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Comment by matherial

9 hours ago

I'm really tired of these arguments (this and "it's just like calculators").

Photography decimated other forms of visual art, so the concern wasn't wrong. But AI threatens the entirety of human intellectual endeavors. I can make do without oil paintings in my home. I'm not sure I want to live in a future where we make do without brains.

Humans still have brains (and thus human intellect) even in the presence of AI... Even today, people make varying use of their brains.

  • But what use will be their brains to others if a machine can do the thinking instead for a fraction of cost?

Lots of people still make bad music that other people still manage to enjoy (a lot of it has gone multi-platinum!) even though they're not Mozart or Bach.

  • This would be valid if we didn’t live in under capitalism, which reduces the way we spend our time down to dollars and cents.

Had me until the last word. Cameras did take away oil paintings, but not eyes.

  • It did. While you're busy recording an "instagramable" moment, you are not entirely enjoying that moment. Your eyes are on the screen, not on the subject.

    In a way, if photography is an ersatz for painting that eventually made imaging available for the masses, then AI could become an ersatz for thinking. But it feels like I'm paraphrasing TFA.

    What will happen when AI companies have spent their advertising budget on math problems and whatever else gives the maximum wow effect for the bucks? Probably customers hooked on the vain satisfaction of spending token$ to impress friends.