"But, like Guitar Hero, no outside creative skill has been acquired or developed."
Spoken like someone who never actually played the games. GH developed my interest in music as a kid, and Rock Band actually taught me how to drum in real life. It also garnered my interest in picking up and learning real guitar.
Those who forget that Rock Band not only a) existed and b) did everything GH did but a thousand times better + created by real musicians (Harmonix) do the genre, industry, and this article, injustice.
This article is written by someone stretching and reaching to relate two unrelated things. I'm offended by this.
The point being made isn't that it cannot inspire someone to then go on to learn but that mastery of the game alone does not convey creative skill. Of course someone can be inspired to go out and learn the skill being modeled but use of the model doesn't teach the skill even if it might make someone really excited to go learn.
Not the argument you're looking for, but I've been playing drums for over ten years now because of Rock Band. Even used the sticks that came with it on my first e-kit. The game didn't teach me how to drum, but it taught me that I had a much deeper interest in playing drums than I'd ever imagined. That led into years and years of practice and I've actually become pretty good.
And that scenario is covered in the post, in the seventh paragraph. Nowhere in it is Scalzi saying Guitar Hero can’t give you an interest to pick up the Guitar, quite the opposite. The point being made is that when you do pick up the Guitar, you’re starting to learn from scratch, your years of playing Guitar Hero don’t really give you a head-start.
Scalzi has developed an almost religious sort of dogmatic hatred of AI. He seems to acknowledge none of the benefits, even those that are obvious. Likely because he feels it's harmful to the way he earns his living.
He is rapidly coming to define himself through opposition, rather than promotion. Which is a dangerous and fruitless game.
Throughout human history there has never been a still useful technology that we as a species chose to stop using, and AI very much is. Maybe we'll come to regulate it, but the genie will never go completely back into the bottle and folks are going to need to get used to the new world.
I use AI to code review my personal projects. There's no downside - I ignore what I don't like and take the suggestions that make sense. Most of the suggestions are good and it found a ton of little bugs over time.
At the time, I think that someone who's radically opposed to any use of AI is simply a poor developer.
> Likely because he feels it's harmful to the way he earns his living.
Absurd. Scalzi fans are not going to stop reading his works because LLMs exist. If anything, established authors are the ones with the least to fear.
This talking point that when people dislike something it’s because it affects their personal finances is getting really tired. Not everyone is a greedy selfish prick who only thinks of themselves, people are allowed to dislike things for other reasons. That’s normal, it’s not an anomaly.
> but the genie will never go completely back into the bottle and folks are going to need to get used to the new world.
And apparently we’ll never share another original idea, either. “Genie is out of the bottle”, “you’re going to get left behind”. Apparently the people who called LLMs parrots got it wrong, they instead turn people into them, mindlessly repeating whatever the labs want them to.
This is a bad analogy by somebody who never played the game. Guitar hero is not harder or easier than guitar, it's just different.
I don't know how to play guitar, yet I can play guitar hero. My friend who plays guitar cannot play guitar hero. I'm not interested in playing guitar and I don't find GH to be a "shortcut" to learn it. In fact, I play the piano and I'm okay like that.
Guitar Hero is a "rhythm game", perhaps calling it a "guitar simulator" is a bit incorrect. A rhythm game is one where you, for example, push buttons in tune with a song, exactly what Guitar hero is.
So you are good at different things. Maybe not at a real guitar but perhaps at reaction times.
I say this as someone who had one of those plug-in guitars but never knew how to use it, hah.
Except Guitar Hero is a game, and is marketed as such. Guitar Hero is like Bitcoin mining, you are doing useless computations to make some number go up, in the case of Bitcoin, your money, and Guitar Hero, your score.
But AI actually does something unlike Guitar Hero. There is a real output that can be used tomorrow even if AI "goes away".
You say AI helps you learn no skills, essentially. I don't know about you, but AI helped me understand Linux better in a way I didn't feel confident I would be able to before AI. I have created code with AI that I can maintain, and understand without it.
AI can go in conjunction with learning manually and can be helpful. Just because many examples exist of AI being unhelpful does not mean the whole technology is unhelpful.
