Rob Donoghue: It is scary to feel AI is going to take your job, but beyond that, it’s exhausting and infuriating to see the quality of work AI generates and to then see that people think so little of your work as to think that it could be a valid replacement.

It is scary to feel AI is going to take your job, but beyond that, it’s exhausting and infuriating to see the quality of work AI generates and to then see that people think so little of your work as to think that it could be a valid replacement.

Hell, it's exhausting to see my students think so little of their own work that they believe I'd prefer the AI.

one kid: "I asked ChatGPT..." me: "Why? You've got the answer written in your notes, right there!"

I think that a lot of decision-makers don’t understand the importance of—or can’t recognize—quality. I know my leadership doesn’t care until it gets reflected back on them. But you can’t grow quality overnight, so it constantly bites them in the butt. And the still don’t learn. I don’t get it.

The job isn't to run a company; it's to fleece it and not get caught holding the bag when the music stops.

Yep. With tech, it's to build the widget into something that either prints money or that exudes enough appeal for a major buyout so the handful of guys at the top get to walk away millionaires/billionaires (screw the staff who actually do the creating/building and the customers).

THIS!!! And seeing so many people who were like "if your job is able to be replaced by AI, you probably weren't that good at it anyway, bc AI sucks" infuriates me. Like, the execs replacing us don't care about quality, just about how much money they can save. The product is secondary at best.

But I remain 100% confident that brands and products with actual good (read: human driven) copy and documentation will retain a competitive edge and thrive. But many mediocre to average writers will bite the dust in this sad trasition, for sure.

sad thing is many mediocre to average writes (artists/designers/musicians) won't be given the chance to develop, find their voice and become good to great.

It’s worth noting that “mediocre” and “average” are considered synonyms. People who get paid to write for a living tend to notice those things. Even the average ones…

Every good writer was a mediocre-to-average writer at some point, you're not born with it

This is very close to my thoughts on this. buttondown.email/PhantasmicTa... And yeah the fact that they have to force people in the industry who otherwise might actually care, to settle for "good enough, I guess?" to normalize this stuff is depressing

Art For Art's Sakebuttondown.email When I started this newsletter, I had every intent of filling it up with Deep Thoughts about art, culture, comics, and what have you. Several months in and...

We rapidly went from: "thanks to AI, we need fewer writers" to "AI will allow our writers to become editors" to "AI will speed up first drafts" to "AI helps our writers find similar things we've written before more quickly"

The pharma industry will leap at the chance to automate away the skilled work of regulatory writers, (often have huge repetitive documents to wrangle) and some writers seem willing to help.

My other half work in ethics for clinical trials, especially dealing with consent forms. There's *already* wild copy-pasting going on that needs humans to go "This is obviously fucking insane and has no sensible bearing on the actual drug study, where the fuck did you paste it from?" So, yeah.

Ooooh, yeah, there’s a hot mess waiting to hit a fan. As if the earlier rubber-stamp IRB scandals weren’t bad enough…

When it comes down to the the Triple Constraint, we're seeing how many businesses will opt for "cheap" and "fast", no matter how bad GenAI's output.

I think there's people who aren't great at expressing their ideas (written, graphically, musically, etc) who can contribute more by amplifying their voice through an AI model. People who like what AI has to offer are typically already used to being looked down on.

The solution to not being good at writing/art/music is and remains learning how to make it better, not avoiding the hard and boring parts by refusing to learn a craft. AI adds nothing of value to someone who can't plot a novel because it's a conceptual problem about what makes your story yours.

If you can't write music, but you want to make original music, at some point you have to admit what you need to do is learn to write music, because you can bang on the most sophisticated audiostation in the world, but you'll only make shit you've heard before if you don't learn to make it yours.

It's bewildering when someone within the industry says wild things like AI gubbins can knock out decent adventures in 5 minutes. Go off! Say I! If that's what you believe go sell it on DMs Guild and fill your coffers! Of course people will have to buy it and that's where "decent" gets the look in.

Nah. All that does is pollute the marketplace so much that no one looks for the good stuff there anymore. Even without AI, it's already supermarket fatigue on steroids.

I am not advocating the above as a serious proposition. 😀 I have expressed views on generative AI on several platforms. These may be summarised as "no" "do not" and ""poison" your art to prevent scraping" 😀 I'm pointing out that AI isn't there yet and it's not inevitable.

It's so degrading and insulting

It shows how little of it they understood in the first place!

Money sees nothing of value in this world but money.

If I was a businessman I would rather have humans make mistakes than have server farms do it for me. At least people messing up you can learn from it/discipline/fire etc and most of all you can usually trust people not to make the same mistake.

I offload a lot of my regular math functions to excel and I have to constantly check the formulae and cross check results but at least excel isn’t going to give me ridiculously wrong answers because the AI stumbled upon the time cube website. (H/T Erica Henderson)

I know my former publishing clients whose editors were mercilessly picky with the work we produced will be passionate defenders of the quality of AI-generated slop they bring back to me for a cut-rate cleanup and polish

i feel this way on so many levels. I am a hand bookbinder as well as a poet. so. . . . *internal screaming*

I just published this: machinesociety.ai/p/are-you-su...

I have to hope they legit believe the hype and think the next version will be 100x better, because…yeah. (Alternately, their brains are so used to empty, jargon-heavy corporate communications that they don’t know good writing exists.)

There are times I am so very grateful I work with my hands Other times I wonder what do office people actually *do*

This doesn't fix anything but maybe it can provide a little hope

A Grand Unified Theory of the AI Hype Cycleblog.glyph.im I’m sorry, but as an AI language model, I cannot repeat history exactly. However, I can rhyme with it.

Please. I've known for years that if corporate clients had the choice of great writing for $1 and mediocre for $0, they'd go with $0.

If a human couldn't be bothered to create it, why should a human be bothered to read/watch/consume/etc. it?

To be fair, I feel like this about most new young employees too.

I couldn't write as badly as AI if I tried. And I'm just some marginally literature rando.

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