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Transcript
recently my friend’s comics professor told her that it’s acceptable to use gen Al for script- writing but not for art, since a machine can’t generate meaningful artistic work. meanwhile, my sister’s screenwriting professor said that they can use gen Al for concept art and visualization, but that it won’t be able to generate a script that’s any good. and at my job, it seems like each department says that Al can be useful in every field except the one that they know best.
It’s only ever the jobs we’re unfamiliar with that we assume can be replaced with automation. The more attuned we are with certain processes, crafts, and occupations, the more we realize that gen Al will never be able to provide a suitable replacement. The case for its existence relies on our ignorance of the work and skill required to do everything we don’t.
This actually relates, in a weird but interesting way, to how people get broken out of conspiracy theories.
One very common theme that’s reported by people who get themselves out of a conspiracy theory is that their breaking point is when the conspiracy asserts a fact that they know - based on real expertise of their own - to be false. So, like, you get a flat-earther who is a photography expert and their breaking point is when a bunch of the evidence relies on things about photography that they know aren’t true. Or you get some MAGA person who hits their breaking point over the tariffs because they work in import/export and they actually know a bunch of stuff about how tariffs work.
Basically, whenever you’re trying to disabuse people of false notions, the best way to start is always the same; figure out what they know (in the sense of things that they actually have true, well founded, factual knowledge of) and work from there. People enjoy misinformation when it affirms their beliefs and builds up their ego. But when misinformation runs counter to their own expertise, they are forced to either accept that they are not actually an expert, or reject the misinformation, and generally they’ll reject the misinformation, because accepting they’re not an expert means giving up on a huge part of their identity and their self-esteem.
It’s also not always strictly necessary for the expertise to actually be well founded. This is why the Epstein files are such a huge danger to the Trump admin. A huge portion of MAGA spent the last decade basically becoming “experts” in “the evil pedophile conspiracy that has taken over the government”, and they cannot figure out how to reconcile their “expertise” with Trump and his admin constantly backpedalling on releasing the files. Basically they’ve got a tiny piece of the truth - there really is a conspiracy of powerful elite pedophiles out there, they’re just not hanging out in non-existent pizza parlour basements and dosing on adrenochrone - and they’ve built a massive fiction around that, but that piece of the truth is still enough to conflict with the false reality that Trump wants them to buy into.
You get a flat-earther who is a photography expert and their breaking point is when a bunch of the evidence relies on things about photography
Or you get a demolitions expert to watch a video of WTC7
I just focus on the parts of what I do know that AI can help me with, not try to say AI can replace other people, but not me. That’s some dumb shit.
So the only real business model here is for people to be able to produce things they are not qualified to work on, with an acceptable risk of generating crap. I don’t see how that won’t be a multi-trillions dollars market.
Investors are rarely experts in the particular niches that the companies they hold shares in are applying AI to.
produce things they are not qualified to work on, with an acceptable risk of generating crap
You just described the C-suite at most major companies.
Hot take: it’s reasonable for a comics student to use AI for script-writing and for a screenwriting student to use AI for concept art, not because machine can generate meaningful artistic work at these fields but because these are not the fields they are trying to learn.
In a way, this can be used to level the field. The comics professor can use the same LLM to generate scripts for all their students. It’ll be slop script, but the slop will be of uniform quality so no student will have the advantage of better writing and it’d be easier to judge their work based on the drawing alone.
And even if AI could generate true art in some field - why would it be acceptable for a student to use it for the very field they are studying and need to polish their own skills at?
Yeah, the comics professor is to grade the visuals, and the text is filler, could be lorem ipsum for all they care. Simlarly a screenwriter using AI to storyboard seems fine as it’s not the core product.
The ideal would be cross-discipline projects bringing students together similar to how they would be expected to deal in the real world, but when individual assignments call for ‘filler’ content to stand in for one of those other disciplines, I think I could accept LLM as a reasonable compromise. I would expect some assignments to ask the students to go beyond their core discipline for some perspective and LLM be bad for that, but I could see a place for skipping the irrelevant complementary pieces of a good chunk of assignments.
This has also been coined the Gell-Mann [Amnesia] effect and is perhaps a kind of corollary to the Dunning-Kruger effect: incompetent people fail to recognize competence.
Truly intelligent people respect the work of professionals and experts in other fields. Or maybe, this is even fundamentally a respect problem.
