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Notes -
... what are you working on?
I find it kind of hard to work on software projects for fun knowing AGI will make it significantly easier to work on if I wait a year before starting. In fact this might always be true.
Labor done in 2025 will be so much less leveraged than labor done in 2026, and so on.
This strikes me somewhat like saying "I don't want to work on learning to play an instrument because music recordings will make it a lot easier to have music in my home". That's true if all you care about is the end result. But if you were going to do this for fun to begin with, presumably you were going to do it because you enjoy the craft. So why wait for different tools? The enjoyment of the craft will be just as much today as it is a year from now.
I agree whole-heartedly with @MathWizard .
I write my own novel(s) for two reasons, one being that I want to establish, for reasons not much more noble than "I was considered a good writer back when that was a rare commodity", the other being that since there's very little of the very niche genre of fiction I enjoy, I might as well write my own.
Some authors view the rise of AI writing with fear and panic. I don't, both because I never relied on it for an income (and of course I'm worried about my own job going away) and I read far more than I write.
My default existence is boredom and ennui, desperate trawling and doomscrolling for literature (or any text) that assuages that thirst. There are never enough of the novels I enjoy, the authors I admire never seem to churn out novels faster than I can read them. Some of them, like Banks, are churlish enough to die instead of keeping on writing indefinitely.
Thus, even if I lose a small amount of utility from my writing becoming obsolete, I gain a great deal more from just having a near endless buffet of good writing to read.
Some would deny that AI can ever do that. Those people are idiots.
I think current LLMs are about 70% of the way to replacing me as an author, assuming they're given an excerpt of text I've written and then told to go wild with it. It's only a matter of years before the matter is settled. A year, if I'm being both highly optimistic and pessimistic.
So it goes for most people. For those who aren't making music as a career and who don't reflexively hate AI made music, the endlessly availability of fresh new music in the genres they like is amazing. While surgeons wouldn't be happy about being replaced, someone who got their appendix removed cheaper and safer would be happy about it. At any rate, it's coming for us whether we like it or not.
I'm assaulted daily by anti-ai takes that sap my will to live, but one in particular sticks in my mind. It went something like comparing generative tools to a child throwing his toy box into a ceiling fan, because the end result is the same as him playing with them. If taken as anything other than babbling of a motivated partisan, that metaphor would reveal how little the poster thinks of his readers, and of himself as well. His writing might only have value for the fun he has while producing it, and nothing else. But that's not normal.
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