Stop generating, start thinking
(localghost.dev)
from codeinabox@programming.dev to programming@programming.dev on 08 Feb 22:50
https://programming.dev/post/45454739
from codeinabox@programming.dev to programming@programming.dev on 08 Feb 22:50
https://programming.dev/post/45454739
#programming
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Llms do create a lot of slop code thats for sure. Makes me want to get off github.
*most of the internet
And a professional guitarist can probably pull off a better solo than an audio model, in real time.
And a professional artist can certainly draw exactly what they want faster than talking the robot into rendering it.
Why do we keep comparing the robot to expert humans? You already learned how to do the thing the hard way. No shit the tech isn’t superhuman. There’s still obvious value in a tool that does things for people who know what they want but not how to do it.
Those using the model to do what they haven’t learned to do are ensuring they never learn to do the thing. Art is a representation of human experience, without the struggle, without challenges, the expression is meaningless.
I did a really good Google search once, please respect me as a creator.
Does the professed difficulty of getting the robot to draw what you want impact that glib treatise on the nature of art, or are we instantly in words-don’t-matter territory?
Most code is not art. I certainly don’t care what someone experienced while making a program; I just need it to work. If a jumped-up chatbot lets people make something with only a shallow understanding of my field of expertise - great. That is the dream of BASIC, realized. If that shit works then we’ve successfully made computers a bicycle for the mind.
Just don’t let them touch networking or cryptography.
Agreed. Tools aren’t the problem generating all the slop, it’s the vibe coding mentality.
What did I say in my response that made you feel we were in “words-don’t-matter” territory? I shared my opinion on what I personally think about the meaning of artistic expression, with human experience being a vital component. You are free to hold your own opinion, and to share it, and act in whatever way you like, so long as you aren’t harming others.
… so does it count or not, when someone spends just as long fighting these tools to express what they want?
I don’t see that as art, no. I am not the arbiter of universal objective truth though, so feel free to form and exercise your own opinion. Godspeed.
Then meaning does not simply come from ‘the struggle, the challenges.’ Art is a sprawling complex aspect of human existence, and once again, a new thing has people making grand assertions for why only the old ways are real art. Directly addressing these philosophical declarations often results in open hostility. I’m not sure passive-aggressive ‘agree to disagree, good day’ is much better. Why’d you say anything if you don’t wanna talk about this?
Never once implied that the meaning of art is simple, or stems only from one area of human experience. What I said is that without struggle, it is meaningless. That isn’t to say art is always a struggle, not even close, it certainly gets easier as you hone your craft, whatever that may be. But it is from the struggle against each challenge along the way that the artist grows more resilient, more passionate; it is through that struggle that their personal flair takes shape. And unless you quit, there will always be some new challenge to overcome. Life imitates art or whatever… The difference between advancement in tools throughout history is that it never once took the doing part out of the process of the art, or stripped the artist of their agency with what is to be done after the doing of the art is finished. A chatbot prompter is not creating anything, instead they are paying a company to proliferate the continued theft of actual artists. True creatives aren’t going anywhere. We do what we do because we love the doing. Destination is not everything, it never has been, and for some (I’d wager most) it is the least enjoyable part of the process. Thank you for sharing your opinion, and thank you for entertaining mine.
You kinda did, though. And then repeated it here. Then immediately contradicted it. You are unsuccessfully splitting hairs as if a sweeping absolute has nuance.
Indirect effort is still effort. CGI artists don’t draw the frames that audiences see. “The destination” is rendered by a computer, from their work. It’s obviously more direct than simply describing the scene - but there’s a gradient, not a cutoff. If someone spends a week fighting any tool to get exactly what they want, then it’s not a trivial push-button affair, and the result is a reflection of their desire and experience.
Even for generated art, you can feed in a blurry approximation, or have it modify a finished-looking image. You can photoshop the output and loop it back through. Hell, a generated video could animate a scene you painted on canvas. To insist that’s not just lesser, but utterly disqualified, is not a defensible assertion.
