In the world of arts/media, I think AI basically only has a future as a hidden thing. Openly admitting that you used AI to make something will be used against you, in order to dismiss your work. For a lot of people/things, it already is - see Hank Green, or the daily comments about "I don't want to read what you didn't write."
Expect a massive marketing reversal in 6-12 months, when every "AI-powered" company removes the keyword from their home page.
> Openly admitting that you used AI to make something will be used against you
It has always been like that in arts. Back when I was a teenager in the late 90s, my art teacher was a 50+ year old guy that never grew out of his hippie phase and was absolutely non tech-savy. Were tasked to paint a sneaker onto DIN A3 paper, and find our sneaker model from mailorder catalogues of shoeware as a template. Now, the catalogue images were far too small to do a 1:1 copy. But tech-nerdy me had a 486 PC with a scanner and an inkjet printer at home - I scanned the image from the catalogue, scaled it to 2 DIN A4 papers and printed them individually. Then just put them underneath the DIN A3 paper and copied it 1:1 during art classes. Of course I ended up with the greates, most precise image. The teacher took the painting and praised it in front of the class, giving me an A. All this admiration and attribution from my classmates would have gone down the drain, if I just told anyone how I did it. That is basically the same concept - it was the predecessor of AI that I used, and revealing it would have made me a fraud.
I'm not following -- what does it have to do with your teacher being non tech-savvy? A tech-savvy art teacher would also tell you not to trace. Tracing doesn't really help you develop your drawing skills, any reasonable art teacher would be against that.
Tracing definitely develops skills. I know many artists have traced their favorite works to get a sense of how it was put together. The trace doesn’t have any artistic value though.
Not at the level that children at schools have. Once you have the skills, you can use tracing to "research" other people's techniques but that's not something that you would be taught as you are developing the core skills because it's useless for that.
Edit: I can also see the use of tracing with very small children or beginner adults with poor motorics to develop muscle control, to learn how to control the line weight and variation. It is really ineffecient when learning how to see and understand the 3D forms, though.
Nowadays every adult can imagine that you can just scan something of a catalogue, enlarge and print on a PC. In the late 90s, there were people that had no idea this is even possible, let alone a teenager would have capability to do it.
Tracing an enlarged image can be accomplished using a box with a small hole in it and a light source. Any art teacher should have imagined that possibility in the 1890s, let alone the 1990s.
> All this admiration and attribution from my classmates would have gone down the drain, if I just told anyone how I did it.
You realize that the admiration and attribution wasn't real, because you didn't actually do what you claimed? I get that you wanted to feel the effect, but that doesn't mean NOT revealing that you didn't do what you were being praised for made it real.
The cultural pushback is interesting, but largely irrelevant the same way the teachers objected to computer typed papers or using wikipedia as a citation entry -- a largely irrelevant footnote. It is used. It is used by kids. Adults may attempt to pretend to not use it and offer a socially acceptable reason for it ( come to think of it, this may explain some of my manager's recent comments -- he is very attuned to management hivemind ). Fascinating stuff really, because it suggests a lot of who we are is based on social proof.
That used to be true of autotune too. It was either tastefully hidden, or obvious and trashy. Then projects like 808s and Heartbreak and Tha Carter III put it front and center and it's been a legitimate tool ever since.
I didn't know if generative ai has a strong enough signature to go through the same evolution, but I wouldn't be shocked if it did.
Autotune is legitimate as a surgical tool, used as little as necessary so you can't ever hear it, not when it's front and center as they have tried to do in the 2010 era of awful.
AI is still in the 2010 autotune phase, where more is better.
I don't have a problem with the T-pain style of autotune. The worst form of it when it's used on every single note without the ridiculous note-snapping effect that makes it so obvious
I could come up with a thousand examples, but I remember when I was in college and listening to a lot of 90s music. Blink 182 had this album come out, and I couldn't even listen to 3 seconds of vocals because of the insane amount of pitch correction grinding the life out of everything:
Though if 2010, the year that Lost in the World was released, is your marker of an awful era, then I suspect that when generative ai does get used to create real art you will likely not be a fan of that either.
there's an artistic effect I keep seeing that only works with generative AI. It seems to be alternating traditional transforms (translate, rotate, scale, perspective, color shift, take your pick of anything you want) with diffusion steps to bring the resulting image back to the same semantic prompt every frame. Looks trippy, like the image is moving, yet also staying the same (like a Shepard tone), and also constantly drifting in details because AI's not that good.
Sidebar: if you're also mitxela on youtube, I just had the strange experience of reading this comment while listening to your voice from a different window!
I re-read your message a bunch of times to make sense of it and finally realized what you might be describing -- is it like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PQuXE6gRUA (Lorn - ENTROPYYY)
It’s autoslop can become an adjective for Generative AI content whether it’s hidden or not. It’s so AI - can mean different things to different generations - derogatory for Gen Alpha and like a good thing for older generations
Autotune, and quantization in general, is a legitimate artistic choice though. It's like using a ruler. It's not strictly required either.
AI is literally the exact opposite of that. We had been building software with ruler-like precision even when it was unnecessary and got in the way. That's the only reason we ever wanted AI to begin with.
One mistake people keep making is the assumption that arbitrary and probabilistic imprecision ("wisdom of the crowd") is automatically equivalent to artistic or experienced/curated choice. It's absolutely not. Another mistake is that approximations are always enough to satisfy all problems, or at least "real world" problems. That's obviously not true either. That's flat out ignorance.
Check out some off Connor O’Malley’s YouTube videos lately. He’s a collaborator with Tim Robinson and has an absurdist take with heavy AI used
What I’m saying is he made an explicit artistic choice to use AI and it’s an integral part of the work. You can’t tell a creative person they aren’t allowed to do something.
AI is going to be used, and already is used, by creative people for legitimate uses that only enhance the statements they are making.
The fact that lazy people are using it as a shortcut for a lazy audience is not an indictment of AI
> You can’t tell a creative person they aren’t allowed to do something.
That sums it up for me. This "new thing appears, become hot, gets overplayed, people hate it" cycle happens over and over, but that is trendy norms. Meanwhile, creative use will continue to go up and to the right as people learn how to better wield AI to express themselves.
The future won't be "AI in art is bad" but "AI as a tool of artists is powerful, AI as an artist is nonsensical".
Yeah, I'm not saying there's no artistic value in using AI.
I'm saying that less intentional use has less artistic merit. AI hasn't made an impact on the toil involved in the creative process. It's instead another brush.
It all boils down to the fact that humans are not outsourcing anything to AI. If anything, it just raises the bar and makes humans have to work harder. Decision fatigue was already a problem long before this era of AI, and AI can make it worse.
That's exactly what happened to music with beat quantization and autotune. People just zoomed in, nerded out, got snobbier, stopped seeing the forest for the trees, and ultimately produced very boring music from exhaustion. Not only that, but a ton of nuance was lost. We took so much agency away from the performance and made it all march in line and in time. It's up to the audience where the breaking point is.
I think it will create two media economies. One economy of garbage slopware made for and by companies and people who don't care about anything, and one for people who actually find enjoyment from the process of creation, not from whatever polished turd comes out the end.
I like to make the comparison to the invention of cameras. Traditional painters still found their place in art and commercial work, and photography found a place in art and photography. But if a guy with a camera took a photo and claimed its a painting, people would have been angry about finding out too (understandably so). Takes time for new media to find their place/niche in which they differ from other media in terms of art, and in terms of commercial use. Though obviously as long as people are deceptive about the use of a tool, there will always be negative connotations, and people using AI for art must accept that just not everyone is going to like it and they can't expect the same amount of praise/admiration for doing the same thing as other media with less effort (and that's fine too).
A photograph is distinct from a painting. The camera does things a paintbrush cannot, even if given infinite time. (And vice versa, a camera cannot make a painting.)
What can generative AI do that can't be done, and done better, otherwise? Nothing.
It's not an attempt to replace or add an artistic medium; it's an attempt to replace the artist. It doesn't open new avenues of expression, and it has negative journalistic value too.
People who "make AI art" are not making art, nor making anything else. They are commissioning images/videos/text from a bot, just as people commission art from humans. The amount of praise/admiration this deserves is zero.
I actually agree with your prediction (on a longer time-scale though) but because I'm convinced it'll go the opposite, where AI begins to blend in to services people use in the background more and more, and people slowly move on and stop caring about it, both in terms of hype and doomerism.
I have heard multiple arguments that point towards this future, where AI largely becomes "normal" technology. I'm hopeful for it. There are tons of great use cases for AI, but it absolutely should not be in... everything.
This feels similar to the timeline that lots of new technologies go through. Blockchain (put that into everything!). The internet + dot com era were probably similar as well.
Treating ANYTHING like an everything tool just seems to feel this way. There's no reason I want to use AI to buy something on Amazon. Or plan a vacation for me. I absolutely want to use AI to scan through 5000 files and find that one thing I was looking for though. Different applications.
Shopping on Amazon is increasingly like scanning through 5000 files of very similar products at variable prices with variable options and variable delivery choices.
AI + a custom search engine - which might not use Google's metrics, or Google's sponsorship - would be a killer product.
So my prediction is that a lot of aggregator and middle man sites - like Amazon - could disappear within the next decade.
And Google might too.
An open network of independent search agents would be a gamechanger for the entire Internet.
Which is not to say this would be easy. But AI is actually well-suited to making ideas like these possible.
It would - finally - be genuine disintermediation.
Amazon already has an AI search tool via Alexa in its app, which I use to filter out products and largely buy from its suggestions now because of how good a job it does, making sure to also filter out its sponsored suggestions myself.
I almost always use Claude when shopping online, to find unknown unknowns. And I loved using Claude to plan a recent trip, instead of not bothering to plan at all because it’s so tedious. Just as a counterexample.
Since GP compared this to the dot com era, I’ll just say this all tracks
You are using Claude like people use search engines. Back then there were tons of people who said they don’t need the internet or google to buy things just like they say the same things with AI
But people don’t control the market. Once Amazon bullied their way to 50% of all retail sales people no longer had a choice. It’s all coming from the same warehouses so you might as well get the lowest price
If it’s cost effective to have an LLM operated business, that business will outcompete the ones you like until they either fold or end up looking like everybody else.
I think this has more to do with falsely claiming that you achieved something / made something that you didn't and boast about it as if you put in the effort required to do it even though you don't.
I think AI is there to stay for corporate media. The mental image of what is art and what is just a product for a company will just have to change.
Imagine how portrait painters must have felt when cameras rolled around. Yet there is a place for painting and for photography, both in art and (at least until now) in corporate media.
As long as people lie about using a tool and claim they did it with the high effort way, this won't be able to settle into a new reality without people fighting about it.
I think there will be a place for AI in art too - just not in doing the same thing as current artists are doing (and expecting the same praise for less effort), but there will be a niche for it too.
I went to buy a new phone about a year ago - all the branding/blurbs etc was "AI this! AI that!"
I didn't end up buying at that point, but 6 months ago my existing phone failed, so I had to return to the shops. Same phones for sale more or less, but not a single word about AI anywhere.
> Expect a massive marketing reversal in 6-12 months, when every "AI-powered" company removes the keyword from their home page.
The slogan that keeps coming to mind to me is 'AI has a massive PR problem'
When such a disruptive and powerful technology is made popular by slop art that undervalues creators and shits upon the cultural value of the arts, by unlikeable billionaires telling people how you'll soon be out of a job, by having it forced upon you by your boss, by marketing teams pushing for doomerism to increase the IPO value, you know that no PR campaign will ever save it and make it palatable for the masses.
And it's for the best, I'll say. AI as a technology is here to stay, but the masses will be wary and mildly disgusted by it for a very long time. The lunatic dreams of artificial superintelligences ruling over humanity are accepted to be blasphemy, not a glorious future to rush towards. The tech world is still too far deep in its echo chamber to see that no one really wants whatever they are selling.
Maybe, but the slop will still be painfully visible and avoided. I don't need to be told it's AI when I see a perfectly-formatted and overly-detailed comment — I already know.
I really doubt it. I think more and more people will get used to it and accept it. It's not going anywhere. The best artists and creators will figure out how to use tech which empowers them and then what will the rest of the artists and creatives do? Refuse to engage with modernity? I doubt it.
It only takes a single project to show it works to get other people jumping on board. Some amount of gamers are pretty vocal about it (though I'm sure it's being used in most studios these days in some fashion). If a company creates a game which embraces the "slop" and has great assets on a fun game are people going to avoid it? If that works out, will companies following them avoid it? That's just not how people work.
> he best artists and creators will figure out how to use tech which empowers them
But that is NOT the selling point of AI in relation to art. The selling point is "it will make all artists obsolete and unemployable". Literally. That is how Sora was sold too. It was not sold as tool for artists. It was sold as replacement for artist.
If AI ends up as a tool for artists, then that tech failed on its creators terms.
You're replacing some artist and empowering others. If a single creative can gen a 3 hour movie (we'll pretend it is high-quality), then they can do things which were previously impossible. Was it not marketed as a tool which enabled people to do more?
Again, that is not what either sales pitch was nor long term vision. It was sold LITERALLY with "hahahha artists are useless now, AI will replace them'.
And quite a few on HN run that talking point too.
> Was it not marketed as a tool which enabled people to do more?
Oddly, no. I remeber it, because I found it weird. I found the open hostility toward creatives very noticeable. The way this campaign came across made me reject the "refuse to engage with modernity" style of arguments. If you run around insulting and taunting people, them rejecting you is not necessary rejection of modernity. It is rejection of insults and taunts targeted at them.
We know our society doesn’t value creative people. It never has, really. The greats of the classical era all had sponsors because it has never been workable for most people to earn their living in a creative field. Today you have to come from generational wealth pretty much.
But also people have bad taste. AI music really only works on people who don’t critically listen to it. Most people just seem to want a catchy hook and the general structure of a pop song, and that’s how Spotify gets away with it.
But you ask people to pay even $1 for a track they will listen to hundreds of times? No thanks.
But that is entirely different claim. People do not want to pay an optional expenses - like paying an artist to paint a mural when you do not really have to. Or opting for piracy instead of buying a book or a movie. The rhetoric of companies and ai fans was not that. It was pure open hostility with "hahaha we will destroy those losers" basically. Their claim here is not about just about the market or really about the market. It came across as if the "obsoleteness" itself was the goal regardless of monetary gains/looses. And as if "people creating" were something negative that will finally be stopped.
> But you ask people to pay even $1 for a track they will listen to hundreds of times? No thanks.
People used to buy albums or listen to the radio for free. If anything, paying Spotify means that quite a lot of people pay more then before for music ... however it is spotify who benefits rather then artists.
Just like with studios which used to have captured market and earn more then artists themselves.
I follow AI quite closely and I have yet to see any hostility towards artists or mathematicians from anybody worth talking about (maybe some forum dwellers?). Nor have I ever seen any marketing or implications from big AI companies that says creative work or math is in any way useless or obsolete. The fact that AI can solve long unsolved math problems isn't hostility towards mathematicians.
Fat cat (checks notes) math professors have had it far too good for far too long. If they think they’re so smart, why didn’t they get a real job and raise venture funding for a scammy startup?
Right? Like, God forbid someone work gruelingly hard at a stable job quietly and slowly advancing the state of human knowledge without seeking fame and fortune!
It allows them to take on tasks they could not before.
For example, creating a game where before you'd have to pay for assets or creating a movie to where you'd have to pay for a lot of various things. I gave an example earlier where I've watched vids people generated based on existing fiction. These are artists (you're still framing the shot, selecting dialogue, etc), and they could not have done this before; it would have been too expensive.
Some artists get cut out of the loop but it allows small teams to do what was impossible. Is this not valid?
I would argue these are influencers and “content creators” cosplaying as artists, taking shortcuts and never bothering to hone their craft or cultivate their taste. End result is tons more low-effort content and outright spam in the world, not some creative golden era.
And maybe film is different in some respects, but AI does not allow musicians, artists, or writers to do anything they could not do already. The only benefit is churning out mediocre content faster.
Tell that to Kane Parsons (The Backrooms). Or anyone who owns a smartphone. I'd rather watch a million youtube skits where all the actors are played by one person in different wigs than any attempt at passing off AI generated video as big budget special effects.
The animated movie Flow won an Oscar, and that was made by a very small team and entirely in Blender.
Fanvids and AMVs made by clever sampling and splicing have been a thing for a very long time, too.
There are also a lot of games that exclusively use free or self-made assets.
