> Want to make a movie? The goal should be getting the movie out, seen by people and reviewed.
This especially falls apart when it comes to art, which is one of the most “end-goal” processes. People make movies because they enjoy making movies, they want movies to be enjoyed by others because they want to share their art, and they want it to be commercially successful so that they can keep making movies. For the “enjoying a movie” process, do you truly believe that you’d be happy watching only AI-generated movies (and music, podcasts, games, etc.) created on demand with little to no human input for the rest of your life? The human element is truly meaningless to you, it is only about the pixels on the screen? If it is, that’s not wrong - I just think that few people actually feel this way.
This isn’t an “AI bad” take. I just think that some people are losing sight of the role of technology. We can use AI to enable more people than ever before to spend time doing the things they want to do, or we can use it to optimize away the fun parts of life and turn people even further into replaceable meat-bots in a great machine run by and for the elites at the top.
Reducing the human experience as a means to an end is the core idea of dehumanization. Kant addressed this in the "humanity formula of the categorical imperative:
"Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means."
Want to make a movie? The goal should be getting the movie out, seen by people and reviewed.
Whether it's people captured by film, animations in Blender or AI slop, what matters is the outcome. Is it good? Do people like it?
I do the infrastructure at a department of my Uni as sort of a side-gig. I would have never had the time to learn Ansible, borg, FreeIPA, wireguard, and everything else I have configured now and would have probably resorted to a bunch of messy shell scripts that don't work half the time like the people before me.
But everything I was able to set up I was able to set up in days, because of AI.
Sure, it's really satisfying because I also have a deep understanding of the fundamentals, and I can debug problems when AI fails, and then I ask it "how does this work" as a faster Google/wiki.
I've tried windsurf but given up because the AI does something that doesn't work and I can give it the prompts to find a solution (+ think for myself) much faster than it can figure out itself (and probably at the cost of a lot less tokens).
But the fact that I enjoy the process doesn't matter. And the moment I can click a button and make a webapp, I have so many ideas in my drawer for how I could improve the network at Uni.
I think the problem people have is that they work corporate jobs where they have no freedom to choose their own outcomes so they are basically just doing homework all their life. And AI can do homework better than them.