Consider this Neural Viz video. It’s mostly people talking to-camera. You might insist they could’ve done that with real actors… but that’s the thing, this tech can do anything you might do with real actors. Would you suggest that no amount of telling actors what to say and do makes someone an artist? Why is this silly bullshit not art, when a version wiggling GI Joes in front of the camera would be?
I don’t see the contradiction. I do see that there is a fundamental divide between what you and I consider art. As I alluded to in my previous reply, art is the journey. That is my personal take after many years of engaging with many artistic pursuits. If you don’t like my opinion, based on my subjective experience as an artist… I don’t really know what else to say to you. As I keep saying, feel free to hold and exercise you own opinion, based on your own experience.
If that journey is multiple days of fucking with these tools, why does that not count? Why is this the only technology immune to human expression?
I don’t need the constant reminders of what an opinion is - but you might need a refresher on what arguments are. If you give a reason for an opinion, people will often assume that’s why you believe something, and address it in a way that may alter your conclusion.
I’m not sure why you’re so hell bent on changing my opinion on this subject. Could it be that you aren’t so sure of your own opinion, so you’re projecting that uncertainty outward? I don’t feel the need to convince you or anyone of anything. I have simply been sharing where I stand on the subject. I think I should be free to do so without the expectation that I engage wholeheartedly in someone’s desire for debate.
Then why are we talking?
You seem to think opinions are decorative things, having no bearing on reality. Like the topic at hand doesn’t practically impact entire career paths for millions of people. As if the only reason to try to dissuade someone from dismissive absolute rhetoric is if I am somehow swayed by it, and secretly believe the opposite of all the words I’m saying.
Solipsistic time vampire. Why does anyone give a shit where you stand, if you don’t know what it means to stand by it?
I’m sorry, what? How am I a time vampire? This is an open forum. I should be free to share where I stand. Just as you are free to share your standpoint, and attempt to engage in debate. You may not always get what you want in this life, and that’s ok too. It might be that there simply isn’t much debate to be had. Your engagement with these “tools” is directly and actively harming those who provided the data that built them. That is a fact, not opinion. I’m not sure if you consider yourself an artist or a programmer or whatever, but let me ask you this: If you along with several other chatbot prompters were to line up your individual products, would a viewer be able to spot the difference? Would any difference there be specifically attributed to any individual chatbot prompter?
At what point were you engaged in debate? You act bewildered that someone tried to critically examine your assertions. I’ve been asking questions from your opinion. Do you not recognize your own stated beliefs?
Incorrect. Locally running ComfyUI or Ollama neither picks their pockets nor breaks their bones. When these cloud companies crash, local models aren’t going anywhere, and they won’t do psychic damage to someone whose DeviantArt posts were in the training data.
In one shot, probably not. After a week of fucking around to pursue a specific idea in each person’s head, almost certainly. Then again, you could have one group of people prompt a hundred images total, and a completely different group each pick their favorite ten, and that non-interactive selection would reveal individual aesthetic internality. Curation is not creation, but it requires identifying a work’s shortcomings, even if you won’t correct them yourself.
Would a demonstrable difference change your conclusion? Like, is this line of questioning relevant, or are we just saying words recreationally?
Huh?
I find the way you view those whose data built the systems you use pretty interesting. The distaste for artists is palpable. “…won’t do psychic damage to someone who’s DeviantArt posts were in the training data.” How do you view art in general? Is there intrinsic value in the experience for which the piece represents, or is the value of a piece purely the numbers on the pricetag?
Look, I fundamentally do not agree with your thoughts on the matter. That will not change. I also have at no point forced you to respond, you have done that on your own.
You can’t go from ‘it does harm! fact!’ to an appeal from the nature of beauty.
