Americans Hate AI. Which Party Will Benefit

13 pointsposted a month ago
by Webstir
(politico.com)

10 Comments

Webstir

a month ago

Can you hear it? That sound? The luddites are coming for you. What was once fashionable, is now distasteful. Y’all had the chance to do some good in the world, but you’re just too transfixed on “the next thing” so numbers go up whether it’s good or bad.

Well, guess what? The worm has turned. Geeks tried, and failed, because your narrowly educated myopia can never see the big picture. Always looking no further than the screen in front of your faces.

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

phil21

a month ago

Geeks had little to do with it. The geeks and nerds and hackers built the base layer infrastructure for a few decades through the late 90s, then the money showed up and the normies took it all over.

The geeks never had a chance, they were too busy building things for the sake of building.

xg15

a month ago

First the normies showed up and eventually the sociopaths.

Maybe this could be a wakeup csll for the geeks though that if they want to keep building for the sake of building, they ought to do something.

olivierestsage

a month ago

Not an original sentiment, but an honest one: AI has killed the fun of technology for me. From early childhood onward, technology enthusiasm has been one of the defining aspects of my personality, affecting everything -- profession choice, hobbies, etc. Now, for the first time, that's changing.

(The economic side of this is also turning me into an unwilling Marxist, which I think speaks to the point being made in this article. Whoever tapes into this feeling will win big.)

elpocko

a month ago

AI has rekindled the fun of technology for me. Going past the cliché of "type a prompt in 5 seconds, get results", inventing, using and mastering different workflows and approaches to create, rearrange, improvise and reinterpret images, text, sound, video, music, speech or 3d models can be incredibly fun and rewarding.

Still, no matter how much work you put into something, ignorant haters will try and ruin it for you. That's a little depressing.

its-kostya

a month ago

"..._mastering_ different workflows" lol

Most tech savvy people find enjoyment in having depth and understanding of _how_ a problem is solved and that aligns with the authors stance. AI just makes it more accessible, and that's fine just makes for shallow conversations with people that "don't know why" something works. Now, if that accessibility Kindles a love of technology and forces someone to dive deeper, then right on!

An alternative example

Person A: "Had a fun weekend. Cooked an authentic Vietnamese meal. Made Pho.

Person B: What proportions of spices did you use? What fish sauce or noodle do you recommend? Mine always comes out tasting off.

Person A: Oh, I just ordered at the Vietnamese restaurant, but I described exactly what I wanted.

elpocko

a month ago

> "..._mastering_ different workflows" lol

This is only funny to you because your limited view is that using AI = enter prompt, get result, be done. This is what most people think and what most users of AI do, but there is a lot more depth to making creative use of AI that you don't seem to know about.

One example: You can use a diffusion model as a render engine in Blender, with all the modeling and sculpting and related work, but using a diffusion engine to render the scene instead of a pathtracer/raytracer.

Another example: Composing all pieces of music manually and using AI to create different instrumentation or arrangements of your piece.

Even just prompting and bulding workflows for a diffusion model in ComfyUI to make exactly the scene you want and not just crappy slop requires knowledge and a certain amount of skill. There is a lot of overlap with photography and photo editing, and you have to know how the diffusion process works to get good results. Many casual "no effort please" users want to do it, but give up fast because the topic is complex with a somewhat steep learning curve. Their only alternative is to beg for access to workflows others have created.

It's not all just zero-effort, ChatGPT piss-colored images.

its-kostya

a month ago

I apologize if I sound dismissive. Some things that can be produced by AI amaze me and I do see your point about being knowledgeable with your tools.

My point is, in general, it seems lowering the barrier to entry has overwhelming produced a lot of low effort things, but also some very high quality things as well (as you've argued). Unfortunately, low effort output dwarfs other things. And on the whole, it seems things are made to be bought & sold, not enjoyed.

thisgetsit

a month ago

It's rekindled the fun for me.

But I got started writing bare metal code up to a working system. Never cared about the web stack, JS, the browser.

Am using AI to generate a GPU accelerated blank canvas to replace Gnome and other GUI apps. Have built an model of depth data of geometric forms to paint lighting and color on.

It's a work in progress but local AI helped get all the Vulkan boilerplate sorted in a day. It's working just fine generating code to tackle the generic geometric problems. No abstractions to hallucinate when it's just math.

Otherwise just sticking to CLI "desktop" experience. Only running the graphical app when I want to ogle graphics.

The web SaaS stack sucks. Am tired of learning some viral DSL like a new JS framework or Terraform every couple years because some FAANG bro could.

kermatt

a month ago

> Which Party Will Benefit

Benefit in terms of election wins, campaign finding, or "other" financial incentives?