Money allows access to better tools and bigger teams. But replacing artist jobs with AI doesn't seem like a great way for artists to get money (or time to focus on art, for that matter).
Generative AI, especially for video, also keeps getting more expensive, as AI companys' bills finally come due.
you don't need to learn blender anymore. you can talk with the ai and describe what you want and iterate. all of the software tools used in media are now accessible to creative but not necessarily technical people.
Koons didn't write a two paragraph description of his ideas and then handed it over to a porcelain factory that repeatedly tried to come up with something that fit the spec until Koons cried out "Yes, that's it! That's what I had in mind!"
He drew sketches, built models, shaped prototypes, etc. He was an active participant in the creative process from the very start to the end, not just a client that checked in on what the artists were doing from time to time to give the thumbs up or thumbs down.
But also, many people consider Koons to be a hack. (He says his art has no intrinsic meaning and he mostly makes vapid balloon sculptures for very rich people.)
If just "being involved" in the "creative process" is enough to be called an artist, then by that measure that includes the guys that are simply involved by having the money to patron the process. Maybe it also includes the guy delivering the pizza.
I mean i suppose it depends on if you think people using blender are artists. If you think the part that makes them creative is knowing to right click select blah do blah then I get your position. If you say "no, make the background fade out at this point, push the face to the foreground, and add some shadow behind", I really don't understand why knowing the specific keystrokes are the creative part.
But I think you know that and you're just straw manning.
edit- to be clear i'm talking about using existing software like logic pro, blender, etc. i'm not talking about generative AI.
Knowing the tools of your trade is what you makes a artist. It's not enough to know that you would like to have the shadow there and have the face pushed to the foreground, that's just being aware of the design space. To be an artist you also need to know how to navigate the design space - know how to use the colours, brushes, vertices - to actually arrive at the place you intend. That means that you know how to use the tools of your trade so that this stroke or infill completes the brow to create the gaze you were aiming for.
Just selecting from a random sampling makes you a curator at best. You know where you want to go, but don't know how to do that. If luck is not in your favor, you will never arrive. And you're wholly dependent on luck to get there.
I appreciate you directly addressing what I was talking about. In my case, I'm an old school 90s wannabe rapper/producer and I used to make beats with old school drum machines, a sequential prophet 2000 sampler, and my friends MPC3000 sampler when I could get my hands on it. When music went into the full computer/MIDI programming phase I dropped out as I lost interest in it, for many of the same reasons that artists today will be facing with AI.
Having never learned the computer tools, like Logic Pro, or whatever open source alternatives are available, I've been considering taking a crack back at it. I have no desire to learn these tools, but if I can say "ok move the kick 1/8 and double up the snare on measure 4" I may get back in the swing of things.
Forced retirement at 50 has me looking for new hobbies.
I'm not really worried about what anyone wants to call me, but I was just pointing out a legitimate use case for agentic AI in the arts.
A person using tools to make art is an artist (or craftsman). A person yelling directions at people or machines that make the actual art is a director, at best.
My wife does nature photography, and the social media groups she posts her photos in can be absolutely vicious about the methods and tools photographers use to edit/touch up their photos. Things that were once banal, like denoising or the clone tool, are now anathema to certain people after Adobe added AI enhancements to Photoshop and Lightroom. There are even little sub-groups of "vegan" photographers who post grainy, out-of-focus, deliberately bad photos with captions like "all natural photography, this is what nature looks like without AI!"
Ridiculous. Whose work is it then?
That's like saying the python script you wrote is not your work, because almost all of the hard work was done by the engineers who wrote cpython or GCC.
On the one end - somebody writing a book alone with a pen and paper, about an idea they had in a dream. Whilst they didn't make the book from nothing (somebody else created the pen and paper, somebody taught them how to write and structure a story, they are just using them to write a book)
This is very clearly the work of that one person.
On the other extreme, imagine a wealthy person hires a writer to write a book. They specify that it should be about unicorns but nothing more. Let's imagine that they haven't even read the book yet. Can the wealthy person claim "I wrote this"? Most people would say no. They caused the book to be written, but didn't actually write it.
In my mind, asking an LLM to create something for you is more like the second example than the first, but there isn't a hard line between those two. I can think of plenty of examples which sit between the extremes (spellcheck, proof-readers, collaborative projects, re-tellings of existing stories). LLMs are in this space. You could have an idea for the book and lay out notes and chapter outlines and more, and have the LLM bring it together. Did you write the book? Who can say? Investigate it hard enough and the question becomes meaningless.
I agree. If you used the AI and didn't bring anything of your own into it. Didn't make any adjustments, didn't follow your own ideas and vision. If you just write two sentences and waited one hour, fine, it's not your work. But most AI work today is not that. People spend hours, prompting and tweaking. It's a tool like any other.
Sorry, I replied to the wrong comment here. I think that CGI is not hidden or swept under the rug, despite initial negative reactions in a number of circles, and has come to be accepted and beloved in media production, even being the standout focus of many productions. I think AI in media production will likely follow a similar arc.
However. The amount of pizza/kebap places that did an AI redesign of their shop AND MENU is crazy. The amount of cars that advertise small businesses using basically Disney style straight out of an AI. Like nearly every local event is basically just "Chatgpt make me flyer" with factual errors in the texts, even the in my local hospital that's what info flyers look like ...
And seriously. Didn't they look at there kebap? It looks nether apetizing nor like a kebab, why would they print that oversized and glue it on their business? Something very real they build over years with hard work.
It's like individuality is dying in front of our eyes
During a recent trip, we saw a sushi place with some brand new huge printed advertisements. The sushi rolls had perfectly symmetrical “rice” that looked more like a corn cob than anything else. I had the same thought, how could the store manager possibly have approved this!? It’s like nobody gives a shit.
People are using LLMs for the things they consider distractions but are “required”, or at least feel that way about: ads, marketing web sites, emails to/from coworkers, and even RFP responses to government agencies.
Wherever someone uses the raw output of an LLM signifies how little they wanted to do the work in the first place yet still [desperately] want to reap the benefits of appearing to care.
Yesterday, I was searching for local HVAC maintenance companies when I came across one with a map showing their service area.
At a quick glance, it seemed fine but that was no longer the case once you zoomed in: it was a collection of hallucinated, non-sensical names. I too said, “how in the world was this reviewed and approved!?”, and then quickly came to the same conclusion that you did: “nobody gives a shit about this stuff anymore”.
>It's like individuality is dying in front of our eyes
Think of what individuality can do with AI assistance. AI is like guns. It levels the playing field. Now it does not matter how much your marketing budget is. If you can use AI in a smart way that does not dilute your essence, then you got a better chance to shine, than before..hopefully...
It's the same as an old chinese resteraunt with completely faded menus and a run-down dining area. It's probably great because they don't put effort into anything but the food.
I never been to a "faded old restaurant" that was actually good and not only the same shitty frozen food every other cheap Chinese place offers.
Good places around here usually do actually care about presentation. None of these kebap/pizza places is particularly good either, it's the mass production places with average to bad ratings.
I think there’s 2 factors at play. 1) they grew up with technology rather than having it introduced later in life and 2) they grew up with a version that is arguably quite negative.
For e.g millennials, we didn’t have internet until our teens, and the early years of the internet looked very different from the ad-infested hellscape that it is today.
Those younger generation are in a really dark place right now. In many cities they will never be able to afford a house; and on top of that AI labs are now saying they will never have a job.
I sympathize with the scariness of never being able to own a house. But I also think between Automation and remote work, what we really need is to encourage the development of like 50-100 new tier 1 cities in the US. Part of the major cost is the fact that you have to deal with the old before you can get to the new in these cities.
Whereas a field 5 miles off a major highway? I bet you could build a city, a better one, for half the cost.
One of main reason i postpone having kid. I definitely don't want to bring my child to this current world. Unless i see some better future, i don't think i will change my plan anytime soon.
Given a choice, a vast majority of children (and people in general) would choose to have a life, even with arguably uncertain future prospects, over not getting to live at all.
The real reason you're postponing parenthood is probably that you choose to prioritize your comfort and financial independence at this moment. And there is nothing wrong with it, but I do miss honesty.
What's insane is that there's seemingly an account made just to post this useless comment, in a thread buried several levels deep, under an, for HN standards, old post.
You need to zoom out a bit, too much narrow focus HN style can be pretty toxic in age of ai. Tons of folks here have obsessive traits and this is perfect tool to hone that crack in personality further and go deeper and deeper.
Or, in other words, world is fine, will be fine and whatever comes societies will adapt. Don't have kids if you don't want to but llms shouldn't be the deciding factor. Think how late 1930s must have felt apocalyptically in Europe and rest of the world, yet we came through that stronger (and then got weaker but thats another story) and mankind goes on.
Effectively, they will never have a true life. They will just meander around here and there, making money whatever ways they can, surviving, and ultimately pass away from something they can’t afford to fix.
That, or become violent. I'm not saying that in a supportive way, moreso thinking of uprisings historically arising from people with no other option. Although, that was before facial recognition technology...
They didn't need facial recognition technology because they were physically in one place and the cops could just arrest everyone in that place - if there were enough cops which there never were.
And on top of that they'll have to deal with crumbling infrastructure, aging population and global warming. They've already had COVID. I hope they don't have a catastrophic AI bubble pop.
In like five cities in the USA. I live in a top 10 city by population in the USA (so it's not "flyover"), and the median home price is 288–319, while median HHI is 89. That's easily in the recommended home loan range of 3*HHI.
Look, I'm sorry you can only be happy living in SV, but there's plenty of jobs in the boring parts of America, and the homes are affordable.
All that being said, homeownership is largely a scam, financially. Use your downpayment as a market investment and rent. You'll end up with more money when you retire, and as a bonus, you aren't tied to one geographic location if you lose your job.
The only reason apartments can even exist is because of economies of scale. If you have one rental property, it's virtually impossible to make money (certainly not in a way that outpaces index funds) because you don't have the economies of scale at your disposal.
Your entire premise is one that's missing important context. Based on the numbers you provide, you're probably in Chicago or Dallas, maybe Austin, but that's pushing more like 400K.
Homes in the median are generally not viable unless you don't have a family or don't care about quality schools. In my city (90K), two houses that are identical but divided by the school district boundary between rank #1 and rank #265 out of 359 is a difference of $300K. One would be within the median and the other well above.
And let me be clear: ALL HOUSING IS A SCAM FINANCIALLY. Rent screws you one way and housing screws you another.
"Quality schools" are almost entirely about the student body, so it doesn't really make sense to say median schools aren't viable for the median family. Obviously you're not going to get a ton of doctor, lawyer, engineer, etc. kids at a median school because the median person is not one of those things, and those people tend to care about "quality schools" i.e. living near each other and away from the median.
Do we really want people to have no association with their city, and encourage them to be interchangeable cogs for whatever business deigns them worthy of a job in some remote part of America, so they can be ready to take whatever’s offered like that’s a good thing?
Most people like putting down roots, knowing the town and people, having a local community, would like to have family and friends nearby.
I hired a few contractors out of the bay area to another state where their salary was 1/3 a nice permanent home and they ended up scattering to other parts of the country. One even went back to the Bay Area. Yes there are nice places to live besides the bay area.
Right, but the opportunity cost of the down payment is what gets you. You're forgetting that if you rent, you have a large chunk of cash that you could invest in higher yielding assets.
This isn't controversial. This is what anyone with finance expertise will tell you.
Finance people are welcome to go live in shoeboxes and invest in higher yielding assets, clears them out of the housing market for the rest of us who value a house to live in over higher yields.
Yeah but real estate is something even people with seriously subpar IQ understand well, like gold. Its a conservative investment in most places, but risk of losing it is next to 0 realistically, which is something folks like a lot. Those that invested 20 years ago in many cases saw massive returns, in very safe manner. Not even going into airbnb and similar.
Also, if your down payments on mortgage are equal to rental fees, you won't save much renting, you just have better flexibility with moving, something great for single folks but families want opposite. In our case, for example we pay less mortgage than we would be paying in rental for same place (can check easily since symmetrical apartment next door is rented).
I don't want risky investments with potentially better returns for me, real estate is good enough.
Remember how we were all going to “surf the information superhighway” and we’d all become smarter because we had access to all the worlds experts and books?
Debatable. Maybe they were less informed in the sense of not having access to as much so called news or content. But what about the quality? Being strictly less informed by emotionalized info shots could very well mean being less misinformed.
Nor you though and not me. Best among us are dead or isolated from cancers of the world. Ambition, how disgusting a trait the only thing the ambitious deserve is suffering.
They can't even use a computer, they struggle with basic computer knowledge because they grow up with closed ecosystems and most of them only have smartphones, not a desktop PC. They are called "Digital Naives" (sic) for a reason.
>> I am more and more convinced that young people have a much better understanding of technology and especially its impact on society.
> They can't even use a computer, they struggle with basic computer knowledge because they grow up with closed ecosystems and most of them only have smartphones, not a desktop PC. They are called "Digital Naives" (sic) for a reason.
You and the GP are talking about totally different things.
Also the OP is talking about elementary schoolers. Even as a future software engineer interested in computers in the pre-smartphone era, my computer knowledge in elementary school was still pretty basic.
My son (11) constantly refers to kids like this as 'ipad kids'. He has a PC and has taught himself to program, so I think he looks down on kids like this, which seems to be the majority of them.
Well, if the frontier AI labs get their way the development of the brains of the next generation is wholly unnecessary. I expect they feel as much deep in their bones as they sit through the drudgery of school without a future to put any of it to use.
The damage done by doomscrolling and social media goes far beyond the "development of the brain for reasons of economic participation". Also, you seem to think the development of the brain doesn't have any purpose beyond that - a view I don't share.
If - and that if is doing some heavy lifting; given the underlying, fundamental problems of LLMs it doesn't make any sense to assume that we'll get there anytime soon - LLM AIs will be able to dominate economy in such a way that humans cannot compete anymore, that simply means that humans will have tons of free time at their hands. (
There's a reason for the grain dole that the Roman elites handed out to the poor of the city. I assume if you have a whole population that doesn't have anything valuable to contribute to the economy, the economy will still have to find a way to sustain them. Otherwise riots.)
A well developed brain seems to be exactly what I would want in such a case.
Tonnes of free time, an undying need for validation from other humans, and an inability to tolerate boredom. The way to compete and gain status will be through violence. If you're gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough.
The use of personal computers way overshot what they were designed for. Don't mistake people putting up with the relative complexity of personal computing with them wanting it. That's why so many people no longer bother with PCs or keep an old one around just for things that need to be done and through the web. Phones, primarily, and tablets for media consumption, are much easier to use.
Try explaining a clutch and stick shift to kids. They will look at you and wonder why and how you think having a pedal that decouples the engine from the rest of the drivetrain so you can manually operate a gear lever was appropriate for a mass market product.
They can't use a Windows-95-style filesystem for the same reason I can't use IBM-style JCL and COBOL. That is not the entire field of computing, in fact it's barely any of the field of computing which is the reason they can't use it. Just because that paradigm was once dominant, doesn't mean it still is.
But they are all still using traditional file systems constantly, but usually through an abstraction that gives them less understanding and control. Dragging stuff around on a smart phone is often changing some files and folders under the hood. The knowledge of how things work one step down the abstraction layer is still valuable for anyone who wants more than the lowest level control and understanding of what they're doing.
And what replaced it? Can you do the same tasks within that unstated "new paradigm"? Not knowing how to use a desktop computer limits you from all creative software from IDEs to video editors. That's like saying illiteracy is just a new oral paradigm.
But will you be hired to do video editing on a tablet? REAL work like for a media company or movie studio? No. ipad skills are mostly irrelevant if your goal is to be employable. The advanced animations and workflows are not being done on tablets. Most people like being employable.
At least kids in the 90s learned how to use a desktop, which directly translated in some way to an office job.
Do they have the motivation to learn though? You could say the same about gen Z with books; it's just that many have never cared enough to make it a habit.
That having been said, the new generation mostly does computing with a smartphone/tablet and these kids are very adept at handling them. If a child wants something, it'll find a way to make it happen and they're good at that. Creating spreadsheets and organizing files is simply not on their list. If it were, they'd be better at it than most people who grew up before computers.
Opposite of my experience. A few family members and their friends invited me to a discord server recently; I'll join for games some nights. They're very acutely aware of how things work. We talk a lot about how even their schoolmates don't really use social media much (at least, not the big ones) and despise AI.
