I'm not following -- what does it have to do with your teacher being non tech-savvy? A tech-savvy art teacher would also tell you not to trace. Tracing doesn't really help you develop your drawing skills, any reasonable art teacher would be against that.

Drawing from reference is bog standard.

Tracing is a cardinal sin.

People lose careers over not understanding the massive difference.

>it would have made me a fraud.

s/made/revealed/

Revealing it doesn't make you a fraud. That was already the truth.

Revealing it makes you known as a fraud.

A little cheating here, a bit of fraud there and before one knows it, one is CEO of some AI company.

The revealing thing is how the cheating is seen as normal and how the other people are considered out of touch or wrong.

> All this admiration and attribution from my classmates would have gone down the drain, if I just told anyone how I did it.

You realize that the admiration and attribution wasn't real, because you didn't actually do what you claimed? I get that you wanted to feel the effect, but that doesn't mean NOT revealing that you didn't do what you were being praised for made it real.

HA! You followed the secret techniques of the great masters:

Philip Steadman, Vermeer's Camera: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces, Oxford University Press, 2001

Autotune is legitimate as a surgical tool, used as little as necessary so you can't ever hear it, not when it's front and center as they have tried to do in the 2010 era of awful.

AI is still in the 2010 autotune phase, where more is better.

It’s autoslop can become an adjective for Generative AI content whether it’s hidden or not. It’s so AI - can mean different things to different generations - derogatory for Gen Alpha and like a good thing for older generations

Autotune, and quantization in general, is a legitimate artistic choice though. It's like using a ruler. It's not strictly required either.

AI is literally the exact opposite of that. We had been building software with ruler-like precision even when it was unnecessary and got in the way. That's the only reason we ever wanted AI to begin with.

One mistake people keep making is the assumption that arbitrary and probabilistic imprecision ("wisdom of the crowd") is automatically equivalent to artistic or experienced/curated choice. It's absolutely not. Another mistake is that approximations are always enough to satisfy all problems, or at least "real world" problems. That's obviously not true either. That's flat out ignorance.

> projects like 808s and Heartbreak and Tha Carter III

Or 22, A Million by Bon Iver.

“Death of autotune, moment of silence”.

Nah, they were still keen to let people know it made you a clown.

I like to make the comparison to the invention of cameras. Traditional painters still found their place in art and commercial work, and photography found a place in art and photography. But if a guy with a camera took a photo and claimed its a painting, people would have been angry about finding out too (understandably so). Takes time for new media to find their place/niche in which they differ from other media in terms of art, and in terms of commercial use. Though obviously as long as people are deceptive about the use of a tool, there will always be negative connotations, and people using AI for art must accept that just not everyone is going to like it and they can't expect the same amount of praise/admiration for doing the same thing as other media with less effort (and that's fine too).

So you're saying either way, we are going to get a polished turd? lol

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So, kind of like popular music, and good music

I have heard multiple arguments that point towards this future, where AI largely becomes "normal" technology. I'm hopeful for it. There are tons of great use cases for AI, but it absolutely should not be in... everything.

This feels similar to the timeline that lots of new technologies go through. Blockchain (put that into everything!). The internet + dot com era were probably similar as well.

Treating ANYTHING like an everything tool just seems to feel this way. There's no reason I want to use AI to buy something on Amazon. Or plan a vacation for me. I absolutely want to use AI to scan through 5000 files and find that one thing I was looking for though. Different applications.

Spellcheck and autocorrect got considerably worse when people starting replacing its perfectly good backend with LLMs.

yesh I argue! Spellchrc ist he beat investor humanity has ever conceded of!

> I wonder if any movie special effects that you notice will be considered AI?

Zach King is a YouTuber to watch on this topic.

> he best artists and creators will figure out how to use tech which empowers them

But that is NOT the selling point of AI in relation to art. The selling point is "it will make all artists obsolete and unemployable". Literally. That is how Sora was sold too. It was not sold as tool for artists. It was sold as replacement for artist.

