Where are I and AI

After Writing about AI and cohorts I wanted to spend time putting down where I am with AI, hopefully this is a post that grows and changes as my feelings do.

Also sorry for the grammar in the title, I think it sounds clever.

As a Consumer

As somebody who consumes a lot of books, art, & music I want hand created content for a few reasons.

Reason 1: I Buy Stuff

I pay for content; I buy books by the droves, I purchase music directly,¹ and I commission art from artists² as well as have an active Patreon subscription I am always struggling to cull back.

What does this have to do with AI? Well I want the most value possible for my money. AI is low value content. It’s extremely easy to create for next to nothing. So then why should I pay for it?

Value can sometimes be arbitrary, but I put a lot of value on the time, energy, and effort of other people. I don’t really value the output of a computer that much, the computer and the software? Yes! it’s output, not really. That’s cheap, and intentionally so.

Reason 2: Error Tolerance

I have a moderately low error tolerance. Allow me to explain with an example.

Below is the title of an anime I am currently enjoying.

How I Attended an All-Guy’s Mixer

How much does this bother you? Did you even notice?

The human brain has an “auto-correct” system and there is a lot of memes about how if you rearrange all the consonants or set up a consistent typo, your brain will ‘swallow it’ and move on. Usually once somebody points out the error that it is an “All-Guys Mixer” you can’t unsee it.

However some people can’t miss these things.

I am usually less picky about grammar and typing, but am extremely picky about anatomy in art. I am that person who looks at furry, anime, and comic book art and screams about broken spines. If you aren’t sure what I am talking about there is a whole site dedicated to pointing this out.

Generative AI is notoriously bad at anatomy and creating errors in art. The errors it generates also look exceptionally annoying to me. This translates to factual errors and all the other various “hallucinations” it makes.

As a Creator

As a creator I have not gotten value out of generative AI because it is self reinforcing in my workflow, e.g. it doesn’t teach you a skill outside of how to use itself better.

I often think about the article “I have forgotten how to read” and the lost art of long form reading not only for entertainment but also education. I have had a conversation with a few different people about reading habits and how getting too into “quick” shorthand knowledge makes it harder to sit and engage with longer form content. Our brain readjusts and becomes bored engaging with content for a long period of time.

This applies to AI and “what it teaches us” because every time I have used AI it has been all about getting to the solution as rapidly as possible, not spending the time learning the thing. There are some exceptions to this but generally these are the products that are being sold to me.

When I used it to write code, I spent time using it to explain how to use a library to me, or to summarize some code to me, it didn’t teach me how to engage with the docs or how to read the code, it just provided the answers, with varying degrees of correctness, which only taught me how to quickly identify it’s mistakes and manipulate the AI to giving better answers. I also tried the copilot auto-correct method and found myself only learning how to make what it did better.

When I used it to improve my fiction and story writing, it didn’t teach me how to be a better writer, but how to re-adjust what it did in my writing to have my personal tone and flavor.

When i made it generate music for me I got some passable results, but with none of the satisfaction or knowledge on how to make the sounds or composition.

Now, if I had different priorities as a creator, this wouldn’t matter. If I didn’t care about learning how to learn with a variety of libraries, or improving my writing with my tone, or the act of making music itself…. then AI would have been a big win. But I have specific goals as a creator and they are less tied around the quantity of output but instead the quality and my my personal journey of improvement.

In fact my music “output” is a number that infinitely approaches zero and that is intentional. I just do music in the moment so having something else do music for me is pretty pointless.

Have I Found Value in AI Somewhere?

1. My favorite use so far is cleaning vocal samples from movies & TV of background sounds. it’s pretty amazing at that abhorrently hard task.
2. Sometimes I still run my writing through it, which usually mangles it and forces me to rewrite sections of it again. But that can help with stale descriptions.

That is it! Yea… not a promising list.

If you have a use you think I would like, you are welcome to send me a message on social media!