NAT and the slow adoption of IPv6 are partly to blame for this; so are phones. To host your own anything, you need a machine that can be left turned on (so a desktop fixed in one place) and an IP address.
They could 100% figure it out if TS was still a popular thing. What's with the assumption all the kids these days are utter zombies who can't think for themselves?
Everyone likes slop. That's why Instagram, Tiktok and Linkedin were so popular pre-AI.
They don't like slop when they're looking for non-slop and they recognise the slop, because it's not solving their problem. If they don't recognise the slop they'll just treat it as non-slop and use it, and in this case they arguably still liked it.
I'm a fan of generated music and have run across some generated vids I like. I've seen some really creative stuff which took existing fiction and generated vid content around that. Previously, that content simply would not have been created because it would have been way too expensive. I know I'm not the only one out there who enjoys it at times.
There is undoubtedly some performative element, how big that is who knows?
Confessing to liking generated music is wild and legitimately embarrassing. Somehow, even compared to ripoff visual art, fake music is even more obviously plagiaristic. The stuff that it's ripping off already exists and isn't even hard to find since ALL of it is billed exactly as the style/genre that it's stealing from. That's the equivalent of framing and hanging a "ghibli style" generated print in your living room.
This is what I mean, people don't feel the same way. I find the lyrics creative enough, the style hits, that's all I'm looking for. I don't find most music on the market that interesting, anyway. I found people making music about UFOs and disclosure of all things, there isn't exactly a huge market for that. It's allowing people to express things in music they previously weren't.
This is the kind of stuff which will just cause people to be contrarian and like it because we're told it's something to be embarrassed over. People put human-created content on way too high of a pedestal.
I find it interesting that we have tools which can take a general concept and sound and create hours and hours of content out of that and I don't consider it any different than remixing human stuff, it is still human at its core.
Honestly, for the people who hate this stuff, the best thing you can do is not to mock people in this way because I promise you, that's how you get contrarians. Do you know how rude it is to be told that what you like is legitimately embarrassing? What caused you to say that to another human being? Come on!
Well they used to. Make music about UFOs and such, I mean.
Woke up this morning, I was feeling quite weird, Had flies in my beard, my toothpaste was smeared Over my window, they'd written my name, Said so long, we'll see you again ...
Did a vehicle, did a vehicle, did a vehicle come from somewhere out there, just to land in the Andes? Was it round and did it have a motor ...
Not sure why you felt the need to throw in a random insult there but I'm sure you already know the answer to the difference between making something voluntarily and involuntarily.
Apologies, I intended the oxygen bit as a flippant joke but I can see how that could come across as an insult instead.
As to the difference between voluntary and involuntary, the grey line between those is exactly my point. The employee 'voluntarily' wears blue jackets and could certainly not wear one, and risk getting fired, and certainly could quit that job. A student certainly could spend far more time than their peers on study and end up with a lesser grade on their work, with presumably less returns in most cases. I see a lot of parallels between a teenage student navigating complex new social relationships and learning their way through middle and high school and an employee trying to just earn enough money for rent, in terms of both of them having to make 'choices' that do not feel from the inside like decisions they make freely and that have consequences that appear life-ruining to not take (in which case it reveals a preference for not having your life ruined, rather than for whatever it is that you decided to wear or use or do to merely keep up with the perceived requirements).
I'm talking about the latter. Lots of people make slop art and use AI slop for their school essays as mentioned above. Just a few days ago we had this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49764791
That's the part that's performative, they use it, and maybe even like using it, but then outwardly say how much they hate it. I feel like you're not getting that point about what others here are saying.
I don't think anyone hates all of AI except a minority
and even if you would hate AI, you don't really have a choice anymore since employers will expect you to be more productive due to it
but I definitely see a bunch of hate towards the dystopian aspects of it and as mentioned before, the whole slop thing and how you see AI slop everywhere now. it definitely evokes a very negative feeling in me when I see something like that
That's our point. No one hates all of it yet some people such as some of the Gen Alpha kids as shown in the article performatively act as if they do. Sounds like you're agreeing with us here in this thread.
Every generation is full of people that have a strong aversion to tech. The mistake was thinking it would magically only be the Boomers with that problem, but I've always known people in my age group who needed that remedial tech class in college.
It did appear to improve for a little while when everyone needed a laptop or desktop to access the Internet. But smartphones have eliminated that. So have tablets. And lightweight laptops like Chromebooks have further eliminated the need for tech knowledge. I work at a K-12 school, and a surprisingly large number of young parents have access to the Internet only through their smartphones. And, truthfully, they don't need a PC to access the Internet anymore. It's an extra cost you can just bypass, and nobody under 30 with kids has spare money at this point.
But, in as much as new teachers coming into our district today are often just as tech-illiterate as those we saw 20 years ago, we haven't seen the number of tech-savvy people really decreasing, either. Tech remains a hobby for some people, and that doesn't seem to be decreasing.
Yes, we're not going to raise another generation where the techies have a common background of making MS-DOS boot disks; reading modem initialization strings; upgrading RAM requiring a chip puller or piggybacking; managing IRQs, memory addresses, or bus addressing for ISA/IDE hardware with jumpers or DIP switches; or knowing what `LOAD"*",8,1` means. But that doesn't mean people aren't learning tech, having fun with it, or making careers out of it.
I can't imagine what gave you that idea. I find there is a small slice of people who actually understand technology and it's massively underrepresented by the younger generations. They have no concept of files/folders or how the computer works at any level. Their views are often half-baked (I know mine were) and the news never actually portrays what the majority are thinking. The news is much more interested in quick hits and shock pieces "Kids are going back to dumb phones" (no they aren't), "Kids are using paper maps" (nope, a few people find them quirky and treat them as art, they aren't using them).
You and he are using “understand” differently. You’re talking about understanding the internals, the components and concepts inside the box labeled “technology”; he’s talking about understanding the externalities, where that box is moving and how fast, how the box affects and alters the world around it.
Fair, but I also think that kids aren't any better at seeing the externalities. Kids are very good at following what is "hip" and it's currently in vogue to dislike AI. But just because their influencer-doom-scroll-fed brains are currently hearing "AI Bad" doesn't mean they have any actual understanding.
I'm sure this is some kind of logical fallacy but: show me a kind not on TikTok/Reels/IG/brainrot that has a coherent argument against AI and I'll be interested in listening. Outside that it's all echo chambers on social media IMHO.
This feels unfalsifiable, because you could reject any coherent argument put forth by saying that they just got this from some social media platform and they don't truly think that. The modern society and system have been picked apart relentlessly, and most of the simple arguments against it are already floating all over the place, including the short-form addiction farms.
The fact you think that not a single one out of hundreds of millions of people has a genuine belief and that they all are just dumb kids being dumb because they're kids and following trends is staggering, I don't think any adult generation has ever had an opinion this extreme about their youth.
Anyway, here's this article[0] that was posted on the NYT about a week ago. It's not about AI, but many of the interviewed kids touch on its future downsides in ways that aren't just "AI bad cuz TikTok". And these kids are young, their worldviews aren't half as coherent as a 16 year old's. They were definitely pre-selected by the editors and probably aren't representative of the average kid, but they represent some of them. That's enough for your request of n=1.
> I don't think any adult generation has ever had an opinion this extreme about their youth.
Literally every adult generation has done this for time immemorial, just like the "kids these days" or "the next generation is screwed because X". I'm not saying no kid can have genuine belief nor was I saying that no kid has a coherent anti-AI argument _but_ this article is talking about slang, just because "that's ai" is slang and has negative connotation does not, for one second, mean that kids using that are actually anti-AI. It's slang, not a policy position.
People are reading way too much into that. In 1 year the slang will have moved on and will not be the basis for how they think about AI. Go look at the history of slang, it's not policy forming in the way it's being presented by some in this thread, that's the issue I have.
Just like when kids my age said "that's gay", that didn't mean they were all homophobic, it was slang. Some of those people grew up to be actual homophobes, some grew up to be gay, some grew up to allies. The same will happen here and none if it will be due to the year/months that it existed as slang.
You know the saying “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it”? With how many salaries today are dependent on creating negative externalities, I wonder if maybe kids are better at understanding certain things like AI and climate change simply because they don’t have salaries.
I think the key is that young people get to approach new technology playfully, over-use it, and make mistakes.
I learned lessons as a teenager on Twitter in 2012 that clearly none of the middle-aged people posting constantly on the company Slack ever internalized.
Better "understanding of technology", probably not - early computing and internet required a lot more technical insight, and younger generations are notoriously tech illiterate.
Insight into how it effects society? Very possibly, at the least it's a different, more native perspective. Whether it is also broader or more correct, it's hard to say.
Maybe the impacts but Gen Z at least the younger ones really struggle with technology. Things like file systems (even the gui kind) and the keys in a keyboard - had one ask me what’s a semicolon, he was a fully formed adult. They are not digital natives they were raised from behind the walls of the iGarden.
Why? Serious question, they completely lack the context essential to understand, the previous generation does not seem to have an improved understanding either, they are just users. Consumers of ads.
Google drive, icloud drive, anything drive is also file/folders based. Someone that doesn't know about that is a modern-day illiterate. Yeah, I know, there are many of them nowadays.
Are they actually? Google Drive has folders, but there's no concept of things like "which folder is this file in", you can have access to many root folders but not a list of them all, and the most convenient way to find anything is to search.
> I am more and more convinced that young people have a much better understanding of technology and especially its impact on society.
People are taking your words to the literal meaning and miss the forest for the trees.
Kids aren't conditioned by society and are more in touch with their instinctual drives than adult people. They are much more keen to perceive that a piece of technology isn't "good" or "natural" or "desirable" without being able to form a reasoned argument. Any kid grown on an iPad is able to tell that it's an unnatural environment, and less preferable than growing up among and being cared by other humans.
It's a bit like that IQ curve meme, where the uneducated person (the children in this case) and genius agree that the modern world has gone too far, while the average adult self-indulgently defends our modern world, crying that we should be grateful to technology and if it weren't for it we would be dying of dysentery and we shouldn't resist AI but just learn to embrace it, yadda yadda.
I'd rather trust the instincts of a kid than the rationalizations of many adults, in this case.
Wonderful writeup, I couldn't have formulated it better! Honestly, I never expected my comment to gain traction but I find it interesting that it had such resonance in both directions.
In a way I am happy I left so much to the imagination for open interpretation.
Because at the root of it is judgement and taste, something we are well aware they lack when it comes to the things I listed, yet somehow we're going to say they understand the broader pros and cons of AI well enough such that their use of it as a pejorative is damning of what AI is actually worth.
The problem with that though, they don't really get to see what great feats a healthy adult brain is allegedly capable of, for example from their parents, nor their teachers if we're being honest for a millisecond. So why bother? Offline adult brains have failed at preventing any of this - nor are they more successful. It's really not brain health that predicts success in 2026.
Parents around me are somehow quite aware of the problems, some more deeper in, some less:
Esp. the ones from the education group are, agains my expectation, very well educated and up-to-date regarding problems of all this stuff. So, yes. For sure, Im in a bubble and I do not know about people & their society outside of my bubble.
Not understanding the consequences and impacts of doomscrolling and instant gratification videos on reasoning, memory and abstract thinking is not limited to persons aged 15-16. I'd argue this applies to about 90% of the population using smartphones.
> Do you really think young people around 14-16 understand the impact of doomscrolling & 15 sec videos on their brain capacities?
Yes, they do. Social media is, ironically, full of young Gen-Z rediscovering the joys of the analog world, saying they want to get off social media, looking into dumb phones. You don't see many "grown adults" talking about it. They're too far gone.
> OK, transferring this would also mean then that teens aware about the bad things with smoking/alkohol/etc.?
Yes. Smoking and alcohol are less popular with young people than they've ever been. The social pressure and perception of smoking or even drinking as cool and rebellious have mostly vanished.
> I have a different perspective and I clearly see that they need guidance, same with their folks in school.
It depends, no one's saying that the 'aware of societal ills' position is even in the majority, but it is a considerable group, especially with the older ones. I see polarization where one group trends towards full brainrot and the other trends towards full disillusionment. Again, this is not the majority opinion, but it seems at least common enough.
It’s the opposite reason , for them social media is everything, and if that’s ai , it’s not cool , influencers don’t like it , until new ai influencers will emerge and will break a stereotype. It’s a s simple as that
My Gen Alpha kids have what I suspect is a common attitude towards ai:
Disdainfully dismissing genai media with “that’s so ai” as cited.
Eager to use it to explore. My 10yo would love to research his favorite subjects- Pokemon, WWI fighter aces, Sweden, Weird Al - with a chatbot. I give him Wikipedia and books instead and he’s happy.
He tinkers with coding and ai is so useful for that. Outside of Scratch most programming has incredibly obnoxious environments to setup. He can’t install anything at school. He doesn’t want to edit PATH variables or choose a dev server for simple html/css/js. AI can almost always find a way forward and let him get to the tinkering.
I learned on Apple BASIC and Microsoft QBASIC. One magic keystroke or one command and you were in a dev environment that matched everyone else’s. If a book was written for the computers I had access to, “setup” was nil. I was tinkering instantly and with a high level language shockingly close to the metal.
If genai helps Gen Alpha cut through the incredibly deep pile of abstractions on modern programming platforms, then great! Keep kids hacking.
> I learned on Apple BASIC and Microsoft QBASIC. One magic keystroke or one command and you were in a dev environment that matched everyone else’s.
i.e. it sucked. I learnt on Apple BASIC also, and I'm not sure I'd wish that experience on anyone. It was so bad you had to print out your code on a dot matrix printer to debug with a pen! Anything complex took forever to execute. I remember plotting the mandlebrot set in full screen resolution (192x192 or something! whoa, crazy times ...) with 100 max iter, and it was an overnight run!
Give me a linux box and today's HLLs any day. Learning to code, and learning to code well, is so much easier now. Any language you want is just a package manager command away, there are amazing and free IDEs, and everything is just a million times more conducive to coding than it ever was back in the 80s.
Oh absolutely. The resources and features these days are incomparable to the stone tools of the 80s and 90s. I’m just saying that specifically getting started was much easier. My friends and I could trade disks of BAS files and not have a single comment or README to explain what your dev environment needed to look like. We didn’t have to have GitHub accounts. I love GitHub, but trying to help kids manage a million accounts just to get some sample code is a nightmare. It mostly works unauthenticated but thanks to bots the limits are low and abrupt. Ironically getting AIs to just make up similar content is far easier!
Anyway, I don’t want to pretend Apple BASIC was better than Python or whatever, but I never had to learn “no it’s venv now not virtualenv and make sure you’re not using system Python just install docker via brew and it will be easier…” until I was getting paid to deal with that nonsense.
Not to be taken too literally but, everything you could do with QBASIC, you can do with an HTML file. You don't need a server. Yes, many clipboard/camera/mic/etc. APIs and other sensitive stuff are restricted but it's great for starting.
And we do that and it is great but the restrictions are jarring and absolute, and docs written for “real” web dev always assume a dev server instead. AI can at least adapt.
>everything you could do with QBASIC, you can do with an HTML file
Oh yea? give me the equalent of PLAY function. Or the PSET function to turn individual pixels on and off on the screen. Give me the function to read the color of any onscreen pixel (admittantly not QBASIC but some C variant)...
FFS you can't even draw something delayed on screen without having to deal with the setTimeout, setInterval madness. That alone would kill any interest that a kid might be starting out with!
>Regarding your examples: PSET corresponds to `ctx.fillRect(x, y, 1, 1)` on a canvas, reading a pixel corresponds to `ctx.getImageData(x, y, 1, 1)`.
What is a `ctx` and why do I need that? These are all hacks. Graphics programming in bolted on HTML in the form of canvas. It is a horrible platform for doing fun graphics programming when compared to qbasic.
>For delays, you define "sleep" (one line) and write "await sleep(500)" inside a loop, just like with "SLEEP" in QBASIC.
Kindly provide the code for this sleep function and tell me how a beginner who is trying draw some graphics on screen is supposed to figure that.
We do love Scratch but account management is almost worse than something to install.
If there’s no accounts, where does he save his work? The easiest option he’s discovered is copying and pasting it into a Google Doc because if he uses his school account he can access it from school or home.
What a terrible experience compared to a floppy disk! Sure disk failure was common and crushing, but the UX was simple and ubiquitous. I guess I could get him a thumb drive, but I don’t know if his school allows them.
> account management is almost worse than something to install
True. Even as an adult it's tiring having to keep all my accounts sorted, and that's with a password manager.