If AI ends up as a tool for artists, then that tech failed on its creators terms.

How does AI “empower” artists…?

> Refuse to engage with modernity?

God I hope so! Modernity sucks.

Ridiculous. Whose work is it then? That's like saying the python script you wrote is not your work, because almost all of the hard work was done by the engineers who wrote cpython or GCC.

Counterexamples: windshield wipers and spellcheck.

This is directly what happened with CGI.

Those younger generation are in a really dark place right now. In many cities they will never be able to afford a house; and on top of that AI labs are now saying they will never have a job.

Remember how we were all going to “surf the information superhighway” and we’d all become smarter because we had access to all the worlds experts and books?

I remember!

Before the like button, it was more individualistic. Before web 2.0, before global market penetration had hit 10%, it was mainly early adopters.

Who clicks on the clickbait? Who upvotes the garbage? Who actually sees ads and goes to buy what they didn't need? I think we all know.

The window we saw may have been one of an illusive sub-population who is forever on the treadmill trying to get away from the unwashed masses.

>> I am more and more convinced that young people have a much better understanding of technology and especially its impact on society.

> They can't even use a computer, they struggle with basic computer knowledge because they grow up with closed ecosystems and most of them only have smartphones, not a desktop PC. They are called "Digital Naives" (sic) for a reason.

You and the GP are talking about totally different things.

Also the OP is talking about elementary schoolers. Even as a future software engineer interested in computers in the pre-smartphone era, my computer knowledge in elementary school was still pretty basic.

My son (11) constantly refers to kids like this as 'ipad kids'. He has a PC and has taught himself to program, so I think he looks down on kids like this, which seems to be the majority of them.

The use of personal computers way overshot what they were designed for. Don't mistake people putting up with the relative complexity of personal computing with them wanting it. That's why so many people no longer bother with PCs or keep an old one around just for things that need to be done and through the web. Phones, primarily, and tablets for media consumption, are much easier to use.

Try explaining a clutch and stick shift to kids. They will look at you and wonder why and how you think having a pedal that decouples the engine from the rest of the drivetrain so you can manually operate a gear lever was appropriate for a mass market product.

They can't use a Windows-95-style filesystem for the same reason I can't use IBM-style JCL and COBOL. That is not the entire field of computing, in fact it's barely any of the field of computing which is the reason they can't use it. Just because that paradigm was once dominant, doesn't mean it still is.

Do they have the motivation to learn though? You could say the same about gen Z with books; it's just that many have never cared enough to make it a habit.

That having been said, the new generation mostly does computing with a smartphone/tablet and these kids are very adept at handling them. If a child wants something, it'll find a way to make it happen and they're good at that. Creating spreadsheets and organizing files is simply not on their list. If it were, they'd be better at it than most people who grew up before computers.

Haha.

My son got caught trying to fix Windows installation on my wife work computer with bootable Linux Mint USB stick.

"Digital Naive," yes, of course.

Opposite of my experience. A few family members and their friends invited me to a discord server recently; I'll join for games some nights. They're very acutely aware of how things work. We talk a lot about how even their schoolmates don't really use social media much (at least, not the big ones) and despise AI.

Gives me some hope that the kids will be alright.

Every generation is full of people that have a strong aversion to tech. The mistake was thinking it would magically only be the Boomers with that problem, but I've always known people in my age group who needed that remedial tech class in college.

It did appear to improve for a little while when everyone needed a laptop or desktop to access the Internet. But smartphones have eliminated that. So have tablets. And lightweight laptops like Chromebooks have further eliminated the need for tech knowledge. I work at a K-12 school, and a surprisingly large number of young parents have access to the Internet only through their smartphones. And, truthfully, they don't need a PC to access the Internet anymore. It's an extra cost you can just bypass, and nobody under 30 with kids has spare money at this point.

