I remember when I suggested that I shouldn’t learn to write in 1998, because you can just type on the computer, I was laughed at. I was told that at best I’d still need to learn to write, and at worst computers can turn out as a fad due to them requiring electricity to work, they can crash and go bad, etc. Pease note that my dislike of writing was heavily influenced by likely having dyspraxia, and a lot of cheaper pens/pencils being mildly painful to hold.
However, the very same people are now disencouraging anything that the AI is promised to replace. Don’t draw, just use Dall-E. Don’t code, just use ChatGPT. Don’t play music, just use Suno. Don’t make movies, just wait until it can do it good enough. The music one is even often being pushed by those who absolutely despised electronic music for “not requiring any talent, just pressing buttons”, all while AI music is literally what ignorant rock/metal kids thought electronic music production was. Even one person, who criticized me for using amp sims on my PC instead of a wall of tube amplifiers is more favorable than not towards AI music.
I wonder if those who now disencourage art classes in favor of a short lesson on how to prompt an image generator will also disencourage writing due to speech-to-text technologies. Maybe the problem is that they don’t use LLMs, but often a more primitive version of neural networks.
And I’m not 100% against new tools. I even use Neural Amp Modeler, sometimes even two instances with one having a Boss HM-2 response for that Swedish chainsaw tone. But these prompt machines are barely more than toys for real professional work, due to the lack of actual control beyond prompting.
This push is what Business to Business sales looks like, the unrelenting combination of FOMO and ease of use. It reeks of comparative spending where people who don’t know what they are doing buy things for a business based on what competitors are purchasing instead of what their organization needs for the business.
This happened with cloud computing 10 to 15 years ago and is why Cloudflare going down means nothing works.
It happened before with workstations. And before that it was telephony (and that’s why desks have phones even if no one uses them). Before that it was an open office concept.
Business fads are annoying because they are a whole different culture of people I don’t relate to making choices I don’t care about. But AI is connecting all things, businesses and people. The problem is AI doesn’t fit any problem quite right so it is being shipped around to all parts of the market to find buyers. It hasn’t found a sustainable amount of money yet and the combo of business and user subscriptions isn’t cutting it. This is the bubble and when no one is found to want it then the buzz will die down and we can be prodded into another societal gimmick.