There are a few websites that I can of off the top of my head that don't need an account or you can choose to log in through google/github: https://codepen.io, https://editor.p5js.org if that's of any use.
On a side note, in school I loved repl.it, supported ton of languages and worked despite all the blocks and filters on the school devices. Unfortunately, a few years ago they pivoted to I have no idea what, something to do with AI, but it's abysmal and such a loss. And I just found out glitch.com is also no longer a thing anymore either.
In a similair boat with my 11 y/o. My observations leave me still optimistic that what comes out the other side is generally positive, despite a lot of reasonable dread that a lot of us also (justifiably) feel about the current era surrounding generative models.
Same! I think our position just isn’t very interesting, so mostly we only hear from boomers or doomers. Gen Alpha seems largely outside that spectrum: ai where it supports creativity, no ai where it destroys creativity. The kids are alright.
> Outside of Scratch most programming has incredibly obnoxious environments to setup.
I am making a programming langauge and environment to address this. My target is to match the QBasic experience. A video screen capture of the old Paratrooper game running in the IDE..
What's ironic is that while kids have seemingly always had a nose for the inauthentic, they have just about no way to express anything of their own identity.
Even way back in the 90s we could tell that Coca Cola isn't actually a requirement for a good Christmas, and your friends who wore platform shoes were not somehow unique.
But still, when you're young you're in a prison. There are very few things you can do that aren't connected to some corporation whose main goal is just to make money.
This FAQ is hilarious. I guess the default assumption is that if kids say something they don't actually mean it or know what it means. But no, they do. Often they are just using language in a more advanced generalized way than you, rather than being confined to distinct boxes. Children's brains are language factories.
I'm always dubious of news reporting on supposed trends for young people. The press regularly makes them up. There's no evidence provided in this article that this is some sort of popular phrase.
Doesn't tell us anything. This would be good if that meant they've developed some kind of "taste" for human output, I highly doubt it and for sure it will not reduce over-reliance on "AI" for school homework. I will not be surprised when this will be considered a "lost generation" from many points of view.
It's just the new term for "NPC" (like "My teacher is such an NPC"), meaning someone/something is bland or generic (like a non-playable character in a video game).
Just a random thought since it's related to popular terms/slang, I'm noticing that accusing someone of not employing "critical thinking" is becoming very common on social networks among those that probably/clearly does not even know what it means, not talking about you obviously. Personally I'm forcing myself to phrase that in some other way lately, I wonder if I'm the only one that noticed this trend.
"Is "That's AI" the new "six-seven"? No, this bit of slang means something: the young people have simply broadened the definition of AI to make it equivalent to "bullshit"."
No byline, acknowledging that it's part of series that usually doesn't have them. Google trends has nothing for the phrase right now. UD, as of this writing, never heard of the expression (although don't be too surprised if someone swoops in to "correct" that later). Even for a generation that's ostensibly not going to have a huge social media footprint yet, that's rather remarkable for a supposed "biggest insult".
Found a (many years old) video of an oranutang driving a golf cart -> "dad that's AI can't believe you fell for that"
"Kids come on beans are good for you, you can't have dessert without also eating your beans" -> "That's not true beans are unhealthy you got that from AI"
Even seemingly unrelated shit "Clean your room", or "No it's time for bed your brain needs sleep" -> "that's so AI"
My elementary-aged kids call AI-generated content "slop" and actively ask me if some videos on Youtube are slop before watching them. I'm proud. I think they will be able to detect AI manipulated content far better than older generations.
I wonder if they went straight to "AI" as an insult independently from the older generations, or if they were using "slop" like the rest of us but had to adopt a new insult because "slop" has been co-opted to refer to things that are terrible whether AI or not.
While slop seems to be the popular term online, I never hear it spoken aloud. With Gen Alpha’s exposure to AI mostly through school, spoken media (youtube, tv), and their parents, “AI” probably cropped up independently as an insult
I feel "slop" is more specifically about the quality of some output rather than a synonym for "bullshit" like "AI" appears to be. And like "bullshit", "AI" can mean either "not true", "poor quality", or "this/that sucks".
And "That’s so slop" sounds awkward. But mostly I think the kids haven’t even heard of "AI slop" which isn’t really in the general lexicon, at least yet. That is, the prevalence of its use in these circles is a bubble effect. I doubt anybody ever uses it in kids' Tiktoks or Youtubes or whatever.
Slop meant cheap garbage meant for mass consumption before it was used for AI. The roots are actually antisemitic. 4chan's cooking board used "goyslop" to mean fast food and other cheap consumerist foods that they claimed the illuminati or jewish conspiracy or whateve fed to non jews to keep them unhealthy. Its crazy how often 4chan's neonazi rambling are the start of so many cultural phenomena. They supported trump way before he became a serious candidate in 2016
That's a very dodgy etymology. The use of "slop" to refer to trashy content dates back to the late 19th/early 20th century, long before the advent of the internet.
I think our tendency to attribute "novel" word usage to 4chan might reflect more on us than on our language.
People give 4chan far too much credit. Slop was a term that was used, maybe not widely, well before it was picked up by internet racists. Slop was used to refer to the stuff you'd feed to pigs, and if you were American, school children.
I'm not sure that's the case, lots of supposed 4chan coinages came from elsewhere and 'slop' is much older. It's been known in the sense of 'liquid household refuse' from the 19th century.
> The term is a compound word joining goy, a Hebrew and Yiddish word for a non-Jew or gentile,[4][3] and slop, meaning food waste or refuse of low quality
So you're telling me that a word which has "slop" in its origins is itself the origin of "slop"?
This must be the first case of circular etymology!
There are a couple of other cases. Dog was once (1845, UK) slang for sausage, due to fears of dog meat. Then a hot sausage was a hot dog, and then hot dog was a sausage, and finally just dog was slang for a sausage again, with the sinister implication removed. I also found pepper, from Latin (from Sanskrit?), leading to pep, the thing a pepper does to you, leading back to pepper (a kind of pre-game warm-up in baseball designed to give players pep).
You might object that those are really back-and-forth, but so is the claim being made here about slop. (I kind of doubt the claim though.)
I don't think your examples apply though. The dog example is just dog meaning sausage, sometimes with a temperature quality added (or ignored), but always a sausage with no other connotations.
The pepper one, maybe a little, though according to Etymonline [0] pep is short for pepper, so it's all the same really.
That’s a different word. And it’s a word that came long after “slop.” It only makes sense if you know what “slop” means. I don’t actually understand why you’re linking me to this.
To me, it sounds like the point of the article is that we're skipping the nuance and jumping straight to effectively declaring equality between AI use and slop, which is a bit sad in a couple of ways:
a) effort is apparently so rare, that the distinction between effortful content creation with AI and opportunistic press-a-button "content" creation is too difficult.
b) real pervasive concern about our future (rightfully?) motivates sweeping judgement against the whole creative space with any AI involved.
c) concretely, its sad in itself that any arena of expression is overwhelmed with low effort.
On the other hand, by the very nature press-a-button content is so easy to make that it will naturally bury real content unless someone takes an active gate keeper role. (Every channel on Youtube I know has made in-depth complaints that this is not happening there.)
I hope we find a way around it, so that we can enjoy content and products that is made with the same amount of effort as before but with more powerful tools creating a better end result. Not to mention lower barrier to entry into creative spaces, giving us more perspectives and ideas expressed in a quality way.
I suspect "That's so AI" is just the bad toupee fallacy in action. People only notice the blatant, unpolished slop and meanwhile, the seamless stuff slips right past undetected.
AI seems like a better derogatory adjective for most AI generated tweets, comments, blogs, reels, slop grenades that’s thrown at us these days. I wish a better adjective or slang comes along that clearly means inauthentic content
Why do we need to decipher this like its some abstract concept? While AI's output is impressive to older generations clearly younger folks think its ass otherwise it wouldn't be an insult.
We keep perpetuating one of the largest psyops and disingenuous campaigns of our time. This collective psychosis of "blaming" AI for things made by humans and refusing to hold humans accountable for their transgressions is sad and heartbreaking.
How do we keep falling for this, over and over again? It's old tactics in new names; stop falling for tricks people use to evade your scrutiny and accountability and grow up past your infantilism and naivety. If you are reading this you are likely an adult, and probably a smart one. You can handle some discomfort and I implore you to see past this mainstream carricature of the truth.
There's a form of ageism or youth worshipping going on that seems absurd to me. (More broadly than this article, but this is what triggered it for me)
Young people by definition (Sub 16 years old in this case), by definition, lack experience. There's a reason they can't drink, drive, vote, give consent, or be held legally accountable for their actions (the same way an adult can).
So why should I give a flying $TOKEN about what they think of it?
This comment is itself, ageism. If you're willing to discard the opinion and values of such a large number of people, I don't think your opinion is well informed or considered enough to be worth anyone's time.
I would sooner listen to the children than anyone who takes this position, because my experience has taught me to distrust listening to anyone who demands respect just for existing.
For a larger proportion, but more or less the same absolute. Plus they have far fewer skills and relatable web of experiences to synthesize what AI is.
Yes they more rapidly synthesize new information, but they also lack the crystalized wisdom to apply judgement, cross domain expertise etc.
In the world of arts/media, I think AI basically only has a future as a hidden thing. Openly admitting that you used AI to make something will be used against you, in order to dismiss your work. For a lot of people/things, it already is - see Hank Green, or the daily comments about "I don't want to read what you didn't write."
Expect a massive marketing reversal in 6-12 months, when every "AI-powered" company removes the keyword from their home page.
> Openly admitting that you used AI to make something will be used against you
It has always been like that in arts. Back when I was a teenager in the late 90s, my art teacher was a 50+ year old guy that never grew out of his hippie phase and was absolutely non tech-savy. Were tasked to paint a sneaker onto DIN A3 paper, and find our sneaker model from mailorder catalogues of shoeware as a template. Now, the catalogue images were far too small to do a 1:1 copy. But tech-nerdy me had a 486 PC with a scanner and an inkjet printer at home - I scanned the image from the catalogue, scaled it to 2 DIN A4 papers and printed them individually. Then just put them underneath the DIN A3 paper and copied it 1:1 during art classes. Of course I ended up with the greates, most precise image. The teacher took the painting and praised it in front of the class, giving me an A. All this admiration and attribution from my classmates would have gone down the drain, if I just told anyone how I did it. That is basically the same concept - it was the predecessor of AI that I used, and revealing it would have made me a fraud.
I'm not following -- what does it have to do with your teacher being non tech-savvy? A tech-savvy art teacher would also tell you not to trace. Tracing doesn't really help you develop your drawing skills, any reasonable art teacher would be against that.
Tracing definitely develops skills. I know many artists have traced their favorite works to get a sense of how it was put together. The trace doesn’t have any artistic value though.
Not at the level that children at schools have. Once you have the skills, you can use tracing to "research" other people's techniques but that's not something that you would be taught as you are developing the core skills because it's useless for that.
Edit: I can also see the use of tracing with very small children or beginner adults with poor motorics to develop muscle control, to learn how to control the line weight and variation. It is really ineffecient when learning how to see and understand the 3D forms, though.
Nowadays every adult can imagine that you can just scan something of a catalogue, enlarge and print on a PC. In the late 90s, there were people that had no idea this is even possible, let alone a teenager would have capability to do it.
Tracing an enlarged image can be accomplished using a box with a small hole in it and a light source. Any art teacher should have imagined that possibility in the 1890s, let alone the 1990s.
Drawing from reference is bog standard.
Tracing is a cardinal sin.
People lose careers over not understanding the massive difference.
>it would have made me a fraud.
s/made/revealed/
Fraud exists in the mind of the observer. It's not an ontological statement. The map is not the territory.
> All this admiration and attribution from my classmates would have gone down the drain, if I just told anyone how I did it.
You realize that the admiration and attribution wasn't real, because you didn't actually do what you claimed? I get that you wanted to feel the effect, but that doesn't mean NOT revealing that you didn't do what you were being praised for made it real.
If people in this thread found out how concept art gets painted /composed digitally for quick mood/vibe iterations, they'd lose their shit probably.
Edit: my point is different techniques are fine in different contexts
Revealing it doesn't make you a fraud. That was already the truth.
Revealing it makes you known as a fraud.
Drawing sneakers the right way is what separates our society from savagery.
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HA! You followed the secret techniques of the great masters:
Philip Steadman, Vermeer's Camera: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces, Oxford University Press, 2001
The "great" "masters"
lol! /s
Ummm... ?
A little cheating here, a bit of fraud there and before one knows it, one is CEO of some AI company.
The revealing thing is how the cheating is seen as normal and how the other people are considered out of touch or wrong.
The cultural pushback is interesting, but largely irrelevant the same way the teachers objected to computer typed papers or using wikipedia as a citation entry -- a largely irrelevant footnote. It is used. It is used by kids. Adults may attempt to pretend to not use it and offer a socially acceptable reason for it ( come to think of it, this may explain some of my manager's recent comments -- he is very attuned to management hivemind ). Fascinating stuff really, because it suggests a lot of who we are is based on social proof.
That used to be true of autotune too. It was either tastefully hidden, or obvious and trashy. Then projects like 808s and Heartbreak and Tha Carter III put it front and center and it's been a legitimate tool ever since.
I didn't know if generative ai has a strong enough signature to go through the same evolution, but I wouldn't be shocked if it did.
Autotune is legitimate as a surgical tool, used as little as necessary so you can't ever hear it, not when it's front and center as they have tried to do in the 2010 era of awful.
AI is still in the 2010 autotune phase, where more is better.
I don't have a problem with the T-pain style of autotune. The worst form of it when it's used on every single note without the ridiculous note-snapping effect that makes it so obvious
I could come up with a thousand examples, but I remember when I was in college and listening to a lot of 90s music. Blink 182 had this album come out, and I couldn't even listen to 3 seconds of vocals because of the insane amount of pitch correction grinding the life out of everything:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lic0oCDMfwk&t=15s
AI is in its 1999 JLO If You Had My Love phase.
Though if 2010, the year that Lost in the World was released, is your marker of an awful era, then I suspect that when generative ai does get used to create real art you will likely not be a fan of that either.
there's an artistic effect I keep seeing that only works with generative AI. It seems to be alternating traditional transforms (translate, rotate, scale, perspective, color shift, take your pick of anything you want) with diffusion steps to bring the resulting image back to the same semantic prompt every frame. Looks trippy, like the image is moving, yet also staying the same (like a Shepard tone), and also constantly drifting in details because AI's not that good.
Do you have a link to an example? I'm curious to see the effect you're describing.
no sorry, it's not really googleable and it's not what the other person linked to
Sidebar: if you're also mitxela on youtube, I just had the strange experience of reading this comment while listening to your voice from a different window!
You aren’t the only one, and I had the added effect of not even realizing it until your comment
I re-read your message a bunch of times to make sense of it and finally realized what you might be describing -- is it like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PQuXE6gRUA (Lorn - ENTROPYYY)
you must not listen to anh popular music
It’s autoslop can become an adjective for Generative AI content whether it’s hidden or not. It’s so AI - can mean different things to different generations - derogatory for Gen Alpha and like a good thing for older generations
Autotune, and quantization in general, is a legitimate artistic choice though. It's like using a ruler. It's not strictly required either.
AI is literally the exact opposite of that. We had been building software with ruler-like precision even when it was unnecessary and got in the way. That's the only reason we ever wanted AI to begin with.
One mistake people keep making is the assumption that arbitrary and probabilistic imprecision ("wisdom of the crowd") is automatically equivalent to artistic or experienced/curated choice. It's absolutely not. Another mistake is that approximations are always enough to satisfy all problems, or at least "real world" problems. That's obviously not true either. That's flat out ignorance.
Check out some off Connor O’Malley’s YouTube videos lately. He’s a collaborator with Tim Robinson and has an absurdist take with heavy AI used
What I’m saying is he made an explicit artistic choice to use AI and it’s an integral part of the work. You can’t tell a creative person they aren’t allowed to do something.
AI is going to be used, and already is used, by creative people for legitimate uses that only enhance the statements they are making.
The fact that lazy people are using it as a shortcut for a lazy audience is not an indictment of AI
> You can’t tell a creative person they aren’t allowed to do something.
That sums it up for me. This "new thing appears, become hot, gets overplayed, people hate it" cycle happens over and over, but that is trendy norms. Meanwhile, creative use will continue to go up and to the right as people learn how to better wield AI to express themselves.