AI will never be able to provide a suitable replacement.
Don’t become as delusional as the grifters. Generated content is already a suitable replacement for lots of things. It’s not so much about the quality of generated content (which continues to improve) as much about easily replacing the worthless bullshit that we’re forced to produce (eg. cover letters, “art” serving capitalism, etc). The system is already built on fake nonsense. Generated content has always been a great fit for this system. The punishment of workers is just another bonus.
Which explains why C-suites push it so hard for everyone
Well, they do have the one job that actually can be replaced by “AI” (though in most cases it’d be more beneficial to just eliminate it altogether).
Which is acting like they know everything about everyone else’s jobs, while making up wholly inaccurate assumptions
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almost everything is more difficult and more complex than I initially assume it is.
Try being born rich.
I’m in a nightmare scenario where my new job has a guy using Claude to pump out thousands of lines of C++ in a weekend. I’ve never used C++ (just C for embedded devices).
He’s experienced, so I want to believe he knows what he’s doing, but every time I have a question, the answer is “oh that’s just filler that Claude pumped out,” and some copy pasted exposition from Claude.
So I have no idea what’s AI trash and what’s C++ that I don’t know.
Like a random function was declared as a template. I had to learn what function templates are for. So I do, but the function is only defined once, and I couldn’t think of why you would need to templatize it. So I’m sitting here barely grasping the concept and syntax and trying to understand the reasoning behind the decision, and the answer is probably just that Claude felt like doing it that way.
That’s just what C++ people do. They are all equally mad. I am not even joking.
Can you elaborate? This is my first time dealing with higher level languages in the workplace (barring some Python scripts), and I feel like I’m losing my mind.
Ask a C++ programmer to write “Hello World” and they’ll start by implementing a new string type that maybe saves half a CPU instruction when compiled for a very specific CPU but the code can’t be read by anyone else or themselves in 6 weeks
Ah. So basically FizzBuzz Enterprise.
Your coworker is mistreating Claude and this story wants me to call CPS.
Claude will come up with all kinds of creative ideas and that’s neat, but you really need to reign it in to make it useful. Use Claude’s code as a suggestion, cut out the stuff that’s over the top – explain why you did that to Claude, it will generally get it. Add it to your CLAUDE.md if it’s a repeat issue.
Claude will
come up withsurface all kinds ofcreativeeother people’s ideas and that’s neat, but you really need to reign it in to make it useful. Use Claude’s code as a suggestion, cut out the stuff that’s over the top – explain why you did that to Claude, it will generallyget itincorporate that into future prompts. Add it to your CLAUDE.md if it’s a repeat issue.FTFY
Thanks.
Thank you. Dude checked in a shit load of code before going on PTO for three weeks. We get pretty live plots of data, but he broke basically every hardware driver in the process.
That’s actually terrifying. Code has been degrading a lot in the past 10 years or so, and it looks like the LLM trend for code is doing more harm than good. I don’t think that needs to be the case but it appears to be the case.
Like, Microsoft’s CEO bragging that 25% of all their code was written by AI, and that was a year plus ago now so it’s probably higher at this point… I don’t find that reassuring, it’s part of the reason I won’t let my Windows workstation upgrade to 23H2 and I’ve almost completely converted to Linux at home (I keep the laptop running my simulator games on Windows because peripherals can be a pain to get working right without the manufacturer’s software, but it’s also locked to 23H2)
And I’ve used AI to assist me with writing code.
But that’s the distinction: it assists me, it doesn’t write it for me. If I don’t understand how or why something works or why I would do it this way, I’m not using it in production. Far too many seem to be checking out, though, and telling their GPT to take the wheel, and that’s where I think one of the biggest issues comes in.
Choosing a screw. Pretty straightforward, right? It’s not. What forces are involved? What materials the screw and the surface are made of? What conditions will it be exposed to?
Yeah that’s Dunning-Kruger in a nutshell. Kind of scary that almost everyone in leadership positions sits atop the peak of “Mount Stupid” for most of the things they make decisions about.
Feel like the plateau of sustainability is too high. Being supremely competent in a field can’t compete with the obnoxious confidence of the idiots…
Interestingly, we all sit somewhere near the peak of “Mount Stupid” on nearly every decision we make in a given day. Btw, how long is yogurt good for in the fridge?