But, in as much as new teachers coming into our district today are often just as tech-illiterate as those we saw 20 years ago, we haven't seen the number of tech-savvy people really decreasing, either. Tech remains a hobby for some people, and that doesn't seem to be decreasing.

Yes, we're not going to raise another generation where the techies have a common background of making MS-DOS boot disks; reading modem initialization strings; upgrading RAM requiring a chip puller or piggybacking; managing IRQs, memory addresses, or bus addressing for ISA/IDE hardware with jumpers or DIP switches; or knowing what `LOAD"*",8,1` means. But that doesn't mean people aren't learning tech, having fun with it, or making careers out of it.

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You and he are using “understand” differently. You’re talking about understanding the internals, the components and concepts inside the box labeled “technology”; he’s talking about understanding the externalities, where that box is moving and how fast, how the box affects and alters the world around it.

Files and folders aren't fundamental to computing though.

That's not what OP is saying.

They're saying they have a better understanding of the impact of technology, not the specifics of using technology.

That’s old technology now.

That’s like being GenX and saying millennials never learned to use a rotary phone.

Wonderful writeup, I couldn't have formulated it better! Honestly, I never expected my comment to gain traction but I find it interesting that it had such resonance in both directions.

In a way I am happy I left so much to the imagination for open interpretation.

Understanding technology and doing something like drinking are not equivalent, what are you on about?

I've seen the same thing in my family and relatives across all age groups, I doubt they understand it either.

The problem with that though, they don't really get to see what great feats a healthy adult brain is allegedly capable of, for example from their parents, nor their teachers if we're being honest for a millisecond. So why bother? Offline adult brains have failed at preventing any of this - nor are they more successful. It's really not brain health that predicts success in 2026.

Not understanding the consequences and impacts of doomscrolling and instant gratification videos on reasoning, memory and abstract thinking is not limited to persons aged 15-16. I'd argue this applies to about 90% of the population using smartphones.

Does your age bracket, in general?

> Do you really think young people around 14-16 understand the impact of doomscrolling & 15 sec videos on their brain capacities?

Yes, they do. Social media is, ironically, full of young Gen-Z rediscovering the joys of the analog world, saying they want to get off social media, looking into dumb phones. You don't see many "grown adults" talking about it. They're too far gone.

Oh absolutely. The resources and features these days are incomparable to the stone tools of the 80s and 90s. I’m just saying that specifically getting started was much easier. My friends and I could trade disks of BAS files and not have a single comment or README to explain what your dev environment needed to look like. We didn’t have to have GitHub accounts. I love GitHub, but trying to help kids manage a million accounts just to get some sample code is a nightmare. It mostly works unauthenticated but thanks to bots the limits are low and abrupt. Ironically getting AIs to just make up similar content is far easier!

Anyway, I don’t want to pretend Apple BASIC was better than Python or whatever, but I never had to learn “no it’s venv now not virtualenv and make sure you’re not using system Python just install docker via brew and it will be easier…” until I was getting paid to deal with that nonsense.

And we do that and it is great but the restrictions are jarring and absolute, and docs written for “real” web dev always assume a dev server instead. AI can at least adapt.

>everything you could do with QBASIC, you can do with an HTML file

Oh yea? give me the equalent of PLAY function. Or the PSET function to turn individual pixels on and off on the screen. Give me the function to read the color of any onscreen pixel (admittantly not QBASIC but some C variant)...

FFS you can't even draw something delayed on screen without having to deal with the setTimeout, setInterval madness. That alone would kill any interest that a kid might be starting out with!

We do love Scratch but account management is almost worse than something to install. If there’s no accounts, where does he save his work? The easiest option he’s discovered is copying and pasting it into a Google Doc because if he uses his school account he can access it from school or home.

What a terrible experience compared to a floppy disk! Sure disk failure was common and crushing, but the UX was simple and ubiquitous. I guess I could get him a thumb drive, but I don’t know if his school allows them.