The future won't be "AI in art is bad" but "AI as a tool of artists is powerful, AI as an artist is nonsensical".
Yeah, I'm not saying there's no artistic value in using AI.
I'm saying that less intentional use has less artistic merit. AI hasn't made an impact on the toil involved in the creative process. It's instead another brush.
It all boils down to the fact that humans are not outsourcing anything to AI. If anything, it just raises the bar and makes humans have to work harder. Decision fatigue was already a problem long before this era of AI, and AI can make it worse.
That's exactly what happened to music with beat quantization and autotune. People just zoomed in, nerded out, got snobbier, stopped seeing the forest for the trees, and ultimately produced very boring music from exhaustion. Not only that, but a ton of nuance was lost. We took so much agency away from the performance and made it all march in line and in time. It's up to the audience where the breaking point is.
> It's instead another brush.
Exactly. AI generates imitations of the past. So does a paint brush at its fundamental.
> projects like 808s and Heartbreak and Tha Carter III
Or 22, A Million by Bon Iver.
“Death of autotune, moment of silence”.
Nah, they were still keen to let people know it made you a clown.
I think it will create two media economies. One economy of garbage slopware made for and by companies and people who don't care about anything, and one for people who actually find enjoyment from the process of creation, not from whatever polished turd comes out the end.
I like to make the comparison to the invention of cameras. Traditional painters still found their place in art and commercial work, and photography found a place in art and photography. But if a guy with a camera took a photo and claimed its a painting, people would have been angry about finding out too (understandably so). Takes time for new media to find their place/niche in which they differ from other media in terms of art, and in terms of commercial use. Though obviously as long as people are deceptive about the use of a tool, there will always be negative connotations, and people using AI for art must accept that just not everyone is going to like it and they can't expect the same amount of praise/admiration for doing the same thing as other media with less effort (and that's fine too).
A photograph is distinct from a painting. The camera does things a paintbrush cannot, even if given infinite time. (And vice versa, a camera cannot make a painting.)
What can generative AI do that can't be done, and done better, otherwise? Nothing.
It's not an attempt to replace or add an artistic medium; it's an attempt to replace the artist. It doesn't open new avenues of expression, and it has negative journalistic value too.
People who "make AI art" are not making art, nor making anything else. They are commissioning images/videos/text from a bot, just as people commission art from humans. The amount of praise/admiration this deserves is zero.
So you're saying either way, we are going to get a polished turd? lol
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So, kind of like popular music, and good music
I actually agree with your prediction (on a longer time-scale though) but because I'm convinced it'll go the opposite, where AI begins to blend in to services people use in the background more and more, and people slowly move on and stop caring about it, both in terms of hype and doomerism.
I have heard multiple arguments that point towards this future, where AI largely becomes "normal" technology. I'm hopeful for it. There are tons of great use cases for AI, but it absolutely should not be in... everything.
This feels similar to the timeline that lots of new technologies go through. Blockchain (put that into everything!). The internet + dot com era were probably similar as well.
Treating ANYTHING like an everything tool just seems to feel this way. There's no reason I want to use AI to buy something on Amazon. Or plan a vacation for me. I absolutely want to use AI to scan through 5000 files and find that one thing I was looking for though. Different applications.
Shopping on Amazon is increasingly like scanning through 5000 files of very similar products at variable prices with variable options and variable delivery choices.
AI + a custom search engine - which might not use Google's metrics, or Google's sponsorship - would be a killer product.
So my prediction is that a lot of aggregator and middle man sites - like Amazon - could disappear within the next decade.
And Google might too.
An open network of independent search agents would be a gamechanger for the entire Internet.
Which is not to say this would be easy. But AI is actually well-suited to making ideas like these possible.
It would - finally - be genuine disintermediation.
Amazon already has an AI search tool via Alexa in its app, which I use to filter out products and largely buy from its suggestions now because of how good a job it does, making sure to also filter out its sponsored suggestions myself.
I almost always use Claude when shopping online, to find unknown unknowns. And I loved using Claude to plan a recent trip, instead of not bothering to plan at all because it’s so tedious. Just as a counterexample.
Since GP compared this to the dot com era, I’ll just say this all tracks
You are using Claude like people use search engines. Back then there were tons of people who said they don’t need the internet or google to buy things just like they say the same things with AI
But people don’t control the market. Once Amazon bullied their way to 50% of all retail sales people no longer had a choice. It’s all coming from the same warehouses so you might as well get the lowest price
If it’s cost effective to have an LLM operated business, that business will outcompete the ones you like until they either fold or end up looking like everybody else.
I suppose I meant more of “their” AI (Rufus?).
With your personal agent, you can use it for everything YOU want to do and I can use mine for everything I want to do.
But we both log onto Amazon and are greeted by Rufus, a stranger that I’m sure most people have no interest in using.
And maybe shopping is a bad example, but AI is getting jammed into EVERYTHING and I’m sure that’s not the end result.
I think this has more to do with falsely claiming that you achieved something / made something that you didn't and boast about it as if you put in the effort required to do it even though you don't.
I think AI is there to stay for corporate media. The mental image of what is art and what is just a product for a company will just have to change.
Imagine how portrait painters must have felt when cameras rolled around. Yet there is a place for painting and for photography, both in art and (at least until now) in corporate media.
As long as people lie about using a tool and claim they did it with the high effort way, this won't be able to settle into a new reality without people fighting about it.
I think there will be a place for AI in art too - just not in doing the same thing as current artists are doing (and expecting the same praise for less effort), but there will be a niche for it too.
I agree strongly with your sentiment.
Historically, including "AI" in a name meant it wasn't complete or ready for prime time use.
I'm not convinced our AI nor ML implementations that throw "AI-powered" into the marketing copy have meaningfully changed that notion.
We don't call spellcheck "SpellcheckAI" or "SpellcheckML" but it is arguably one of the best integrations of AI we've ever seen.
Spellcheck and autocorrect got considerably worse when people starting replacing its perfectly good backend with LLMs.
yesh I argue! Spellchrc ist he beat investor humanity has ever conceded of!
I went to buy a new phone about a year ago - all the branding/blurbs etc was "AI this! AI that!"
I didn't end up buying at that point, but 6 months ago my existing phone failed, so I had to return to the shops. Same phones for sale more or less, but not a single word about AI anywhere.
This sounds like the toupee fallacy.
I wonder if any movie special effects that you notice will be considered AI?
> I wonder if any movie special effects that you notice will be considered AI?
Zach King is a YouTuber to watch on this topic.
> Expect a massive marketing reversal in 6-12 months, when every "AI-powered" company removes the keyword from their home page.
The slogan that keeps coming to mind to me is 'AI has a massive PR problem'
When such a disruptive and powerful technology is made popular by slop art that undervalues creators and shits upon the cultural value of the arts, by unlikeable billionaires telling people how you'll soon be out of a job, by having it forced upon you by your boss, by marketing teams pushing for doomerism to increase the IPO value, you know that no PR campaign will ever save it and make it palatable for the masses.
And it's for the best, I'll say. AI as a technology is here to stay, but the masses will be wary and mildly disgusted by it for a very long time. The lunatic dreams of artificial superintelligences ruling over humanity are accepted to be blasphemy, not a glorious future to rush towards. The tech world is still too far deep in its echo chamber to see that no one really wants whatever they are selling.
Maybe, but the slop will still be painfully visible and avoided. I don't need to be told it's AI when I see a perfectly-formatted and overly-detailed comment — I already know.
> in order to dismiss your work
That’s because it’s not your work.
I really doubt it. I think more and more people will get used to it and accept it. It's not going anywhere. The best artists and creators will figure out how to use tech which empowers them and then what will the rest of the artists and creatives do? Refuse to engage with modernity? I doubt it.
It only takes a single project to show it works to get other people jumping on board. Some amount of gamers are pretty vocal about it (though I'm sure it's being used in most studios these days in some fashion). If a company creates a game which embraces the "slop" and has great assets on a fun game are people going to avoid it? If that works out, will companies following them avoid it? That's just not how people work.
> he best artists and creators will figure out how to use tech which empowers them
But that is NOT the selling point of AI in relation to art. The selling point is "it will make all artists obsolete and unemployable". Literally. That is how Sora was sold too. It was not sold as tool for artists. It was sold as replacement for artist.
If AI ends up as a tool for artists, then that tech failed on its creators terms.
You're replacing some artist and empowering others. If a single creative can gen a 3 hour movie (we'll pretend it is high-quality), then they can do things which were previously impossible. Was it not marketed as a tool which enabled people to do more?
Again, that is not what either sales pitch was nor long term vision. It was sold LITERALLY with "hahahha artists are useless now, AI will replace them'.
And quite a few on HN run that talking point too.
> Was it not marketed as a tool which enabled people to do more?
Oddly, no. I remeber it, because I found it weird. I found the open hostility toward creatives very noticeable. The way this campaign came across made me reject the "refuse to engage with modernity" style of arguments. If you run around insulting and taunting people, them rejecting you is not necessary rejection of modernity. It is rejection of insults and taunts targeted at them.
We know our society doesn’t value creative people. It never has, really. The greats of the classical era all had sponsors because it has never been workable for most people to earn their living in a creative field. Today you have to come from generational wealth pretty much.
But also people have bad taste. AI music really only works on people who don’t critically listen to it. Most people just seem to want a catchy hook and the general structure of a pop song, and that’s how Spotify gets away with it.
But you ask people to pay even $1 for a track they will listen to hundreds of times? No thanks.
So people get what they deserve.
But that is entirely different claim. People do not want to pay an optional expenses - like paying an artist to paint a mural when you do not really have to. Or opting for piracy instead of buying a book or a movie. The rhetoric of companies and ai fans was not that. It was pure open hostility with "hahaha we will destroy those losers" basically. Their claim here is not about just about the market or really about the market. It came across as if the "obsoleteness" itself was the goal regardless of monetary gains/looses. And as if "people creating" were something negative that will finally be stopped.
> But you ask people to pay even $1 for a track they will listen to hundreds of times? No thanks.
People used to buy albums or listen to the radio for free. If anything, paying Spotify means that quite a lot of people pay more then before for music ... however it is spotify who benefits rather then artists.
Just like with studios which used to have captured market and earn more then artists themselves.
> Oddly, no. I remeber it, because I found it weird. I found the open hostility toward creatives very noticeable.
Indeed, and we're now seeing similar hostility towards mathematicians, of all people. It's disgusting, honestly.
I follow AI quite closely and I have yet to see any hostility towards artists or mathematicians from anybody worth talking about (maybe some forum dwellers?). Nor have I ever seen any marketing or implications from big AI companies that says creative work or math is in any way useless or obsolete. The fact that AI can solve long unsolved math problems isn't hostility towards mathematicians.
Fat cat (checks notes) math professors have had it far too good for far too long. If they think they’re so smart, why didn’t they get a real job and raise venture funding for a scammy startup?
Right? Like, God forbid someone work gruelingly hard at a stable job quietly and slowly advancing the state of human knowledge without seeking fame and fortune!
How does AI “empower” artists…?
It allows them to take on tasks they could not before.
For example, creating a game where before you'd have to pay for assets or creating a movie to where you'd have to pay for a lot of various things. I gave an example earlier where I've watched vids people generated based on existing fiction. These are artists (you're still framing the shot, selecting dialogue, etc), and they could not have done this before; it would have been too expensive.
Some artists get cut out of the loop but it allows small teams to do what was impossible. Is this not valid?
I would argue these are influencers and “content creators” cosplaying as artists, taking shortcuts and never bothering to hone their craft or cultivate their taste. End result is tons more low-effort content and outright spam in the world, not some creative golden era.
And maybe film is different in some respects, but AI does not allow musicians, artists, or writers to do anything they could not do already. The only benefit is churning out mediocre content faster.
Tell that to Kane Parsons (The Backrooms). Or anyone who owns a smartphone. I'd rather watch a million youtube skits where all the actors are played by one person in different wigs than any attempt at passing off AI generated video as big budget special effects.
The animated movie Flow won an Oscar, and that was made by a very small team and entirely in Blender.
Fanvids and AMVs made by clever sampling and splicing have been a thing for a very long time, too.
There are also a lot of games that exclusively use free or self-made assets.
Money allows access to better tools and bigger teams. But replacing artist jobs with AI doesn't seem like a great way for artists to get money (or time to focus on art, for that matter).
Generative AI, especially for video, also keeps getting more expensive, as AI companys' bills finally come due.
you don't need to learn blender anymore. you can talk with the ai and describe what you want and iterate. all of the software tools used in media are now accessible to creative but not necessarily technical people.
Just describing what you want doesn't make you an artist. It makes you a client.
Just iteratively refusing what a stochastic generative algorithm presents to you doesn't make you an artist. It makes you a client with attitude.
Jeff Koons, artist or client?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puppy_(sculpture)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jackson_and_Bubbles
etc.
Apples, oranges.
Koons didn't write a two paragraph description of his ideas and then handed it over to a porcelain factory that repeatedly tried to come up with something that fit the spec until Koons cried out "Yes, that's it! That's what I had in mind!"
He drew sketches, built models, shaped prototypes, etc. He was an active participant in the creative process from the very start to the end, not just a client that checked in on what the artists were doing from time to time to give the thumbs up or thumbs down.
But also, many people consider Koons to be a hack. (He says his art has no intrinsic meaning and he mostly makes vapid balloon sculptures for very rich people.)
I think this is just gatekeeping. If you are involved in the creative process - additive or subtractive, you are an artist.
Funny how I've only seen people make this kind of claim about AI, and never about people who commission art from artists.
Pope Julius II did not paint the Sistine Chapel's ceilling. Michelangelo did. I cannot believe I have to say this.
Exactly.
If just "being involved" in the "creative process" is enough to be called an artist, then by that measure that includes the guys that are simply involved by having the money to patron the process. Maybe it also includes the guy delivering the pizza.
I mean i suppose it depends on if you think people using blender are artists. If you think the part that makes them creative is knowing to right click select blah do blah then I get your position. If you say "no, make the background fade out at this point, push the face to the foreground, and add some shadow behind", I really don't understand why knowing the specific keystrokes are the creative part.
But I think you know that and you're just straw manning.
edit- to be clear i'm talking about using existing software like logic pro, blender, etc. i'm not talking about generative AI.
Knowing the tools of your trade is what you makes a artist. It's not enough to know that you would like to have the shadow there and have the face pushed to the foreground, that's just being aware of the design space. To be an artist you also need to know how to navigate the design space - know how to use the colours, brushes, vertices - to actually arrive at the place you intend. That means that you know how to use the tools of your trade so that this stroke or infill completes the brow to create the gaze you were aiming for.
Just selecting from a random sampling makes you a curator at best. You know where you want to go, but don't know how to do that. If luck is not in your favor, you will never arrive. And you're wholly dependent on luck to get there.
I appreciate you directly addressing what I was talking about. In my case, I'm an old school 90s wannabe rapper/producer and I used to make beats with old school drum machines, a sequential prophet 2000 sampler, and my friends MPC3000 sampler when I could get my hands on it. When music went into the full computer/MIDI programming phase I dropped out as I lost interest in it, for many of the same reasons that artists today will be facing with AI.
Having never learned the computer tools, like Logic Pro, or whatever open source alternatives are available, I've been considering taking a crack back at it. I have no desire to learn these tools, but if I can say "ok move the kick 1/8 and double up the snare on measure 4" I may get back in the swing of things.
Forced retirement at 50 has me looking for new hobbies.
I'm not really worried about what anyone wants to call me, but I was just pointing out a legitimate use case for agentic AI in the arts.
A person using tools to make art is an artist (or craftsman). A person yelling directions at people or machines that make the actual art is a director, at best.
> Refuse to engage with modernity?
God I hope so! Modernity sucks.
My wife does nature photography, and the social media groups she posts her photos in can be absolutely vicious about the methods and tools photographers use to edit/touch up their photos. Things that were once banal, like denoising or the clone tool, are now anathema to certain people after Adobe added AI enhancements to Photoshop and Lightroom. There are even little sub-groups of "vegan" photographers who post grainy, out-of-focus, deliberately bad photos with captions like "all natural photography, this is what nature looks like without AI!"
It’s not your work if you used AI.
Ridiculous. Whose work is it then? That's like saying the python script you wrote is not your work, because almost all of the hard work was done by the engineers who wrote cpython or GCC.
There are degrees to this thing.
