I can't help but wonder if creativity dies a little when the effort disappears. There’s something about the hundreds of hours spent on an animation or a piece of code that gives it beauty and value. If we automate the 'struggle' with a single prompt, do we lose the very connection that Wittgenstein was talking about?
I love this point. The consolation that I feel (but I'm not sure I can yet argue), is that I don’t think that the effort disappears but transmutes into something else, so instead of labouring over language-level code, we labour over structure and architecture and other things. I remember once trying to implement a recursive algorithm in assembly. There was real craft in that. But, I never did it again because I didn’t need to. And, undoubtedly, something was lost, but I don’t know that I want to go back to that. Music is beautiful in ways that code isn’t, and I understand its creation so much less, so perhaps this doesn’t translate there.
It’s true that moving to higher levels of abstraction like moving from Assembly to Python solved a lot of problems. But with AI, the jump in abstraction is so total that we risk becoming 'editors' rather than 'creators. If we aren't laboring over the language ourselves, are we still connecting through it, or are we just directing a black box to connect on our behalf?
I can't help but wonder if creativity dies a little when the effort disappears. There’s something about the hundreds of hours spent on an animation or a piece of code that gives it beauty and value. If we automate the 'struggle' with a single prompt, do we lose the very connection that Wittgenstein was talking about?
I love this point. The consolation that I feel (but I'm not sure I can yet argue), is that I don’t think that the effort disappears but transmutes into something else, so instead of labouring over language-level code, we labour over structure and architecture and other things. I remember once trying to implement a recursive algorithm in assembly. There was real craft in that. But, I never did it again because I didn’t need to. And, undoubtedly, something was lost, but I don’t know that I want to go back to that. Music is beautiful in ways that code isn’t, and I understand its creation so much less, so perhaps this doesn’t translate there.
It’s true that moving to higher levels of abstraction like moving from Assembly to Python solved a lot of problems. But with AI, the jump in abstraction is so total that we risk becoming 'editors' rather than 'creators. If we aren't laboring over the language ourselves, are we still connecting through it, or are we just directing a black box to connect on our behalf?