Comment by DrewADesign
1 day ago
The only thing better than a substandard, derivative, inexpertly produced product is 10x more of it by 10x more people at the same time.
1 day ago
The only thing better than a substandard, derivative, inexpertly produced product is 10x more of it by 10x more people at the same time.
It all started going wrong with the printing press.
Bad faith argument. Did the printing press write shitty books? No. It didn’t even write books. Does AI write shitty books? Yes. Constantly. Millions.
Books took exactly the same amount of time to write before and after the printing press— they just became easier to reproduce. Making it easier to copy human-made work and removing the humanity from work are not even conceptually similar purposes.
Nitpick: the press of course did remove the humanity from book-copying work, before that the people copying books often made their own alterations to the books. And had their own calligraphic styles etc.
But my thought was that the printing press made the printed work much cheaper and accessible, and many many more people became writers than had been before, including of new kinds of media (newspapers). The quality of text in these new papers was of course sloppier than in the old expensive books, and also derivative...
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Rousseau speaks of this.
>> The only thing better than a substandard, derivative, inexpertly produced product is 10x more of it by 10x more people at the same time.
> It all started going wrong with the printing press.
Nah. We hit a tipping point with social media, and it's all downhill from here, with everything tending towards slop.
Scale matters. We're probably producing 100x content than we were making in the 1990s and 1 billion x more than in the 1690s.
We have probably greatly increased quality volume since then, but not 100x or 1 billion x.
Grey Goo disaster, but it’s informational rather than physical.
Imagine if you had to hire a designer if you wanted to build a web application or mobile app, at a cost of perhaps thousands or even tens of thousands.
Would we be better off?
I doubt it.
Do you consider designers part of “we” or is it only the computer people that count?
It’s definitely not better for the general public. Designers can’t even be replaced by AI as effectively as authors. They make things sorta ’look designed’ to people that don’t understand design, but have none of the communication and usability benefits that make designers useful. The result is slicker-looking, but probably less usable than if it was cobbled together with default bootstrap widgets, which is how it would have been done 2+ years ago. If an app needs a designer enough to not be feasible without one, AI isn’t going to replace the designer in that process. It just makes the author feel cool.
> Do you consider designers part of “we” or is it only the computer people that count?
Well you're not going to build a web application if you're a designer, at best you can contribute to one.
Of course that's changing in their favour with AI too - and it's fantastic if they can execute their vision themselves without being held back because they didn't pursue a different field or career choice, without having to go on a long sidequest to acquire that knowledge.
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