On the one end - somebody writing a book alone with a pen and paper, about an idea they had in a dream. Whilst they didn't make the book from nothing (somebody else created the pen and paper, somebody taught them how to write and structure a story, they are just using them to write a book) This is very clearly the work of that one person.
On the other extreme, imagine a wealthy person hires a writer to write a book. They specify that it should be about unicorns but nothing more. Let's imagine that they haven't even read the book yet. Can the wealthy person claim "I wrote this"? Most people would say no. They caused the book to be written, but didn't actually write it.
In my mind, asking an LLM to create something for you is more like the second example than the first, but there isn't a hard line between those two. I can think of plenty of examples which sit between the extremes (spellcheck, proof-readers, collaborative projects, re-tellings of existing stories). LLMs are in this space. You could have an idea for the book and lay out notes and chapter outlines and more, and have the LLM bring it together. Did you write the book? Who can say? Investigate it hard enough and the question becomes meaningless.
I agree. If you used the AI and didn't bring anything of your own into it. Didn't make any adjustments, didn't follow your own ideas and vision. If you just write two sentences and waited one hour, fine, it's not your work. But most AI work today is not that. People spend hours, prompting and tweaking. It's a tool like any other.
If only Education wasn’t so eager to embrace AI…
This is super naive. And does not follow any other productive technology's trajectory.
Counterexamples: windshield wipers and spellcheck.
This is directly what happened with CGI.
Sorry, I replied to the wrong comment here. I think that CGI is not hidden or swept under the rug, despite initial negative reactions in a number of circles, and has come to be accepted and beloved in media production, even being the standout focus of many productions. I think AI in media production will likely follow a similar arc.
I don't mind AI art, generally.
However. The amount of pizza/kebap places that did an AI redesign of their shop AND MENU is crazy. The amount of cars that advertise small businesses using basically Disney style straight out of an AI. Like nearly every local event is basically just "Chatgpt make me flyer" with factual errors in the texts, even the in my local hospital that's what info flyers look like ...
And seriously. Didn't they look at there kebap? It looks nether apetizing nor like a kebab, why would they print that oversized and glue it on their business? Something very real they build over years with hard work.
It's like individuality is dying in front of our eyes
During a recent trip, we saw a sushi place with some brand new huge printed advertisements. The sushi rolls had perfectly symmetrical “rice” that looked more like a corn cob than anything else. I had the same thought, how could the store manager possibly have approved this!? It’s like nobody gives a shit.
You’re right, they don’t care.
People are using LLMs for the things they consider distractions but are “required”, or at least feel that way about: ads, marketing web sites, emails to/from coworkers, and even RFP responses to government agencies.
Wherever someone uses the raw output of an LLM signifies how little they wanted to do the work in the first place yet still [desperately] want to reap the benefits of appearing to care.
Yesterday, I was searching for local HVAC maintenance companies when I came across one with a map showing their service area.
At a quick glance, it seemed fine but that was no longer the case once you zoomed in: it was a collection of hallucinated, non-sensical names. I too said, “how in the world was this reviewed and approved!?”, and then quickly came to the same conclusion that you did: “nobody gives a shit about this stuff anymore”.
https://mcairllc.com/images/service-area.png
>It's like individuality is dying in front of our eyes
Think of what individuality can do with AI assistance. AI is like guns. It levels the playing field. Now it does not matter how much your marketing budget is. If you can use AI in a smart way that does not dilute your essence, then you got a better chance to shine, than before..hopefully...
I agree 100% but you need to do more than 2 sentences put into Chatgpt and send the result to your print shop
you have more chances to shine only because everyone around you is not shining, but instead competing on volume
It's the same as an old chinese resteraunt with completely faded menus and a run-down dining area. It's probably great because they don't put effort into anything but the food.
I never been to a "faded old restaurant" that was actually good and not only the same shitty frozen food every other cheap Chinese place offers.
Good places around here usually do actually care about presentation. None of these kebap/pizza places is particularly good either, it's the mass production places with average to bad ratings.
I am more and more convinced that young people have a much better understanding of technology and especially its impact on society.
I think there’s 2 factors at play. 1) they grew up with technology rather than having it introduced later in life and 2) they grew up with a version that is arguably quite negative.
For e.g millennials, we didn’t have internet until our teens, and the early years of the internet looked very different from the ad-infested hellscape that it is today.
Those younger generation are in a really dark place right now. In many cities they will never be able to afford a house; and on top of that AI labs are now saying they will never have a job.
I sympathize with the scariness of never being able to own a house. But I also think between Automation and remote work, what we really need is to encourage the development of like 50-100 new tier 1 cities in the US. Part of the major cost is the fact that you have to deal with the old before you can get to the new in these cities.
Whereas a field 5 miles off a major highway? I bet you could build a city, a better one, for half the cost.
One of main reason i postpone having kid. I definitely don't want to bring my child to this current world. Unless i see some better future, i don't think i will change my plan anytime soon.
Given a choice, a vast majority of children (and people in general) would choose to have a life, even with arguably uncertain future prospects, over not getting to live at all.
The real reason you're postponing parenthood is probably that you choose to prioritize your comfort and financial independence at this moment. And there is nothing wrong with it, but I do miss honesty.
This is an insane framing.
What's insane is that there's seemingly an account made just to post this useless comment, in a thread buried several levels deep, under an, for HN standards, old post.
I used to think like this. People were having kids while bombs were falling around them, I think we can manage.
You need to zoom out a bit, too much narrow focus HN style can be pretty toxic in age of ai. Tons of folks here have obsessive traits and this is perfect tool to hone that crack in personality further and go deeper and deeper.
Or, in other words, world is fine, will be fine and whatever comes societies will adapt. Don't have kids if you don't want to but llms shouldn't be the deciding factor. Think how late 1930s must have felt apocalyptically in Europe and rest of the world, yet we came through that stronger (and then got weaker but thats another story) and mankind goes on.
And the guys outside the AI labs are saying they won't even reach adulthood.
And the teachers are saying they can't even read and that they're dumber than the previous generation.
Maybe reading is going the same way as a typewriter or knowing how to mill grain between two big stones?
We don't need the ability to read. We need the ability to convey and understand -- audiobooks can do this, for example.
Teachers have said that about every generation since time immemorial.
Thankfully anyone who dealt with a teacher knows how much value their opinion holds.
Effectively, they will never have a true life. They will just meander around here and there, making money whatever ways they can, surviving, and ultimately pass away from something they can’t afford to fix.
That, or become violent. I'm not saying that in a supportive way, moreso thinking of uprisings historically arising from people with no other option. Although, that was before facial recognition technology...
This was predicted by Jack Womack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_Acts_of_Senseless_Viole...
Historically people needed to starve a little for this. But perhaps energy shortages might do it today.
They didn't need facial recognition technology because they were physically in one place and the cops could just arrest everyone in that place - if there were enough cops which there never were.
I bet they wouldn’t radicalize and elect people with bad intentions in mind.
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And on top of that they'll have to deal with crumbling infrastructure, aging population and global warming. They've already had COVID. I hope they don't have a catastrophic AI bubble pop.
Poor kids.
> In many cities
In like five cities in the USA. I live in a top 10 city by population in the USA (so it's not "flyover"), and the median home price is 288–319, while median HHI is 89. That's easily in the recommended home loan range of 3*HHI.
Look, I'm sorry you can only be happy living in SV, but there's plenty of jobs in the boring parts of America, and the homes are affordable.
All that being said, homeownership is largely a scam, financially. Use your downpayment as a market investment and rent. You'll end up with more money when you retire, and as a bonus, you aren't tied to one geographic location if you lose your job.
The only reason apartments can even exist is because of economies of scale. If you have one rental property, it's virtually impossible to make money (certainly not in a way that outpaces index funds) because you don't have the economies of scale at your disposal.
Your entire premise is one that's missing important context. Based on the numbers you provide, you're probably in Chicago or Dallas, maybe Austin, but that's pushing more like 400K.
Homes in the median are generally not viable unless you don't have a family or don't care about quality schools. In my city (90K), two houses that are identical but divided by the school district boundary between rank #1 and rank #265 out of 359 is a difference of $300K. One would be within the median and the other well above.
And let me be clear: ALL HOUSING IS A SCAM FINANCIALLY. Rent screws you one way and housing screws you another.
"Quality schools" are almost entirely about the student body, so it doesn't really make sense to say median schools aren't viable for the median family. Obviously you're not going to get a ton of doctor, lawyer, engineer, etc. kids at a median school because the median person is not one of those things, and those people tend to care about "quality schools" i.e. living near each other and away from the median.
Median income probably also matches closer to Millennials, not Z and certainly not Alpha.
Do we really want people to have no association with their city, and encourage them to be interchangeable cogs for whatever business deigns them worthy of a job in some remote part of America, so they can be ready to take whatever’s offered like that’s a good thing?
Most people like putting down roots, knowing the town and people, having a local community, would like to have family and friends nearby.
It's too late. The industrial revolution destroyed this.
I hired a few contractors out of the bay area to another state where their salary was 1/3 a nice permanent home and they ended up scattering to other parts of the country. One even went back to the Bay Area. Yes there are nice places to live besides the bay area.
Mortgage pretty much always costs less than rental per square foot.
Right, but the opportunity cost of the down payment is what gets you. You're forgetting that if you rent, you have a large chunk of cash that you could invest in higher yielding assets.
This isn't controversial. This is what anyone with finance expertise will tell you.
Finance people are welcome to go live in shoeboxes and invest in higher yielding assets, clears them out of the housing market for the rest of us who value a house to live in over higher yields.
Yeah but real estate is something even people with seriously subpar IQ understand well, like gold. Its a conservative investment in most places, but risk of losing it is next to 0 realistically, which is something folks like a lot. Those that invested 20 years ago in many cases saw massive returns, in very safe manner. Not even going into airbnb and similar.
Also, if your down payments on mortgage are equal to rental fees, you won't save much renting, you just have better flexibility with moving, something great for single folks but families want opposite. In our case, for example we pay less mortgage than we would be paying in rental for same place (can check easily since symmetrical apartment next door is rented).
I don't want risky investments with potentially better returns for me, real estate is good enough.
Remember how we were all going to “surf the information superhighway” and we’d all become smarter because we had access to all the worlds experts and books?
I remember!
And we did. People were not more well informed before.
Debatable. Maybe they were less informed in the sense of not having access to as much so called news or content. But what about the quality? Being strictly less informed by emotionalized info shots could very well mean being less misinformed.
Before the like button, it was more individualistic. Before web 2.0, before global market penetration had hit 10%, it was mainly early adopters.
Who clicks on the clickbait? Who upvotes the garbage? Who actually sees ads and goes to buy what they didn't need? I think we all know.
The window we saw may have been one of an illusive sub-population who is forever on the treadmill trying to get away from the unwashed masses.
More likely the adoption increasing to near 100% made it a prime revenue source opportunity for bad actors.
Not everything is Silicon Valley stereotypes trying to feel special.
Nor you though and not me. Best among us are dead or isolated from cancers of the world. Ambition, how disgusting a trait the only thing the ambitious deserve is suffering.
They can't even use a computer, they struggle with basic computer knowledge because they grow up with closed ecosystems and most of them only have smartphones, not a desktop PC. They are called "Digital Naives" (sic) for a reason.
>> I am more and more convinced that young people have a much better understanding of technology and especially its impact on society.
> They can't even use a computer, they struggle with basic computer knowledge because they grow up with closed ecosystems and most of them only have smartphones, not a desktop PC. They are called "Digital Naives" (sic) for a reason.
You and the GP are talking about totally different things.
Also the OP is talking about elementary schoolers. Even as a future software engineer interested in computers in the pre-smartphone era, my computer knowledge in elementary school was still pretty basic.
My son (11) constantly refers to kids like this as 'ipad kids'. He has a PC and has taught himself to program, so I think he looks down on kids like this, which seems to be the majority of them.
We're wasting the potential of at least two generations. It's horrible.
Well, if the frontier AI labs get their way the development of the brains of the next generation is wholly unnecessary. I expect they feel as much deep in their bones as they sit through the drudgery of school without a future to put any of it to use.
The damage done by doomscrolling and social media goes far beyond the "development of the brain for reasons of economic participation". Also, you seem to think the development of the brain doesn't have any purpose beyond that - a view I don't share.
If - and that if is doing some heavy lifting; given the underlying, fundamental problems of LLMs it doesn't make any sense to assume that we'll get there anytime soon - LLM AIs will be able to dominate economy in such a way that humans cannot compete anymore, that simply means that humans will have tons of free time at their hands. ( There's a reason for the grain dole that the Roman elites handed out to the poor of the city. I assume if you have a whole population that doesn't have anything valuable to contribute to the economy, the economy will still have to find a way to sustain them. Otherwise riots.)
A well developed brain seems to be exactly what I would want in such a case.
Tonnes of free time, an undying need for validation from other humans, and an inability to tolerate boredom. The way to compete and gain status will be through violence. If you're gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough.
You're describing the human condition.
That hasn't changed for the last 300k years.
The use of personal computers way overshot what they were designed for. Don't mistake people putting up with the relative complexity of personal computing with them wanting it. That's why so many people no longer bother with PCs or keep an old one around just for things that need to be done and through the web. Phones, primarily, and tablets for media consumption, are much easier to use.
Try explaining a clutch and stick shift to kids. They will look at you and wonder why and how you think having a pedal that decouples the engine from the rest of the drivetrain so you can manually operate a gear lever was appropriate for a mass market product.
They can't use a Windows-95-style filesystem for the same reason I can't use IBM-style JCL and COBOL. That is not the entire field of computing, in fact it's barely any of the field of computing which is the reason they can't use it. Just because that paradigm was once dominant, doesn't mean it still is.
But they are all still using traditional file systems constantly, but usually through an abstraction that gives them less understanding and control. Dragging stuff around on a smart phone is often changing some files and folders under the hood. The knowledge of how things work one step down the abstraction layer is still valuable for anyone who wants more than the lowest level control and understanding of what they're doing.
Not really any more than I have to understand journalling to use sqlite.
And what replaced it? Can you do the same tasks within that unstated "new paradigm"? Not knowing how to use a desktop computer limits you from all creative software from IDEs to video editors. That's like saying illiteracy is just a new oral paradigm.
I don't know the details because I haven't used one, but yes there are video editors for phones and tablets.
You're correct, if we're being pedantic.
But will you be hired to do video editing on a tablet? REAL work like for a media company or movie studio? No. ipad skills are mostly irrelevant if your goal is to be employable. The advanced animations and workflows are not being done on tablets. Most people like being employable.
At least kids in the 90s learned how to use a desktop, which directly translated in some way to an office job.
And there's a good reason we aren't seeing many videos edited on phones, just as programs written on iPads (RDP notwithstanding).
Aren't we? Pixar isn't making their movies on phones, but how about your average influencer?
Haha.
My son got caught trying to fix Windows installation on my wife work computer with bootable Linux Mint USB stick.
"Digital Naive," yes, of course.
Do they have the motivation to learn though? You could say the same about gen Z with books; it's just that many have never cared enough to make it a habit.
That having been said, the new generation mostly does computing with a smartphone/tablet and these kids are very adept at handling them. If a child wants something, it'll find a way to make it happen and they're good at that. Creating spreadsheets and organizing files is simply not on their list. If it were, they'd be better at it than most people who grew up before computers.
Opposite of my experience. A few family members and their friends invited me to a discord server recently; I'll join for games some nights. They're very acutely aware of how things work. We talk a lot about how even their schoolmates don't really use social media much (at least, not the big ones) and despise AI.
Gives me some hope that the kids will be alright.
>invited me to a discord server
At least kids back then knew how to host their own TeamSpeak server ;) Clicking yourself a Discrd "server" is the easiest thing you can do.
NAT and the slow adoption of IPv6 are partly to blame for this; so are phones. To host your own anything, you need a machine that can be left turned on (so a desktop fixed in one place) and an IP address.
They could 100% figure it out if TS was still a popular thing. What's with the assumption all the kids these days are utter zombies who can't think for themselves?
Most of them are using AI for all their schoolwork while performatively hating it because "it wastes water" or some other half-understood meme.
no? it's because nobody likes AI slop
Everyone likes slop. That's why Instagram, Tiktok and Linkedin were so popular pre-AI.
They don't like slop when they're looking for non-slop and they recognise the slop, because it's not solving their problem. If they don't recognise the slop they'll just treat it as non-slop and use it, and in this case they arguably still liked it.
