This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I know what you mean, I've run into this myself a few times, but I don't think all workflows are affected the same way. For images what you said harkens back to the old graphic designer's lament, when a customer really likes what you did, they just want a "small adjustment" like having a character face the camera, instead of facing sideways. With AI maybe the changes you want to apply aren't quite so drastic, but when the output is a flat unlayered image, making a small adjustment will indeed add work.
I don't think this applies to text output, though. Text is easy to modify, so if the AI gets off track you can correct it cheaply. Code comes with it's own set of traps, where it's possible to write something that makes sense when you read it, works, but contains so fatal flaw. Early on developers reported that whatever gains in code output are made up by the extra time spent on reviewing it. It's still an issue to some extent today, but in my experience nowadays AI just comes up with dumb ideas you never asked for, rather than doing what you wanted, with fatal flaws attached. The former is a lot easier to filter.
Either way, the proof is in the pudding, and I'm telling you reproducing the entire Adobe and Microsoft suite would have been a gargantuan undertaking as recently as last year, or even a few months ago. And it's not theoretical, we have actual examples of intelligent, driven people, with an ideological hate-on for big corporations taking their best shot at reproducing these suites to give them away for free. They've put countless man-years into it with laudable results, but since they don't have the same amount of resources they usually couldn't keep up with industry. Their work is now getting btfo'd by AI, which you can say is a far cry from btfo'ing Adobe itself, but I think it shows that all these arguments about how AI only seems impressive when you first use it, or that it makes errors humans wouldn't and this somehow costs more work than it saves, are all flawed.
I don't know about employment in particular either, people adapt, and it's not like the introduction of power tools caused massive unemployment in the construction industry, but we are definitely looking at a similarly sized disruption.
More options
Context Copy link