Comment by ang_cire

11 hours ago

I think the analogy/ substitution falls apart in that singing is generally not very stable or lucrative (for 99.999% of singers), so it is pretty rare to find someone singing who hates it. Much less uncommon to find people working in IT who hate the specific work of their jobs.

And I think we do tend to (rightfully) look down on e.g. singers who lip-sync concerts or use autotune to sing at pitches they otherwise can't, nevermind how we'd react if one used AI singing instead of themselves.

Yes, loving something is no guarantee of skill at it, but hating something is very likely to correspond to not being good at it, since skills take time and dedication to hone. Being bad at something is the default state.

I have been working in IT for 5 years while being a professional musician for 8 years (in France and touring in Europe). I've never met a single singer who told me they hate singing, on other hand, I can't even count how many of my colleagues told me how much they hate coding.

Another analogy would be with sound engineering. I've met sound engineer who hate their job as they would rather play music. They are also the ones whose jobs are likely to be replaced by AI. And I would argue that the argument stand stills. AI Sound Engineers who hate working on sound are often the bad sound engineers.

> I think the analogy/ substitution falls apart in that singing is generally not very stable or lucrative (for 99.999% of singers), so it is pretty rare to find someone singing who hates it.

I tried to cover this particular case with:

> And while it is easier to become good at coding than at singing - for professional purposes at least - I believe that the effect still holds.

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> Yes, loving something is no guarantee of skill at it, but hating something is very likely to correspond to not being good at it, since skills take time and dedication to hone. Being bad at something is the default state.

I tried to cover this particular case with:

> It is of course positively correlated with it.

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> Being bad at something is the default state.

Well, skill-wise yes. But being talented at something can happen, even when you hate something.

> And I think we do tend to (rightfully) look down on e.g. singers who lip-sync concerts or use autotune to sing at pitches they otherwise can't, nevermind how we'd react if one used AI singing instead of themselves.

Autotune is de rigueur for popular music.

In general, I'm not sure that I agree with looking down on people.

  • Looking down on someone for actions they choose to take, versus for intrinsic characteristics of who they are, are very different things.