Your wife is right. History is repeating itself. And not even for the first time.

Horse carriage drivers -> Cars

Print media -> Internet

Drafting -> CAD

Music -> Electronic music, DAWs

Film photography -> Digital

Traditional film special effects -> CGI

Hollywood nepotism -> YouTube / TikTok / Creator economy (there are more millionaire creators now than movie stars)

In each of these cases, there was a subset of people that did the previous thing that hated on the people doing the new thing. They had every opportunity to adapt, but chose not to. They thumb their nose at it as everyone else jumps on board.

This time around, it isn't just practitioners hating on it. The internet has enabled a bunch of cling-on performative folks that aren't even artists, engineers, etc. that love to dog pile onto the hate.

It's really funny because I've shot lots of films over the last few decades. When people criticize my AI films, I ask them what they've made. Not only will a lot of them proudly tell you they've never made anything, they'll then double down. They'll say that if they were to hypothetically make something (which they won't), it would be using the old tools and that I should be ashamed of myself for using AI. Despite the fact that I have years of experience using the tools they're describing to me.

I don't even get it. Not even putting in the effort to try, yet telling me that my enormous wealth of experience is wrong and that I'm unethical and my creative output is "worthless".

It's some kind of sick comedy.

> When people criticize my AI films, I ask them what they've made.

They're saying that your contribution is negative. Even if their contribution is zero, zero is still better than negative.

You give examples of transitions that happened, but you have made no argument about how those transitions made us better off. It is not self-evident that a change in technology is necessarily an improvement.

What is the transition now? Science and whatever someone with a computer can create -> AI prompting?

...but one of your examples has had disastrous consequences. Sure cars prevailed but they have changed the climate and let to unfriendly development patterns. Likewise social media may make people less happy, less likely to couple etc. Novel tech solves problems but can create others. We can surely afford to move deliberately at least, particularly in education.

> Horse carriage drivers -> Cars

I think you're badly missing the point.

It is true that car drivers replaced horse carriage drivers and car mechanics replaced the people who took care of horses and what not.

But in the horse carriage vs car metaphor with AI, people are not the drivers and blacksmiths, people are the horses.

How many horses do you see around lately?

Hollywood nepotism -> YouTube / TikTok / Creator economy

Certainly seems like an apt comparison! Personally I think we should just ban AI if it’s going to primarily facilitate the production of slop-shit like TikTok.

And despite the touts insisting on how useful and amazing these tools are, I have yet to see anything of true value be produced. Slop-shit vomit factories indeed.

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