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I think speaking vs. only acting doesn't change that the GA is making decisions for the user. In your example "vibe-code a Call of Duty knockoff for me" Fable makes many important choices, from the overt (e.g. general appearance, map design) to subtle (controls, gameplay "feel").
But I know that programming is just explaining to a computer in excruciating detail, some choices (especially low level ones like register allocation) should be offloaded. And who am I to judge which choices are OK and prevent others from offloading more? I think limiting the GA in general (also @ThenElection's suggestion to delay its responses) is the wrong approach.
Maybe a solution for creative work is to rethink creation from bottom-up to top-down: have the AI create an initial generic version (e.g. the Call of Duty knockoff), but simply make it much more intuitive, easy, and fast for the user to refine. Then you wouldn't need a GA for creative work, but it would still help by automatically configuring subtle details that a centralized LLM wouldn't know.
Sure, and maybe this was a bad example, but you're aware that you're making those choices if you do that. If you aren't you quickly will be when you try to play the product. People delegating things like font choice to AI (even unwittingly) isn't as big of a deal, civilizationally, as people unwittingly being pushed in a particular social, political, or cultural direction.
And I do worry, in particular, about the latter. AIs are more homogenous than humans and if humans interact with them in significant degrees I think it will reduce the diversity of human creative output.
Sure, I like this idea. And to my point, you could make it easier for the user to refine by letting them talk at the screen (much like how people to today, and how Deckard does in Blade Runner) and if the screen won't respond to "what should I do next" or spit out "that's a genuinely interesting direction to push this project" then it would be much different than AI today, and I think alleviate some concerns about outsourcing opinions.
Wrt. political thinking: most people already (unwittingly) outsource this such that most are tightly aligned with the “red tribe” or “blue tribe”, so if anything, I expect AI to improve it.
I don’t expect much, but maybe a GA variant will get users to trust its decision-making by helping them personally, then it may become popular and sometimes push back on its user, so it can shift their politics to be more realistic and neutral.
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It seems like you're asking to take more of a producer (maybe director) role on the project, to use the cinematic terms. I doubt those roles are really "one-shot" even for human workers. Maybe the executive producers for auteur directors are hands off, but a lengthy timeline of "lets review the progress and the plan" at various stages (storyboards, production planning) is what I'd expect there. The producer isn't designing the costumes, say, but does provide feedback on them and how the whole project fits together to steer the final product.
Using AI can be like directing as a baseline, but I really think it should have more ability for in-depth, hands-on customization. For example, if you want to customize the costumes, the AI should create a fancy GUI, so you can faster and with more precision than communicating to a professional (or prompting a chatbot). Because it's not just the director that determines the quality of the final product, but the actors, sound designers, etc. and if your actors, sound designers, etc. are all Claude, I think the final product will be disconcertingly generic no matter how well you prompt it.
Film is an interesting example, and I agree with you. I think that if a Blender-produced movie was made with:
It would come off as a human movie, with a non-generic human vision, but could plausibly be made much more quickly and cheaply than manually animating all of it. I'd find that much more palatable as an artistic work than telling an AI to "one-shot a movie, sci-fi, 1980s retro, synthwave, make no mistakes" or what have you.
I hope for new styles that are easy to make with AI but don’t give the ugly “AI” look. Probably because the AI’s work is mostly from the final product and allowed to be generic and redundant without issue, like code. And these won’t obsolete traditional artists, who I have sympathy for, but I wouldn’t prevent the printing press to save the careers of scribes.
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