The difference is, the more “leadership” you get, the more isolated you are from getting reality shoved in your face. I think being a billionaire is actually a form of brain damage. They never get feedback on when they are wrong, or if they do, they are surrounded by sycophants who will tell them the critic is wrong. The rest of us at least get humbled once in a while.
Good point. When I go “how hard can it be?” and try to fix my car by myself - I inevitably end up eating humble pie and paying a mechanic.
When CEOs lay off half the company, they cash out their stock and get hired to run another company before they see any consequences.
playing bass guitar-- there’s an exception. it’s exactly as difficult as it looks
Pretty difficult then? I’ve heard some jazz bass guitarists that were insane
low end and rhythm-- that’s what the bass guitar is there for. you can still be technically officially a competent “bassist” without any of the fancy technical embellishments that great bass players employ.
but yea, not to disparage the bass guitar at all, but the basics of matching the kick drum and chord progression and the physical chops of actually playing the thing doesn’t take that long to get a handle on
edit: check out les claypool and primus for an example of some rare bass-centric music
Counterpoint: time. Even playing simple lines, there’s a big difference between a groove that is completely locked in, and one that is not. And that difference is all about the precise timing of the hits between the players in the rhythm section. The bass sets the foundation of all of that.
Life is hard for a musician. For a bassist it’s nearly impossible.
Simple bass line, anyone can play this.
I basically assume every aspect of the work my friends do is insanely difficult and they have to put in effort convincing me certain parts are stupid easy that even a child could do it.
That’s also why the billionaires love it so much:
they very rarely have much if any technical expertise, but imagine that they just have to throw enough money at AI and it’ll make them look like the geniuses they already see themselves as.
billionaires love it
They think it knows everything because they know nothing.
Which ironically means that they are the easiest people to replace with AI.
… They just… get to own them.
For some reason.
That and it talks to them like every jellyfish yes man that they interact with.
Which subsequently seems to be why so many regular ass people like it, because it talks to them like they’re a billionaire genius who might accidentally drop some money while it’s blowing smoke up their ass.
I literally have to give my local LLM a bit of a custom prompt to get it to stop being so overly praising of me and the things that I say.
Its annoying, it reads as patronizing to me.
Sure, everyonce in a while I feel like I do come up with an actually neat or interesting idea… but if you went by the default of most LLMs, they basically act like they’re a teenager in a toxic, codependent relationship with you.
They are insanely sycophantic, reassure you that all your dumbest ideas and most mundane observations are like, groundbreaking intellectual achievements, all your ridiculous and nonsensical and inconsequential worries and troubles are the most serious and profound experiences that have ever happened in the history of the universe.
Oh, and they’re also absurdly suggestible about most things, unless you tell them not to be.
… they’re fluffers.
They appeal to anyone’s innate narcissism, and amplify it into ego mania.
Ironically, you could maybe say that they’re programming people to be NPCs, and the template they are programming to be, is ‘Main Character Syndrome’.
AI has been excellent at teaching me to program in new languages. It knows everything about all languages - except the ones I’m already familiar with. It’s terrible at those.
and all the things we aren’t experts in, we’re unqualified to be the evaluators of the AI’s output
Art is purely subjective. There is absolutely no objective/scientific “expert”.
Yup, that’s exactly the Dunning-Kruger mechanism at work.
And that’s exactly why ai is not as useful as people think. if you don’t know something, you can’t evaluate the correctness of the output, and if you know something, why bother using ai?
Cause people don’t understand how AI works and they just assume AI is always right. The world is overrun by idiots and idiots love AI.
Ignorance and lack of respect for other fields of study, I’d say. Generative ai is the perfect tool for narcisists because it has the potential to lock them in a world where only their expertise matters and only their oppinion is validated.
This is why leadership loves it. They don’t know shit about fuck.
I was just thinking it’s like an offshoot of this effect. It also explains all the tech bros who are all-in on AI as they’re experts in nothing.
Not exactly what’s described here imo, but still a very interesting bias, thanks!
Thank you. I was trying to remember this one. It’s Dunning Kruger adjacent but one is evaluate one’s own knowledge while the other is one evaluating another’s knowledge.
People have literally experienced psychosis by doing both at once.
IDK about that I’m a professional slop maker and I think it could replace me easily.