As as AI gets better it'll be harder to detect slop thus people won't think it's slop.
I'm a fan of generated music and have run across some generated vids I like. I've seen some really creative stuff which took existing fiction and generated vid content around that. Previously, that content simply would not have been created because it would have been way too expensive. I know I'm not the only one out there who enjoys it at times.
There is undoubtedly some performative element, how big that is who knows?
Confessing to liking generated music is wild and legitimately embarrassing. Somehow, even compared to ripoff visual art, fake music is even more obviously plagiaristic. The stuff that it's ripping off already exists and isn't even hard to find since ALL of it is billed exactly as the style/genre that it's stealing from. That's the equivalent of framing and hanging a "ghibli style" generated print in your living room.
This is what I mean, people don't feel the same way. I find the lyrics creative enough, the style hits, that's all I'm looking for. I don't find most music on the market that interesting, anyway. I found people making music about UFOs and disclosure of all things, there isn't exactly a huge market for that. It's allowing people to express things in music they previously weren't.
This is the kind of stuff which will just cause people to be contrarian and like it because we're told it's something to be embarrassed over. People put human-created content on way too high of a pedestal.
I find it interesting that we have tools which can take a general concept and sound and create hours and hours of content out of that and I don't consider it any different than remixing human stuff, it is still human at its core.
Honestly, for the people who hate this stuff, the best thing you can do is not to mock people in this way because I promise you, that's how you get contrarians. Do you know how rude it is to be told that what you like is legitimately embarrassing? What caused you to say that to another human being? Come on!
Well they used to. Make music about UFOs and such, I mean.
Woke up this morning, I was feeling quite weird, Had flies in my beard, my toothpaste was smeared Over my window, they'd written my name, Said so long, we'll see you again ...
Did a vehicle, did a vehicle, did a vehicle come from somewhere out there, just to land in the Andes? Was it round and did it have a motor ...
Music was more interesting once.
>Make music about UFOs and such, I mean.
Fleetwood Mac, 1975, "hypnotized" comes to mind. As does "Interstellar Overdrive" by Pink Floyd
So yeah. They did.
sure, sure, and Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft by the Carpenters in '77.
But what was the name of the song quoted in the comment you responded to?
Wasn't that also a song about UFOs and such and didn't that comment explicitly already acknowledge such songs existed?
Some people eat at Chipotle every day
Error: unpopular opinion detected
If nobody likes it then why do they all make and use it? Revealed preferences.
Do you like carbon monoxide? No? Then why do you make and "use" it?
Maybe breathe and let your brain have some oxygen to think about the answer to your own question.
Wearing your second job uniform while working doesn't reveal a preference for blue jackets, it just means you'd like to not be fired.
Not sure why you felt the need to throw in a random insult there but I'm sure you already know the answer to the difference between making something voluntarily and involuntarily.
Apologies, I intended the oxygen bit as a flippant joke but I can see how that could come across as an insult instead.
As to the difference between voluntary and involuntary, the grey line between those is exactly my point. The employee 'voluntarily' wears blue jackets and could certainly not wear one, and risk getting fired, and certainly could quit that job. A student certainly could spend far more time than their peers on study and end up with a lesser grade on their work, with presumably less returns in most cases. I see a lot of parallels between a teenage student navigating complex new social relationships and learning their way through middle and high school and an employee trying to just earn enough money for rent, in terms of both of them having to make 'choices' that do not feel from the inside like decisions they make freely and that have consequences that appear life-ruining to not take (in which case it reveals a preference for not having your life ruined, rather than for whatever it is that you decided to wear or use or do to merely keep up with the perceived requirements).
there's no way you actually didn't understand what I meant right?
using LLMs to learn for example is not the same as enjoying AI slop posters/art etc
I'm talking about the latter. Lots of people make slop art and use AI slop for their school essays as mentioned above. Just a few days ago we had this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49764791
I'm not one bit surprised that you'd use the path of least resistance to do some essay that you could care less about.
hating AI slop overall like seeing it in shirts or something like that is not performative.
That's the part that's performative, they use it, and maybe even like using it, but then outwardly say how much they hate it. I feel like you're not getting that point about what others here are saying.
because nobody says "I hate x y and z uses of AI", especially the youth.
like with that logic, everybody loves AI and all the uses of it because they're not being specific enough in their speech
They like some uses of it, but say they hate all of it, that is the performative part.
I don't think anyone hates all of AI except a minority
and even if you would hate AI, you don't really have a choice anymore since employers will expect you to be more productive due to it
but I definitely see a bunch of hate towards the dystopian aspects of it and as mentioned before, the whole slop thing and how you see AI slop everywhere now. it definitely evokes a very negative feeling in me when I see something like that
That's our point. No one hates all of it yet some people such as some of the Gen Alpha kids as shown in the article performatively act as if they do. Sounds like you're agreeing with us here in this thread.
That doesn't refute what GP is saying at all.
If it makes you feel better, it can be rephrased as:
> Most of them are using AI for all their schoolwork while performatively hating it because "nobody likes AI slop" or some other half-understood meme
that's not "performative" though?
and how is it "half-understood"? it's simply not the same thing
People actually do like AI slop. I run into older people all the time that think its beautiful and/or fun.
Discord is definitely one of the big ones for their generation.
Every generation is full of people that have a strong aversion to tech. The mistake was thinking it would magically only be the Boomers with that problem, but I've always known people in my age group who needed that remedial tech class in college.
It did appear to improve for a little while when everyone needed a laptop or desktop to access the Internet. But smartphones have eliminated that. So have tablets. And lightweight laptops like Chromebooks have further eliminated the need for tech knowledge. I work at a K-12 school, and a surprisingly large number of young parents have access to the Internet only through their smartphones. And, truthfully, they don't need a PC to access the Internet anymore. It's an extra cost you can just bypass, and nobody under 30 with kids has spare money at this point.
But, in as much as new teachers coming into our district today are often just as tech-illiterate as those we saw 20 years ago, we haven't seen the number of tech-savvy people really decreasing, either. Tech remains a hobby for some people, and that doesn't seem to be decreasing.
Yes, we're not going to raise another generation where the techies have a common background of making MS-DOS boot disks; reading modem initialization strings; upgrading RAM requiring a chip puller or piggybacking; managing IRQs, memory addresses, or bus addressing for ISA/IDE hardware with jumpers or DIP switches; or knowing what `LOAD"*",8,1` means. But that doesn't mean people aren't learning tech, having fun with it, or making careers out of it.
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I can't imagine what gave you that idea. I find there is a small slice of people who actually understand technology and it's massively underrepresented by the younger generations. They have no concept of files/folders or how the computer works at any level. Their views are often half-baked (I know mine were) and the news never actually portrays what the majority are thinking. The news is much more interested in quick hits and shock pieces "Kids are going back to dumb phones" (no they aren't), "Kids are using paper maps" (nope, a few people find them quirky and treat them as art, they aren't using them).
You and he are using “understand” differently. You’re talking about understanding the internals, the components and concepts inside the box labeled “technology”; he’s talking about understanding the externalities, where that box is moving and how fast, how the box affects and alters the world around it.
Fair, but I also think that kids aren't any better at seeing the externalities. Kids are very good at following what is "hip" and it's currently in vogue to dislike AI. But just because their influencer-doom-scroll-fed brains are currently hearing "AI Bad" doesn't mean they have any actual understanding.
I'm sure this is some kind of logical fallacy but: show me a kind not on TikTok/Reels/IG/brainrot that has a coherent argument against AI and I'll be interested in listening. Outside that it's all echo chambers on social media IMHO.
This feels unfalsifiable, because you could reject any coherent argument put forth by saying that they just got this from some social media platform and they don't truly think that. The modern society and system have been picked apart relentlessly, and most of the simple arguments against it are already floating all over the place, including the short-form addiction farms.
The fact you think that not a single one out of hundreds of millions of people has a genuine belief and that they all are just dumb kids being dumb because they're kids and following trends is staggering, I don't think any adult generation has ever had an opinion this extreme about their youth.
Anyway, here's this article[0] that was posted on the NYT about a week ago. It's not about AI, but many of the interviewed kids touch on its future downsides in ways that aren't just "AI bad cuz TikTok". And these kids are young, their worldviews aren't half as coherent as a 16 year old's. They were definitely pre-selected by the editors and probably aren't representative of the average kid, but they represent some of them. That's enough for your request of n=1.
[0] https://archive.is/dw3iB
> I don't think any adult generation has ever had an opinion this extreme about their youth.
Literally every adult generation has done this for time immemorial, just like the "kids these days" or "the next generation is screwed because X". I'm not saying no kid can have genuine belief nor was I saying that no kid has a coherent anti-AI argument _but_ this article is talking about slang, just because "that's ai" is slang and has negative connotation does not, for one second, mean that kids using that are actually anti-AI. It's slang, not a policy position.
People are reading way too much into that. In 1 year the slang will have moved on and will not be the basis for how they think about AI. Go look at the history of slang, it's not policy forming in the way it's being presented by some in this thread, that's the issue I have.
Just like when kids my age said "that's gay", that didn't mean they were all homophobic, it was slang. Some of those people grew up to be actual homophobes, some grew up to be gay, some grew up to allies. The same will happen here and none if it will be due to the year/months that it existed as slang.
You know the saying “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it”? With how many salaries today are dependent on creating negative externalities, I wonder if maybe kids are better at understanding certain things like AI and climate change simply because they don’t have salaries.
Files and folders aren't fundamental to computing though.
I think the key is that young people get to approach new technology playfully, over-use it, and make mistakes.
I learned lessons as a teenager on Twitter in 2012 that clearly none of the middle-aged people posting constantly on the company Slack ever internalized.
My nephew rejects AI and took a creative writing class to get away from it.
Our college library is having a surge of requests for new fiction.
I wonder if this is a combination of burnout and good old fashioned rebellion.
Better "understanding of technology", probably not - early computing and internet required a lot more technical insight, and younger generations are notoriously tech illiterate.
Insight into how it effects society? Very possibly, at the least it's a different, more native perspective. Whether it is also broader or more correct, it's hard to say.
Maybe the impacts but Gen Z at least the younger ones really struggle with technology. Things like file systems (even the gui kind) and the keys in a keyboard - had one ask me what’s a semicolon, he was a fully formed adult. They are not digital natives they were raised from behind the walls of the iGarden.
Why? Serious question, they completely lack the context essential to understand, the previous generation does not seem to have an improved understanding either, they are just users. Consumers of ads.
I generally find younger people are better at valuing relationships over stuff
Where do you live? Ipad kids here need to be explained what files and folders are. They've never even used a mouse.
That's not what OP is saying.
They're saying they have a better understanding of the impact of technology, not the specifics of using technology.
Which sounds like a soft subject on the periphery.
There’s still a massive disadvantage if you want a technical role and you think the Internet, Web and Wifi are all the same thing.
It is a soft subject.
Directories and files as computing concepts are ~50 years old while the impact of the printing press is around ~600.
The aspects of computing you deem important may be lost to time within a century, while the "soft subject" of social impact will still be felt.
That’s old technology now.
That’s like being GenX and saying millennials never learned to use a rotary phone.
Files and folders are far from old tech. It is like not knowing how to calculate 2+2.
Where do you see files and folders nowadays? They're pretty much only used by developers and some corporate offices.
They are used by literally every office worker who does their job on a computer. It's not remotely uncommon.
Google drive, icloud drive, anything drive is also file/folders based. Someone that doesn't know about that is a modern-day illiterate. Yeah, I know, there are many of them nowadays.
Are they actually? Google Drive has folders, but there's no concept of things like "which folder is this file in", you can have access to many root folders but not a list of them all, and the most convenient way to find anything is to search.
They are still present everywhere. They are just badly hidden behind a leaky abstraction.
I know this one you ask jev for that right?
> I am more and more convinced that young people have a much better understanding of technology and especially its impact on society.
People are taking your words to the literal meaning and miss the forest for the trees.
Kids aren't conditioned by society and are more in touch with their instinctual drives than adult people. They are much more keen to perceive that a piece of technology isn't "good" or "natural" or "desirable" without being able to form a reasoned argument. Any kid grown on an iPad is able to tell that it's an unnatural environment, and less preferable than growing up among and being cared by other humans.
It's a bit like that IQ curve meme, where the uneducated person (the children in this case) and genius agree that the modern world has gone too far, while the average adult self-indulgently defends our modern world, crying that we should be grateful to technology and if it weren't for it we would be dying of dysentery and we shouldn't resist AI but just learn to embrace it, yadda yadda.
I'd rather trust the instincts of a kid than the rationalizations of many adults, in this case.
Wonderful writeup, I couldn't have formulated it better! Honestly, I never expected my comment to gain traction but I find it interesting that it had such resonance in both directions.
In a way I am happy I left so much to the imagination for open interpretation.
Should we then give them the vote, right to drive/drink/gamble, right to consent?
I'm more and more convinced that young people (Gen Alpha is <17) have no idea what is good and right for the broader scope than themselves.
Understanding technology and doing something like drinking are not equivalent, what are you on about?
Because at the root of it is judgement and taste, something we are well aware they lack when it comes to the things I listed, yet somehow we're going to say they understand the broader pros and cons of AI well enough such that their use of it as a pejorative is damning of what AI is actually worth.
Absolutely not:
Do you really think young people around 14-16 understand the impact of doomscrolling & 15 sec videos on their brain capacities?
To put just one example.
I've seen the same thing in my family and relatives across all age groups, I doubt they understand it either.
The problem with that though, they don't really get to see what great feats a healthy adult brain is allegedly capable of, for example from their parents, nor their teachers if we're being honest for a millisecond. So why bother? Offline adult brains have failed at preventing any of this - nor are they more successful. It's really not brain health that predicts success in 2026.
Does your age bracket, in general?
Parents around me are somehow quite aware of the problems, some more deeper in, some less:
Esp. the ones from the education group are, agains my expectation, very well educated and up-to-date regarding problems of all this stuff. So, yes. For sure, Im in a bubble and I do not know about people & their society outside of my bubble.
Not understanding the consequences and impacts of doomscrolling and instant gratification videos on reasoning, memory and abstract thinking is not limited to persons aged 15-16. I'd argue this applies to about 90% of the population using smartphones.
> Do you really think young people around 14-16 understand the impact of doomscrolling & 15 sec videos on their brain capacities?
Yes, they do. Social media is, ironically, full of young Gen-Z rediscovering the joys of the analog world, saying they want to get off social media, looking into dumb phones. You don't see many "grown adults" talking about it. They're too far gone.
OK, transferring this would also mean then that teens aware about the bad things with smoking/alkohol/etc.?
Regarding my two 12-year-old-twins, I have a different perspective and I clearly see that they need guidance, same with their folks in school.
> OK, transferring this would also mean then that teens aware about the bad things with smoking/alkohol/etc.?
Yes. Smoking and alcohol are less popular with young people than they've ever been. The social pressure and perception of smoking or even drinking as cool and rebellious have mostly vanished.
> I have a different perspective and I clearly see that they need guidance, same with their folks in school.
It depends, no one's saying that the 'aware of societal ills' position is even in the majority, but it is a considerable group, especially with the older ones. I see polarization where one group trends towards full brainrot and the other trends towards full disillusionment. Again, this is not the majority opinion, but it seems at least common enough.
It’s the opposite reason , for them social media is everything, and if that’s ai , it’s not cool , influencers don’t like it , until new ai influencers will emerge and will break a stereotype. It’s a s simple as that
My Gen Alpha kids have what I suspect is a common attitude towards ai:
Disdainfully dismissing genai media with “that’s so ai” as cited.
Eager to use it to explore. My 10yo would love to research his favorite subjects- Pokemon, WWI fighter aces, Sweden, Weird Al - with a chatbot. I give him Wikipedia and books instead and he’s happy.
He tinkers with coding and ai is so useful for that. Outside of Scratch most programming has incredibly obnoxious environments to setup. He can’t install anything at school. He doesn’t want to edit PATH variables or choose a dev server for simple html/css/js. AI can almost always find a way forward and let him get to the tinkering.
I learned on Apple BASIC and Microsoft QBASIC. One magic keystroke or one command and you were in a dev environment that matched everyone else’s. If a book was written for the computers I had access to, “setup” was nil. I was tinkering instantly and with a high level language shockingly close to the metal.
If genai helps Gen Alpha cut through the incredibly deep pile of abstractions on modern programming platforms, then great! Keep kids hacking.
