“But none of my friends are on there.”

Make new friends then.

My wife thinks maybe he has a humiliation kink.

The trend with AI seems to be that the folks with zero talent—the ones that have never poured themselves into a single cathartic creative, discovery, or research process once in their lives—are the ones pushing AI the hardest. AI art is a solution searching for a problem that has never existed. The only “problem” execs see is that they have too big of a headcount and need to reduce that ASAP so that they can pump out more soulless slop.

The only slack I’ll give here is if you use generated images lightly as an inspiration reference point. Even then, the morality of how these AI tools came to be is questionable since they essentially plagiarized art from others. My theory is that it will also make our brains lazier similar to how map software does for navigation. Navigation makes sense though because it’s a mundane thing. Replacing your entire creative team with it though? Make sure to put some money aside for when your venture inevitably folds.

Funny enough, this is why I’ve enjoyed Rednote a ton. I’ve found that a lot of western folks are there as a reprieve from how insanely volatile Meta and other platforms have gotten. It’s a different vibe and the platform was specifically built for people to learn and grow together. The audience there very much strives to keep a good vibe and will call out anyone that tries to disrupt that.

It’s the closest I’ll ever get.

I used to have a really robust RSS feed but lost it when the service I was using changed. Need to rebuild that.

Thanks! Never thought I’d own a domain with “yachts” in it.

I left every single western social network because they’re all filled to the brim with angry, asshole people. America has a ton of miserable people that will go out of their way to be rude to others on every social network. I’m sick of that energy.

If it’s not rude people, it’s ad after ad.

The only things I use now are Xiaohongshu (Rednote) and Lemmy (my own instance).

[…] who he said were unhappy with the tariffs that he had imposed on imports from the country.

Shocking. Gee I wonder why they are unwilling to work with him…

Train yourself to use the AI only for doing grunt work. I used it yesterday to split 1 cypress test into 3 separate ones for example. I force myself to solve the problems and don’t lean too heavily on AI (it doesn’t increase output anyway in my experience). Copilot gets tons of shit wrong that I end up having to manually write.

Machines in the hands of the working class can thrive in a way that benefits everyone equally, and is available to everyone. But as soon as capitalists get it, the whole idea becomes corrupted because the sole purpose is profit at all costs. AI is not profitable yet, which is why these companies will pull out all the stops (including downloading content from illegal sources that they otherwise scold everyone else for using).

Oh there’s definitely no going back. This will continue to erode the art scene and continue to steal artwork from humans that spent hours making it. No government or entity can or should go into homes and take these things away, but it’s not really about that. Companies are vacuuming up artwork, books, etc and paying nobody for them, while telling us some nonsense like it’s a positive for society. No compensation for the thing they are now going to make money off of, but they’d sue you into oblivion in a second if you stole something from them. That simple fact is why this is all shit.

I love the idea of AI and I’ve built things using ChatGPT’s API (miserable), but these capitalists have gone about it all wrong per usual. It could’ve been a public resource that people willingly contribute to, but the capitalists took it upon themselves to break the rules again, while hiding behind a shield of excuses for why they should pay nobody.

Shoving your beliefs in people’s faces and filling in the circle next to daddy Trump on a ballot does sound like such grueling work. Fake Christians are tough because they’re incapable of identifying when they’re on the wrong side because they just write it off as some warrior’s trial against us poor lost souls.

Gross.

Dev with 18-20 years of experience. I was originally diagnosed in the 90s. Stopped taking meds (Atomoxetine) recently because I hated how they altered my mood.

It’s not just you. Your colleagues probably have the same struggle but it just hasn’t been talked about yet. Any time I’ve brought up a gripe about something, I’ve always had colleagues chime in and agree. Any time I have to traverse complex code like that, I have to have like 5 panes open in VSCode and sometimes I have to take rough notes, or diagram it out.

The problem at its core is definitely capitalism. That said, AI itself is nothing more than a massive plagiarism machine that is extremely cost-prohibitive to run, which means the only ones that control it and have a say are the ones with the most money. There’s a space for ethical AI that isn’t trained haphazardly on copyrighted works, but what we have today in the mainstream is not that.

As much as I personally hate building anything with AI (programmer that has had to build tools that use it), I don’t hate the concept of AI itself. I hate the fact that the people with the most money to innovate with it are churning out the most boring products so they can go to market faster, while also burning the planet down in the process.

Yeah the current admin, at least in the US, ain’t enforcing that lol. They’re all in on AI’ifying everything in sight. AI is a hellscape in the hands of capitalists.

pay people to go enjoy their lives.

The problem is that this isn’t happening. Instead it’s greedy board members trying to find ways to exclude every creative artist so that they can hoard all of the wealth for themselves.

Marx predicted that automation would allow the worker to live a more leisurely life when they were maintaining the machines, vs doing the work manually. This is a nice premise, but it turned out to be wrong. Instead, the workers get replaced entirely and third parties come in to occasionally fix and maintain those machines. Automation is not a bad thing by any stretch, but the point of creative work is to retain humanity and emotion. Using AI voices and artwork is counter to that. At that point it’s no longer artwork and is simply a husk to drive revenue and nothing else. If we replace humans with AI, where does it stop? Why not throw all the creatives out and have AI write the script, storyboard, edit, etc? Mindless entertainment on autopilot sounds miserable.

It’s not a hard one to dodge. I’ll be fine.

You’re welcome to play video games with shitty fake AI voices, but myself and tons of other folks definitely won’t be.