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Please, my fellow AI bros, listen to me.
Stop pretending these things are equivalent to AI. It makes our community look intellectually dishonest.
I’m strongly pro-AI acceleration as you now. But I was also a creator long before generative AI existed, and I think we need to stop pretending this is just another Photoshop, Blender, camera, or synthesizer moment.
Those tools changed how humans created. Generative AI can increasingly do the actual creative execution for you. Like making image, music, code, animation, writing, and even videos from relatively little human input.
That is qualitatively different.
Yes, cameras, Photoshop, digital art, DAWs, CGI, etc. all faced backlash when they appeared. But in all of those cases, the human still had to learn the medium, make thousands of decisions, develop taste, technique, and actually execute the work.
With generative AI, the human can sometimes be reduced mostly to prompting, directing, selecting and iterating while the system performs most of the execution.
That doesn’t mean there is zero creativity involved. Direction, taste, ideas and curation absolutely matter. But we shouldn’t pretend the relationship between human and tool is unchanged. And you shouldn't say AI is just a "tool" today.
For the first time at this scale, we have a technology capable of collapsing huge parts of the creative process into automated generation.
I’m e/acc. I want AI to accelerate science, medicine, engineering, longevity, energy, space exploration and human capabilities as fast as possible.
But being pro-acceleration doesn’t require pretending every consequence of AI is automatically good, or that generating something is identical to learning how to create it.
We need to be intellectually honest about what is actually new here.
Stop pretending these things are equivalent to AI. It makes our community look intellectually dishonest.
I’m strongly pro-AI acceleration as you now. But I was also a creator long before generative AI existed, and I think we need to stop pretending this is just another Photoshop, Blender, camera, or synthesizer moment.
Those tools changed how humans created. Generative AI can increasingly do the actual creative execution for you. Like making image, music, code, animation, writing, and even videos from relatively little human input.
That is qualitatively different.
Yes, cameras, Photoshop, digital art, DAWs, CGI, etc. all faced backlash when they appeared. But in all of those cases, the human still had to learn the medium, make thousands of decisions, develop taste, technique, and actually execute the work.
With generative AI, the human can sometimes be reduced mostly to prompting, directing, selecting and iterating while the system performs most of the execution.
That doesn’t mean there is zero creativity involved. Direction, taste, ideas and curation absolutely matter. But we shouldn’t pretend the relationship between human and tool is unchanged. And you shouldn't say AI is just a "tool" today.
For the first time at this scale, we have a technology capable of collapsing huge parts of the creative process into automated generation.
I’m e/acc. I want AI to accelerate science, medicine, engineering, longevity, energy, space exploration and human capabilities as fast as possible.
But being pro-acceleration doesn’t require pretending every consequence of AI is automatically good, or that generating something is identical to learning how to create it.
We need to be intellectually honest about what is actually new here.
@Pontifex photoshop? Blender? Cameras?View quoted post on X