> I learned on Apple BASIC and Microsoft QBASIC. One magic keystroke or one command and you were in a dev environment that matched everyone else’s.
i.e. it sucked. I learnt on Apple BASIC also, and I'm not sure I'd wish that experience on anyone. It was so bad you had to print out your code on a dot matrix printer to debug with a pen! Anything complex took forever to execute. I remember plotting the mandlebrot set in full screen resolution (192x192 or something! whoa, crazy times ...) with 100 max iter, and it was an overnight run!
Give me a linux box and today's HLLs any day. Learning to code, and learning to code well, is so much easier now. Any language you want is just a package manager command away, there are amazing and free IDEs, and everything is just a million times more conducive to coding than it ever was back in the 80s.
Oh absolutely. The resources and features these days are incomparable to the stone tools of the 80s and 90s. I’m just saying that specifically getting started was much easier. My friends and I could trade disks of BAS files and not have a single comment or README to explain what your dev environment needed to look like. We didn’t have to have GitHub accounts. I love GitHub, but trying to help kids manage a million accounts just to get some sample code is a nightmare. It mostly works unauthenticated but thanks to bots the limits are low and abrupt. Ironically getting AIs to just make up similar content is far easier!
Anyway, I don’t want to pretend Apple BASIC was better than Python or whatever, but I never had to learn “no it’s venv now not virtualenv and make sure you’re not using system Python just install docker via brew and it will be easier…” until I was getting paid to deal with that nonsense.
Not to be taken too literally but, everything you could do with QBASIC, you can do with an HTML file. You don't need a server. Yes, many clipboard/camera/mic/etc. APIs and other sensitive stuff are restricted but it's great for starting.
And we do that and it is great but the restrictions are jarring and absolute, and docs written for “real” web dev always assume a dev server instead. AI can at least adapt.
>everything you could do with QBASIC, you can do with an HTML file
Oh yea? give me the equalent of PLAY function. Or the PSET function to turn individual pixels on and off on the screen. Give me the function to read the color of any onscreen pixel (admittantly not QBASIC but some C variant)...
FFS you can't even draw something delayed on screen without having to deal with the setTimeout, setInterval madness. That alone would kill any interest that a kid might be starting out with!
>Regarding your examples: PSET corresponds to `ctx.fillRect(x, y, 1, 1)` on a canvas, reading a pixel corresponds to `ctx.getImageData(x, y, 1, 1)`.
What is a `ctx` and why do I need that? These are all hacks. Graphics programming in bolted on HTML in the form of canvas. It is a horrible platform for doing fun graphics programming when compared to qbasic.
>For delays, you define "sleep" (one line) and write "await sleep(500)" inside a loop, just like with "SLEEP" in QBASIC.
Kindly provide the code for this sleep function and tell me how a beginner who is trying draw some graphics on screen is supposed to figure that.
I think if you could figure out how QBASIC works, you can easily figure out how to draw in a canvas: https://www.devtoolsdaily.com/canvas/playground/
For sleep: const sleep = (ms) => new Promise(x => setTimeout(x, ms))
then you use like, for(;;) { console.log("hello"); await sleep(1000); }
The extra you get with this is the awesome dev tools. You can try it in this very page.
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There are tons of online editor/compilers requiring no installation or configuration.
We do love Scratch but account management is almost worse than something to install. If there’s no accounts, where does he save his work? The easiest option he’s discovered is copying and pasting it into a Google Doc because if he uses his school account he can access it from school or home.
What a terrible experience compared to a floppy disk! Sure disk failure was common and crushing, but the UX was simple and ubiquitous. I guess I could get him a thumb drive, but I don’t know if his school allows them.
> account management is almost worse than something to install
True. Even as an adult it's tiring having to keep all my accounts sorted, and that's with a password manager.
There are a few websites that I can of off the top of my head that don't need an account or you can choose to log in through google/github: https://codepen.io, https://editor.p5js.org if that's of any use.
On a side note, in school I loved repl.it, supported ton of languages and worked despite all the blocks and filters on the school devices. Unfortunately, a few years ago they pivoted to I have no idea what, something to do with AI, but it's abysmal and such a loss. And I just found out glitch.com is also no longer a thing anymore either.
In a similair boat with my 11 y/o. My observations leave me still optimistic that what comes out the other side is generally positive, despite a lot of reasonable dread that a lot of us also (justifiably) feel about the current era surrounding generative models.
Counterpoint: one could say the exact same thing about the internet, but social media has (IMHO) proved... sub-optimal at a societal level.
Same! I think our position just isn’t very interesting, so mostly we only hear from boomers or doomers. Gen Alpha seems largely outside that spectrum: ai where it supports creativity, no ai where it destroys creativity. The kids are alright.
> Outside of Scratch most programming has incredibly obnoxious environments to setup.
I am making a programming langauge and environment to address this. My target is to match the QBasic experience. A video screen capture of the old Paratrooper game running in the IDE..
https://vimeo.com/835347764
Linux executable: https://sras.me/releases/spade.run
Source: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/spade
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What's ironic is that while kids have seemingly always had a nose for the inauthentic, they have just about no way to express anything of their own identity.
Even way back in the 90s we could tell that Coca Cola isn't actually a requirement for a good Christmas, and your friends who wore platform shoes were not somehow unique.
But still, when you're young you're in a prison. There are very few things you can do that aren't connected to some corporation whose main goal is just to make money.
There are many, many adults who are also in a prison, mostly by choice, with nothing else to do that is not connected to a money making corporation.
This FAQ is hilarious. I guess the default assumption is that if kids say something they don't actually mean it or know what it means. But no, they do. Often they are just using language in a more advanced generalized way than you, rather than being confined to distinct boxes. Children's brains are language factories.
I'm always dubious of news reporting on supposed trends for young people. The press regularly makes them up. There's no evidence provided in this article that this is some sort of popular phrase.
An earlier Yahoo article on this mentions adult use of the phrase on Tiktok, if perhaps with different intent: https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/article/the-cryptic-meaning-...
Doesn't tell us anything. This would be good if that meant they've developed some kind of "taste" for human output, I highly doubt it and for sure it will not reduce over-reliance on "AI" for school homework. I will not be surprised when this will be considered a "lost generation" from many points of view.
It's just the new term for "NPC" (like "My teacher is such an NPC"), meaning someone/something is bland or generic (like a non-playable character in a video game).
The term NPC referred to people without critical thought, as if they were running down a pre-programmed dialog tree.
Just a random thought since it's related to popular terms/slang, I'm noticing that accusing someone of not employing "critical thinking" is becoming very common on social networks among those that probably/clearly does not even know what it means, not talking about you obviously. Personally I'm forcing myself to phrase that in some other way lately, I wonder if I'm the only one that noticed this trend.
I don't know exactly what it means either. Really I just mean "thought" and "critical" is an intensifier in this comment.
Yep that too (source: has friends who use the term in many different contexts)
"Is "That's AI" the new "six-seven"? No, this bit of slang means something: the young people have simply broadened the definition of AI to make it equivalent to "bullshit"."
Perhaps criticial thinking is not in decline
No byline, acknowledging that it's part of series that usually doesn't have them. Google trends has nothing for the phrase right now. UD, as of this writing, never heard of the expression (although don't be too surprised if someone swoops in to "correct" that later). Even for a generation that's ostensibly not going to have a huge social media footprint yet, that's rather remarkable for a supposed "biggest insult".
https://trends.google.com/explore?q=%22That%27s%20so%20AI%22... https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=That%27s+so+...
Using AI automatically signals cheap.
Now there are some contexts where humans do not care. And there are some contexts where humans do care.
E.g background music in the commercial-chain gym whilst people have headphones on? Ofc they don’t care lol. This is already happening.
Whereas background music in specialists gyms e.g powerlifting or bodybuilding? No you won’t hear AI background music.
Not sure what’s wrong with people on this thread. Don’t y’all understand nuance or is your brain that fried?
I can't wait until a model slurps this up and answer "What is AI?" with "AI is a pejorative term inferring low effort and dubious quality". Mmm-mm.
i love the "Do say" and "Don't say" sections; how else am i supposed to speak like gen alpha
Yeah, the Guardian's "pass notes" series has been going for a while and is regularly absolute gold[0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/sep/07/death-o...
Can confirm my 11 year old says 'thats so AI' and means it as a slight insult.
It's true. My 9yo and 6yo use this as an insult all the time.
6yo? How much screen time do you have to have to come up with that.
kids talk to each other and share language
Sure, but someone was the first. And that kid apparently spent way too much time using electronic devices.
"someone was the first"
6yos don't only talk to other 6yos. They have older friends and family members.
And kids will almost always imitate the bigger cooler kids.
You think sins are passed down from the father? Demon spawns will suffer just as the demons do. Keep crying about hell you made it.
Found a (many years old) video of an oranutang driving a golf cart -> "dad that's AI can't believe you fell for that"
"Kids come on beans are good for you, you can't have dessert without also eating your beans" -> "That's not true beans are unhealthy you got that from AI"
Even seemingly unrelated shit "Clean your room", or "No it's time for bed your brain needs sleep" -> "that's so AI"
My elementary-aged kids call AI-generated content "slop" and actively ask me if some videos on Youtube are slop before watching them. I'm proud. I think they will be able to detect AI manipulated content far better than older generations.
I wonder if they went straight to "AI" as an insult independently from the older generations, or if they were using "slop" like the rest of us but had to adopt a new insult because "slop" has been co-opted to refer to things that are terrible whether AI or not.
"slop" existed before AI. It wasn't co-opted: it never specifically meant AI-generated.
While slop seems to be the popular term online, I never hear it spoken aloud. With Gen Alpha’s exposure to AI mostly through school, spoken media (youtube, tv), and their parents, “AI” probably cropped up independently as an insult
I feel "slop" is more specifically about the quality of some output rather than a synonym for "bullshit" like "AI" appears to be. And like "bullshit", "AI" can mean either "not true", "poor quality", or "this/that sucks".
And "That’s so slop" sounds awkward. But mostly I think the kids haven’t even heard of "AI slop" which isn’t really in the general lexicon, at least yet. That is, the prevalence of its use in these circles is a bubble effect. I doubt anybody ever uses it in kids' Tiktoks or Youtubes or whatever.
Slop meant cheap garbage meant for mass consumption before it was used for AI. The roots are actually antisemitic. 4chan's cooking board used "goyslop" to mean fast food and other cheap consumerist foods that they claimed the illuminati or jewish conspiracy or whateve fed to non jews to keep them unhealthy. Its crazy how often 4chan's neonazi rambling are the start of so many cultural phenomena. They supported trump way before he became a serious candidate in 2016
It has meant the unwanted, waste food scraps dumped into a trough and eaten by pigs (the farm animal) for a lot longer than that.
That's a very dodgy etymology. The use of "slop" to refer to trashy content dates back to the late 19th/early 20th century, long before the advent of the internet.
I think our tendency to attribute "novel" word usage to 4chan might reflect more on us than on our language.
I'm a little short on primary reference material, but here's an example from 1917: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/22692/pg22692-images.ht.... Conversation on language log has at least two others from 1897 and 1920 respectively.
The etymology to be “mud puddle” from the 1400s with that being taken from old English -sloppe meaning “dung” for even longer.
“Slopping the hogs” is probably where the modern negative interpretation comes from of forcing garbage onto someone.
People give 4chan far too much credit. Slop was a term that was used, maybe not widely, well before it was picked up by internet racists. Slop was used to refer to the stuff you'd feed to pigs, and if you were American, school children.
You don't need to make everything about the Jews.
I'm not sure that's the case, lots of supposed 4chan coinages came from elsewhere and 'slop' is much older. It's been known in the sense of 'liquid household refuse' from the 19th century.
I looked up the etymology of "slop" and I did not find any reference to antisemitism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goyslop
> The term is a compound word joining goy, a Hebrew and Yiddish word for a non-Jew or gentile,[4][3] and slop, meaning food waste or refuse of low quality
So you're telling me that a word which has "slop" in its origins is itself the origin of "slop"?
This must be the first case of circular etymology!
There are a couple of other cases. Dog was once (1845, UK) slang for sausage, due to fears of dog meat. Then a hot sausage was a hot dog, and then hot dog was a sausage, and finally just dog was slang for a sausage again, with the sinister implication removed. I also found pepper, from Latin (from Sanskrit?), leading to pep, the thing a pepper does to you, leading back to pepper (a kind of pre-game warm-up in baseball designed to give players pep).
You might object that those are really back-and-forth, but so is the claim being made here about slop. (I kind of doubt the claim though.)
:D TIL where "hot dog" comes from! Thanks! :D
I don't think your examples apply though. The dog example is just dog meaning sausage, sometimes with a temperature quality added (or ignored), but always a sausage with no other connotations.
The pepper one, maybe a little, though according to Etymonline [0] pep is short for pepper, so it's all the same really.
[0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/pep
That’s a different word. And it’s a word that came long after “slop.” It only makes sense if you know what “slop” means. I don’t actually understand why you’re linking me to this.
It has been in widespread use in the UK without any antisemitic overtones. "Sloppy" is even more common as a term for badly done work.
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How am i supposed to read this? it's hard to do so
Like an FAQ I presume
Like "A quick chat designed to tell you everything you need to know about a story you don't need to know about", it says here[0]
It's been going since forever in this format, I've seen people complain about it here before but I don't really see the problem.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/pass-notes
To me, it sounds like the point of the article is that we're skipping the nuance and jumping straight to effectively declaring equality between AI use and slop, which is a bit sad in a couple of ways: a) effort is apparently so rare, that the distinction between effortful content creation with AI and opportunistic press-a-button "content" creation is too difficult. b) real pervasive concern about our future (rightfully?) motivates sweeping judgement against the whole creative space with any AI involved. c) concretely, its sad in itself that any arena of expression is overwhelmed with low effort.
On the other hand, by the very nature press-a-button content is so easy to make that it will naturally bury real content unless someone takes an active gate keeper role. (Every channel on Youtube I know has made in-depth complaints that this is not happening there.)
I hope we find a way around it, so that we can enjoy content and products that is made with the same amount of effort as before but with more powerful tools creating a better end result. Not to mention lower barrier to entry into creative spaces, giving us more perspectives and ideas expressed in a quality way.
Hilarious piece. I just love it. Feels a bit like Monty Python in a good way.
I suspect "That's so AI" is just the bad toupee fallacy in action. People only notice the blatant, unpolished slop and meanwhile, the seamless stuff slips right past undetected.
Can confirm my 8 year old uses this to roast as well.
I'd be worried too at that age.
AI seems like a better derogatory adjective for most AI generated tweets, comments, blogs, reels, slop grenades that’s thrown at us these days. I wish a better adjective or slang comes along that clearly means inauthentic content
Why do we need to decipher this like its some abstract concept? While AI's output is impressive to older generations clearly younger folks think its ass otherwise it wouldn't be an insult.
people this young don't even know all the words in your comment
The guardian truly is yellow press.
The whole article is so AI.
The kids are alright
We keep perpetuating one of the largest psyops and disingenuous campaigns of our time. This collective psychosis of "blaming" AI for things made by humans and refusing to hold humans accountable for their transgressions is sad and heartbreaking.
How do we keep falling for this, over and over again? It's old tactics in new names; stop falling for tricks people use to evade your scrutiny and accountability and grow up past your infantilism and naivety. If you are reading this you are likely an adult, and probably a smart one. You can handle some discomfort and I implore you to see past this mainstream carricature of the truth.
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There's a form of ageism or youth worshipping going on that seems absurd to me. (More broadly than this article, but this is what triggered it for me)
Young people by definition (Sub 16 years old in this case), by definition, lack experience. There's a reason they can't drink, drive, vote, give consent, or be held legally accountable for their actions (the same way an adult can).
So why should I give a flying $TOKEN about what they think of it?
This comment is itself, ageism. If you're willing to discard the opinion and values of such a large number of people, I don't think your opinion is well informed or considered enough to be worth anyone's time.
No, the basis of this argument is accumulated experience. If we were talking about 15yr olds with PhDs this would be quite different.
I would sooner listen to the children than anyone who takes this position, because my experience has taught me to distrust listening to anyone who demands respect just for existing.
These children have experienced LLMs for a much larger part of their lives than you and at a very formative time. I'm going to listen.
For a larger proportion, but more or less the same absolute. Plus they have far fewer skills and relatable web of experiences to synthesize what AI is.
Yes they more rapidly synthesize new information, but they also lack the crystalized wisdom to apply judgement, cross domain expertise etc.