I was trying to figure out what time of day, by UTC, would most people be asleep. Searching I could only pre-slopped answers in hundreds of random blogs.
So I decided to get my own custom slop. Opened Gemini and it said "video generation is free for a few days, try it out!". I uploaded a copy of Neuromancer and asked it to generate a scene.
MF had Cage inserting a power plug in his ear.
Ah and the time zone curiosity question? It went about it for a a minute or so and said "can't help you with that one, anything else?"
I think we've seen the best these LLMs can do and the race to the bottom has started. It's all cost cutting now, and I am very curious to see what will be of OpenAI and Anthropic. Probably will end up absorbed by MS, Amazon and Nvidia.
That implies that you did more than prompt the AI and actually learned whatever activity it is you are asking the AI about, because otherwise you wouldn't know to ask those questions. A person making music solely with AI won't ask about tuning their guitar because they don't have one and don't intend to use one.
Spoken like someone who never actually played the games. GH developed my interest in music as a kid, and Rock Band actually taught me how to drum in real life. It also garnered my interest in picking up and learning real guitar.
Those who forget that Rock Band not only a) existed and b) did everything GH did but a thousand times better + created by real musicians (Harmonix) do the genre, industry, and this article, injustice.
This article is written by someone stretching and reaching to relate two unrelated things. I'm offended by this.
No, you didn't.
You're straw manning an argument that doesn't exist in the article
He is rapidly coming to define himself through opposition, rather than promotion. Which is a dangerous and fruitless game.
Throughout human history there has never been a still useful technology that we as a species chose to stop using, and AI very much is. Maybe we'll come to regulate it, but the genie will never go completely back into the bottle and folks are going to need to get used to the new world.
At the time, I think that someone who's radically opposed to any use of AI is simply a poor developer.
Absurd. Scalzi fans are not going to stop reading his works because LLMs exist. If anything, established authors are the ones with the least to fear.
This talking point that when people dislike something it’s because it affects their personal finances is getting really tired. Not everyone is a greedy selfish prick who only thinks of themselves, people are allowed to dislike things for other reasons. That’s normal, it’s not an anomaly.
> but the genie will never go completely back into the bottle and folks are going to need to get used to the new world.
And apparently we’ll never share another original idea, either. “Genie is out of the bottle”, “you’re going to get left behind”. Apparently the people who called LLMs parrots got it wrong, they instead turn people into them, mindlessly repeating whatever the labs want them to.
Has anyone ever claimed otherwise?
I don't know how to play guitar, yet I can play guitar hero. My friend who plays guitar cannot play guitar hero. I'm not interested in playing guitar and I don't find GH to be a "shortcut" to learn it. In fact, I play the piano and I'm okay like that.
So you are good at different things. Maybe not at a real guitar but perhaps at reaction times.
I say this as someone who had one of those plug-in guitars but never knew how to use it, hah.
> Guitar hero is not harder or easier than guitar.
Ladies and gents, peak dunning krueger moment.
But AI actually does something unlike Guitar Hero. There is a real output that can be used tomorrow even if AI "goes away".
You say AI helps you learn no skills, essentially. I don't know about you, but AI helped me understand Linux better in a way I didn't feel confident I would be able to before AI. I have created code with AI that I can maintain, and understand without it.
AI can go in conjunction with learning manually and can be helpful. Just because many examples exist of AI being unhelpful does not mean the whole technology is unhelpful.
So I decided to get my own custom slop. Opened Gemini and it said "video generation is free for a few days, try it out!". I uploaded a copy of Neuromancer and asked it to generate a scene.
MF had Cage inserting a power plug in his ear.
Ah and the time zone curiosity question? It went about it for a a minute or so and said "can't help you with that one, anything else?"
I think we've seen the best these LLMs can do and the race to the bottom has started. It's all cost cutting now, and I am very curious to see what will be of OpenAI and Anthropic. Probably will end up absorbed by MS, Amazon and Nvidia.
edit: https://share.gemini.google/hvH2A3Yva5Uj
First try.
I doubt their attempt failed because they wrote the question poorly. It was probably just the service being flaky.
I cannot ask the video game why my real guitar is out of tune, or diagnose why I'm holding the fret wrong.