My guess is that guys being replaced by the steam shovel said the same thing about the quality of holes being dug into the ground. "No machine is ever going to be able to dig a hole as lovingly or as accurately as a man with a shovel". "The digging machines consume way too much energy" etc.

I'm pretty sure all the hand wringing about A.I. is going to fade into the past in the same way as every other strand of technophobia has before.

I'm sure you can find people making arguments about a lack of quality from machines about textiles, woodworking, cinematography, etc., but digging holes? If you have a source of someone complaining about hole quality I'll be fascinated, but I moreso am thinking about a disconnecion here:

It looks like you see writing & editing as a menial task that we just do for it's extrinsic value, whereas these people who complain about quality see it as art we make for it's intrinsic value.

Where I think a lot of this "technophobia" actually comes from though are people who do/did this for a living and are not happy about their profession being obsolesced, and so try to justify their continued employment. And no, "there were new jobs after the cotton gin" will not comfort them, because that doesn't tell them what their next profession will be and presumes that the early industrial revolution was all peachy (it wasn't).

DDT has been banned, nuclear reactors have been banned in Germany, many people want to ban internal combustion engines, supersonic flight has been banned.

Moreover, most people have more attachment to their own thoughts or to reading the unaltered, genuine thoughts of other humans than to a hole in the ground. The comment you respond to literally talks about the Orwellian aspects of altering someone's works.

there is no way you aren't able to discern the obvious differences between physical labor such as digging a hole and something as innate to human nature as creativity. you realize just how hollow a set of matrix multiplications are when you try to "talk to it" for more than 3 minutes. the whole point of language is to talk to other people and to communicate ideas to them. that is something that requires a human factor, otherwise the ideas are simply regurgitations of whatever the training set happened to contain. there are no original ideas in there. a steam shovel, on the other hand, does not need to be creative or to have human factor, it's simply digging a hole in the ground

There is a difference.

Excavation is an inherently dangerous and physically strenuous job. Additionally, when precision or delicateness is required human diggers are still used.

If AI was being used to automate dangerous and physically strenuous jobs, I wouldn't mind.

Instead it is being used to make everything it touches worse.

Imagine an AI-powered excavator that fucked up every trench that it dug and techbros insisted you were wrong for criticizing the fucked up trench.

Reading leads to the actual thoughts in our brains. It's a form of self programming. So yeah, it's OK for people to care about what they consume.

When I see an argument like this I'm inclined to assume the author is motivated by jealousy or some strange kind of nihilism. Reminds me of the comment the other day expressing perplexity over why anyone would learn a new language instead of relying on machine translation.

No one ever wrote a song or erected a statue for a steam shovel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_(folklore)

You realize that making an analogy doesn't make your argument correct, right? And comparing digging through the ground to human thought and creativity is an odd mix of self debasement and arrogance. I'm guessing there is an unspoken financial incentive guiding your point of view.