Counterpoint: one could say the exact same thing about the internet, but social media has (IMHO) proved... sub-optimal at a societal level.

Same! I think our position just isn’t very interesting, so mostly we only hear from boomers or doomers. Gen Alpha seems largely outside that spectrum: ai where it supports creativity, no ai where it destroys creativity. The kids are alright.

You’re right, they don’t care.

People are using LLMs for the things they consider distractions but are “required”, or at least feel that way about: ads, marketing web sites, emails to/from coworkers, and even RFP responses to government agencies.

Wherever someone uses the raw output of an LLM signifies how little they wanted to do the work in the first place yet still [desperately] want to reap the benefits of appearing to care.

Yesterday, I was searching for local HVAC maintenance companies when I came across one with a map showing their service area.

At a quick glance, it seemed fine but that was no longer the case once you zoomed in: it was a collection of hallucinated, non-sensical names. I too said, “how in the world was this reviewed and approved!?”, and then quickly came to the same conclusion that you did: “nobody gives a shit about this stuff anymore”.

https://mcairllc.com/images/service-area.png

> AI is like guns.

Let’s you shoot yourself in the leg, if you don’t know what you are doing.

Every artist I know uses LLM’s to help with getting around some very complex program (Unity, Blender, After Effects etc), which they probably would abandon otherwise. They don’t use AI generate images or other visual content, because… It sucks. And to make it unsuck sucks so bad that you might just draw it yourself.

Today’s digital tools (drawing tablets, ProCreate etc) have made image making so effortless that you can make sick designs that would have taken months, in hours. But it still requires you to know how to draw, to make a composition, understand colour etc. Be an artist. You can prompt all you wan’t, but nothing changes that.

I agree 100% but you need to do more than 2 sentences put into Chatgpt and send the result to your print shop

you have more chances to shine only because everyone around you is not shining, but instead competing on volume

I never been to a "faded old restaurant" that was actually good and not only the same shitty frozen food every other cheap Chinese place offers.

Good places around here usually do actually care about presentation. None of these kebap/pizza places is particularly good either, it's the mass production places with average to bad ratings.

The term NPC referred to people without critical thought, as if they were running down a pre-programmed dialog tree.

kids talk to each other and share language

It has meant the unwanted, waste food scraps dumped into a trough and eaten by pigs (the farm animal) for a lot longer than that.

That's a very dodgy etymology. The use of "slop" to refer to trashy content dates back to the late 19th/early 20th century, long before the advent of the internet.

I think our tendency to attribute "novel" word usage to 4chan might reflect more on us than on our language.

I'm a little short on primary reference material, but here's an example from 1917: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/22692/pg22692-images.ht.... Conversation on language log has at least two others from 1897 and 1920 respectively.

People give 4chan far too much credit. Slop was a term that was used, maybe not widely, well before it was picked up by internet racists. Slop was used to refer to the stuff you'd feed to pigs, and if you were American, school children.

The etymology to be “mud puddle” from the 1400s with that being taken from old English -sloppe meaning “dung” for even longer.

“Slopping the hogs” is probably where the modern negative interpretation comes from of forcing garbage onto someone.

You don't need to make everything about the Jews.

I'm not sure that's the case, lots of supposed 4chan coinages came from elsewhere and 'slop' is much older. It's been known in the sense of 'liquid household refuse' from the 19th century.

I looked up the etymology of "slop" and I did not find any reference to antisemitism.

Like "A quick chat designed to tell you everything you need to know about a story you don't need to know about", it says here[0]

It's been going since forever in this format, I've seen people complain about it here before but I don't really see the problem.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/pass-notes

No, the basis of this argument is accumulated experience. If we were talking about 15yr olds with PhDs this would be quite different.

For a larger proportion, but more or less the same absolute. Plus they have far fewer skills and relatable web of experiences to synthesize what AI is.

Yes they more rapidly synthesize new information, but they also lack the crystalized wisdom to apply judgement, cross domain expertise etc.