Nor can you honestly claim ‘this is an open forum for debate’ and then make crystal fucking clear you’re not actually arguing, you’re just spouting words at someone. You came to me. I did not seek your opinion, I did not invite brainstorming, and I’m not keeping you here. But for some fucking reason every single response includes a pearl-clutching rejoinder like you can’t figure out why someone is talking back to you. All you did was offer concrete rationale and claims to fact which are supposedly relevant to the broad and important topic at hand! Why would anyone have something to say about that?
If addressing your alleged reasons cannot possibly change your mind, then they’re just lies. That’s pretense. That’s pulling out excuses that sound like arguments, but cannot be foundational to your conclusions, or else removing them would make that belief structure collapse.
If you don’t actually want to discuss this, consider shutting up.
Idk I’m in college and every time I try to use chatgpt to write something I don’t want to learn, I spend like 10 hours prompting and getting nowhere but when I try to read the docs it just works after 30 mins
With music “sounds good” is a sufficient judgment for completeness. With generated code, someone that is an expert has to review it to make sure it does what it’s supposed to, covers edge cases, doesn’t have any security flaws etc. Only an expert is capable, and it is generally faster and produces better quality for the expert to just write the code instead of fixing up what the slot machine dispensed. It’s a cute analogy but all it does is make it obvious that you have no idea what you’re talking about.
As if amateurs never code stuff the normal way.
I think, the problem is that management wants the expert humans to use the non-expert tools, because they’re non-experts and don’t recognize that it’s slower for experts. There’s also the idea that experts can be more efficient with these tools, because they can correct dumb shit the non-expert tool does.
But yeah, it just feels ridiculous. I need to think about the problem to apply my expertise. The thinking happens as I’m coding. If I’m supposed to not code and rather just have the coding be done by someone/-thing else, then the thinking does not occur and my expertise cannot guarantee for anything.
No, I cannot just do the thinking as I’m doing the review. That’s significantly more time-consuming than coding it myself.
I would mind all those “lesser brain” accusations less if they weren’t often used under liberalism as a pretext for slavery and genocide.
I agree. I just wish others in my company did.
It’s hard to be the one not doing it when C Level people are demanding that you do everything through Claude code first and fall back if you can’t get it to work.
I don’t think it is. I think LLMs have hard limits that people refuse to accept.
They. They outsourced it. Did we ever really have a voice in this? Did we have a choice in what they do with the capitol they control when they wish to reshape society around it? We need to commit to anticorporate lifestyles and genuinely reject their products and services at scale. Until that happens we’re spending our resources to enrich our enemies who use it against us.
People comparing LLM ai models to industrialization with machines, do not understand the issue. The issue with LLM is not automation and taking place where people worked before, but it scrapes and steals data and code without respecting its license. It is unethical by principle. Unless the dataset is ethical obtain and respecting licenses. Also building cars in example is something no one can do for themselves (at least not allowed to use in streets), compared to programming who can be done by anyone and shared.
So I do not see the LLM “revolution” is the same as industrialization. These are two different issues that cannot be compared.
Don’t fall for the scam that is “AI”, think. Computers cannot think for you.
A lot of good stuff here. Especially realising how useful an LLM actually is for coding. It’s a tool and like most tools has a purpose and a limit. I don’t use a screwdriver to put in nails (well sometimes I do at a pinch, but the results suck) or cut wood in half. Spicy autocomplete is probably a good use case, but even then “use with care” should be employed.
The whole “prompt it correctly” stuff is pn point. People have written books on how to correctly and effectively prompt the LLM. If I need to read a book to learn something, why not just read the book on how to do the thing? Or use the LLM to summarise the book, then at least you’re going to get somewhat accurate information. We had someone create an
AGENTS.mdat work and I read it and it just sounds like a joke “You are expert in this and the human known everything. If unsure ask the human” etc. If the main gain is that I don’t need to type so much I might as well use voice dictation.That is aside the financial, environmental, health, and safety issues and damages that are all bundled in for free. If people just saw it for what it is, instead of glamourising them as the panacea for all their problems.