LampDrewNear

You can still drive perfectly well in walkable cities.

And maybe it's just a TV trope, but do your paper bags lack handles? In Europe essentially all grocery bags have handles and are easy to carry. The amount of food you bought sounds easy to me to carry home, and I don't even lift.

This is what I'm thinking as well. I would go so far to say that it's directly evil to automate away illustration and other forms of creativity. Sure, many people will think it's cool and useful, but so many people will see their reason to live taken away from them. This is not only about making a living, creative arts is something much deeper and meaningful for lots of people.

I wish we could spend our collective brainpower applying AI to fight disease, climate change and poverty instead. That would make life better.

I like this view. That is a future I could find meaning in. I actually spent some time during my college years doing amateur musical theater, something I didn't think I would return to, but maybe I will.

This is how I feel as well. I'm a software engineer by trade, but I'm really much more interested in writing music and stories. I always imagined myself retiring the day I have saved up enough money so I could focus on art and creativity. My life certainly has felt much less meaningful since I saw what DALL-E 2 can produce.

And my main concern is not that of professional artists' financial situations. I'm mainly worried about how the massive influx of computer-generated content will inflate away the meaning of human-created art. And I'm afraid that when art becomes so good and so customized to each individual consumer, we won't have much common culture left.

I think this Penny Arcade strip well puts into words how I feel: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2022/06/06/dalliance

In a way, I'm so mad at my fellow engineers. There's so much good we could do, is really killing the creative arts the right thing to do?

And I don't believe for one second this talk about AI just being a tool, and prompt-engineering being a new craft for artists to learn. I think this kind of interface will quickly go away, and soon enough AI apps will look much more similar to TikTok or YouTube than they do today.