure of imagination.

I view generative AI as a visual synthesizer. It bridges the gap between my imagination and my lack of drawing skills. Just as synthesizers allowed one person to compose a full song without a band, AI allows me to get the exact images I want to create.

The likes will give that instant dopamine but it will never fill that need of accomplishing something.

The money from sponsors that comes with building a popular account goes a long way to mitigate that though.

For me the issue is not so much the sense of accomplishment. Afterall, usually one needs to iterate with promoting until content, so I think many people can still get a sense of accomplishment.

The issue is the loss of control and intimate knowledge about my own work.

You can’t write your magnum opus without any practice. Some people write every day, possibly without enjoyment, so that they can create something noteworthy after they have developed their writing skills to be capable of it.

> I could generate some weird 70s sci fi art, make an Instagram profile around that, barrage the algorithm with my posts and rack up likes. The likes will give that instant dopamine but it will never fill that need of accomplishing something.

The value, I expect, to some people, is that if they can monetize that, then it's worthwhile to them, while letting them spend less time on it than if they had to do it themselves (or maybe they aren't artists and couldn't do it themselves, period).

I personally find this kinda dishonest, uncreative, and not something I'd care to look at, but that's just me.

> What’s the point in generating writing or generating art if it gives next to zero feelings of accomplishment?

"photocamera gives no feelings of accomplishment of creating a picture"

and yet photography is an art of its own, and painting also has not disappeared

---

or heck, "taking digital photos gives zero feelings of accomplishment because you didn't do developing in a redroom"

Why indeed! Maybe after the singularity we can all be artists and musicians, doing things only for the love of the craft. Until then, we all got bills to pay.

i've been dabbling in writing for the past few weeks, and like anything im working on this past year, i feel the need to somehow route ai into the process...

Writing however, is perhaps the area it really is quite literally nothing but a rubber duck for me. I think this past week I have likely written ~10k words, and suggestions from ai that ive taken straight up is at maybe like 10 words and even those were likely modified.

I straight up hate all its suggestions for how to word stuff, maybe it has something to do with the amount of prompt responses that Ive read the past year. I imagine if i could generate a nice display of physical eyerolls ive done this past year, topping that list would be when a chatbot responds starting with "your touching on something" or some other output thats painfully common.

Also i wouldn't say its worthless for my writing, it helps me kinda really pinpoint my weak portions, i just don't take any of their suggestions to strengthen it and find my own.

This is a big point thats often missed.

A lot of american buisness communication is packing, fluff or filler to either disguise a lack of knowledge or not make firm statements.

Unless you are very careful, a standard LLM output will wrap a bunch of obvious points in lots of filler language. This works in business because the most toxic phrase you can utter is "I don't know". So we are used to verbal noise, and pick through the filler to glean clues to what the writer actually knows or wants to assert (or not assert)

If you look at modern tech journalism, its either thinly re-worded PR pieces, or re-iteration of other not relevant opinions (see meta's AR glasses) You skim them to read to pull out interesting points (full colour, speakers, battery life, etc). The rest is just packing.

But for "pleasure" reading, ie stuff thats not directly related to your chain of command, there is no use in reading that shit.

Either its a story, where you need to impart emotion, or a. novel viewpoint. Or its an argument, where you also have a story, with some "facts" that also support an emotion.

That requires some level of understanding of the subject matter, to make a coherent narrative, that doesn't feel empty.

TLDR:

LLMs generally produce Buisness passive, which is almost useless as a form of communication. Just send bullet points.

Indeed, AI is basically being used to generate various sorts of “spam”. You can see it all over the internet, and feel the uncanny valley ick.

You have to talk to more tech bros, there's clearly not enough of them in your orbit LOL.

[dead]