I really don't get those takes. AI is the best thing that ever happened to the Free Software world, it is basically turning any software into Free Software. You can just throw file formats, protocols or even plain binaries at the AI and it'll reverse engineer everything in a pinch. Users can finally modify software themselves, which was always the goal of the Free Software world, but very rarely happened in actuality, since it was just so damn complicated. AI lowered the barrier of entry tremendously, not just in terms of required knowledge, but especially time. Same with Creative Commons, sharing art and stuff, was a nice gesture, but rarely useful, since the level of work to modify a work to fit your project was pretty close to just doing it from scratch anyway. With AI everybody can toy around with image generators and get what they want.
Is a social contract being broken? Yeah, kind of, but the problems that that contract existed to solve are no longer a thing. Creation is now easy and commodified. We finally have computer we can interact with in natural language, something people tried to do for at least 70 years and never made any significant progress on until LLM arrived.
If you want to gatekeep or only create stuff to boost your own ego or portfolio, then AI might be an issue, if you actually want to build stuff, AI is godsend. We are essentially living in the StarTrek future with Holodecks and replicators and people still find reason to complain.
Humans will evolve. Some will keep trying to think more. Many others won't. I'm not sure this is that different from previous disruptive tech in that regard.
It could be that AI is the tool the world needs to solve problems the world governments have been deadlocked to solve in the past 50 years.
But does it make sense to think when you're competing with a think-tank of hundreds of agents who all are more intelligent than you AND have way more stamina.
I'd like to think too that the person who can sit quietly in a room and think has an evolutionary advantage over, say, an influencer on tiktok doing silly dances, but the reality seems to be more and more that this is wishful thinking. Nerds have made themselves irrelevant.
grumbel · · focus · HN ↗
Is a social contract being broken? Yeah, kind of, but the problems that that contract existed to solve are no longer a thing. Creation is now easy and commodified. We finally have computer we can interact with in natural language, something people tried to do for at least 70 years and never made any significant progress on until LLM arrived.
If you want to gatekeep or only create stuff to boost your own ego or portfolio, then AI might be an issue, if you actually want to build stuff, AI is godsend. We are essentially living in the StarTrek future with Holodecks and replicators and people still find reason to complain.
amelius · · focus · HN ↗
Maybe AI is the best thing for the free software world, but not the world as a whole.
usewik · · focus · HN ↗
It could be that AI is the tool the world needs to solve problems the world governments have been deadlocked to solve in the past 50 years.
amelius · · focus · HN ↗
I'd like to think too that the person who can sit quietly in a room and think has an evolutionary advantage over, say, an influencer on tiktok doing silly dances, but the reality seems to be more and more that this is wishful thinking. Nerds have made themselves irrelevant.