Compare AI to clothing. Clothing did this shift decades ago. It actually did it twice.
My grandma once put it like this: “In the 60s, no TV presenter would be ok with showing up with an ill-fitting suit. Nowadays that’s normal.”
We collectively descided to move away from perfectly-fitting tailored clothes to ill-fitting mass-produced off-the-shelf clothing because it’s way cheaper.
And then there was the second shift from off-the-shelf clothing using quality materials to off-the-shelf clothing using shit materials, and as a society we too accepted that. More trash for badly-fitting fast fashion.
I fear AI will do much of the same. We already saw AI translation, and its predecessor algorithmic translation, replace human translators in areas where it doesn’t matter that much. Amazon listings in non-English languages have been an utter mess for a long time, but now we are getting the same translation mess on the home pages of major brands (e.g. Samsung or Google). It’s “good enough” to not harm sales, so we now have auto-translation instead of a quality human translation.
The same is happening right now with music, apps, games, websites, Youtube videos and so on.
Is any of that on-par with quality content created by quality professionals? No, by far not. But it’s “good enough” for most people.
I think a good example of this happened at my kid’s school’s summer party. They always have a segment there where they let the kids sing and/or dance to a bunch of songs. Usually it’s some pop music.
This time they had one AI generated song that was about the last school year of the departing class. It mentioned people and activities that were relevant to the kids. It talked about the school camp they had that year and about going skiing together.
Was it good music? Hell no. It kept mixing styles switching between hard rock, reggae, movie trailer and a few other undefinable styles every few lines, it didn’t manage to keep a consistent tone or anything. Musically, it was certainly the worst song of the day and certainly not something that anyone with some understanding of music would want to listen to again. Any decent musician would have been able to create something much better.
But the school doesn’t have the budget to hire a musician for something as irrelevant as a song for the school’s summer party, so this was the best song specifically composed for this school ever. It was the only one so far. And the kids really liked having their experiences memoralized in a song, no matter how bad it was.
I’m kinda ambivalent on AI. I hate it when it degrades the quality of something that we should have gotten in better quality anyway. I hate it when it’s used to fire people who could have done a better job.
I don’t think it’s all that bad when it enables people who could have never created what they wanted without it, and who would have never hired someone to do it for them anyway. Without AI, the school would have just not done that song.
Compare AI to clothing. Clothing did this shift decades ago. It actually did it twice.
My grandma once put it like this: “In the 60s, no TV presenter would be ok with showing up with an ill-fitting suit. Nowadays that’s normal.”
We collectively descided to move away from perfectly-fitting tailored clothes to ill-fitting mass-produced off-the-shelf clothing because it’s way cheaper.
And then there was the second shift from off-the-shelf clothing using quality materials to off-the-shelf clothing using shit materials, and as a society we too accepted that. More trash for badly-fitting fast fashion.
I fear AI will do much of the same. We already saw AI translation, and its predecessor algorithmic translation, replace human translators in areas where it doesn’t matter that much. Amazon listings in non-English languages have been an utter mess for a long time, but now we are getting the same translation mess on the home pages of major brands (e.g. Samsung or Google). It’s “good enough” to not harm sales, so we now have auto-translation instead of a quality human translation.
The same is happening right now with music, apps, games, websites, Youtube videos and so on.
Is any of that on-par with quality content created by quality professionals? No, by far not. But it’s “good enough” for most people.
I think a good example of this happened at my kid’s school’s summer party. They always have a segment there where they let the kids sing and/or dance to a bunch of songs. Usually it’s some pop music.
This time they had one AI generated song that was about the last school year of the departing class. It mentioned people and activities that were relevant to the kids. It talked about the school camp they had that year and about going skiing together.
Was it good music? Hell no. It kept mixing styles switching between hard rock, reggae, movie trailer and a few other undefinable styles every few lines, it didn’t manage to keep a consistent tone or anything. Musically, it was certainly the worst song of the day and certainly not something that anyone with some understanding of music would want to listen to again. Any decent musician would have been able to create something much better.
But the school doesn’t have the budget to hire a musician for something as irrelevant as a song for the school’s summer party, so this was the best song specifically composed for this school ever. It was the only one so far. And the kids really liked having their experiences memoralized in a song, no matter how bad it was.
I’m kinda ambivalent on AI. I hate it when it degrades the quality of something that we should have gotten in better quality anyway. I hate it when it’s used to fire people who could have done a better job.
I don’t think it’s all that bad when it enables people who could have never created what they wanted without it, and who would have never hired someone to do it for them anyway. Without AI, the school would have just not done that song.