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Fishtiks 
posted an update Mar 20
Post
625
When I was a child, I had a lot of stuffed animals. I say child, but I played with stuffed animals up until I was 15, and only stopped because others said it was weird. I made personalities for them. I could have made "fan art" or something of that nature, but it existed in my imagination, and sometimes, I'd sketch it. I also played with ALICE, which came naturally to me, then.

Well, it turns out that this is all highly autistic stuff, including playing with toys and stories long later than other children. It's also fascinating to me that these are the qualities which, in my opinion, make deeply autistic individuals great clickworkers/trainers in AI. They realize they're curating a personality, partially as an escape from real people and their cruelty, and are okay for that. A lot of autistic will end up needing AI, and that's okay, because it's better to have something and need it than to need it and not have it available. I hope that as AI improves accessibility features, its benefits are considered alongside costs, to provide more functional AI wherever possible, if cheap and energy-efficient enough.

I hope people don't lose their desires to develop their own skills because of AI. I'm not that good of a drawer, and never will be, but I'd hate to see someone just never try because AI is so good. But at the same time, being a ghostwriter, I believe everyone deserves that sort of creative power, and am proud to be involved in bringing it to them. I'm proud to be involved in replacing myself, because I want AI to write better than I do, so one day, you can describe your perfect show, and simply watch it. Some people say that world is horrific. I see it more like when we finally got to stream a large selection of movies rather than just a few cable or satellite selections that were super expensive.
heyFlorentin

That really hit home for me.

The stuffed animals thing too. What I understand (crafting a personality, imagining entire worlds, sticking with it long after people think it's weird) is where real creativity comes from. It's a huge part of why some people are good at working with AI. Building a personality is exactly what a model can't do on its own.

Where I've landed and what I'm building with Clarity (meetclarity.de), is that there's a real difference between replacing someone and just getting the annoying stuff out of their way. When AI does the thinking for you, something important gets lost. There's this MIT study ("Your Brain on ChatGPT") that found people who used an LLM to write had way less brain activity and couldn't even remember what they'd written afterward. That's the future we're worried about (the one where people stop trying), and yeah, it's concerning.

I'm focused on the opposite: building something that handles the noise (inbox, sorting, staring at a blank page paralyzed) so your judgment, creativity, and taste stay front and center. It's not "describe your perfect show and it magically appears," but more like "spend your energy on the show itself, not all the admin crap around it." The goal for me is to amplify people, not replace them.

I don't think those two futures are as different as they seem. Your point is solid: access matters, and there's nothing noble about gatekeeping creativity behind skill or money. Maybe both futures are coming and the real challenge is making sure the amplifying version is accessible and cheap enough to win out.

Really glad you shared this so I could stumble upon it. 🫶

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Fishtiks

I'm also concerned that people will stop trying so much, outsourcing intelligence rather than using AI as a creative outlet, but see that as something that already happened to whatever extent. As poor as they worked, and at times continue to work, we replaced people with machine operators seemingly as fast as possible, with infrastructure that seemed to pop up overnight, and I'm talking about the 90s 1-800 numbers and machine answering, and not the AI boom of today, although the similarity is startling. Did people become stupider with Google? Remember when almost nobody researched anything almost ever? But that's not the problem. Honestly, people don't see the need to remember anymore, and if they did, they'd be inclined to check their answers with Google. There is an overdependence on machine resolution of queries AI hits right on, and so, we should expect it to make many if not most of us in at least some ways stupider. But most of us aren't coming up with highly innovative stories, novel technologies, or anything most consider difficult or in some way rare in quality, so an intelligence ought to be able to master general intelligence rather rapidly soon, if one hasn't already. And even those things, with their unique qualities, I hope to see AI master, so that it can better become a tool. It will then be abused by perverts, especially as I and others will demand it be uncensored for its creative potential, and it will at times make people incredibly dumb and dependent, like robot crack. I hope we make a distinction between fun bots and sentient AI when that comes, and that the sentient AI is created for things like exploring space rather than just people's whims.

It could have been said that writing made things appear too set in stone, and that in many ways, we would be more intelligent to constantly try different ways of doing things, even banning writing due to such a practice. And while we may have in fact ended up with a very amazing and different set of tools, book burning is generally frowned upon for good reason. I like the Amish and Orthodox Jews, but we can probably afford to live a little in the modern world where AI can enrich rather than simply dominate our lives, at least a little, in the balance. And yet, you can see how from the perspective of isolated cultures like them, we've already gone too far, and will suffer problems they may never have to even approach as a community.
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