"But, like Guitar Hero, no outside creative skill has been acquired or developed."

Spoken like someone who never actually played the games. GH developed my interest in music as a kid, and Rock Band actually taught me how to drum in real life. It also garnered my interest in picking up and learning real guitar.

Those who forget that Rock Band not only a) existed and b) did everything GH did but a thousand times better + created by real musicians (Harmonix) do the genre, industry, and this article, injustice.

This article is written by someone stretching and reaching to relate two unrelated things. I'm offended by this.

Scalzi has developed an almost religious sort of dogmatic hatred of AI. He seems to acknowledge none of the benefits, even those that are obvious. Likely because he feels it's harmful to the way he earns his living.

He is rapidly coming to define himself through opposition, rather than promotion. Which is a dangerous and fruitless game.

Throughout human history there has never been a still useful technology that we as a species chose to stop using, and AI very much is. Maybe we'll come to regulate it, but the genie will never go completely back into the bottle and folks are going to need to get used to the new world.

And to keep fluffing the control narrative, 0 mention of open weight models were made.

This is a bad analogy by somebody who never played the game. Guitar hero is not harder or easier than guitar, it's just different.

I don't know how to play guitar, yet I can play guitar hero. My friend who plays guitar cannot play guitar hero. I'm not interested in playing guitar and I don't find GH to be a "shortcut" to learn it. In fact, I play the piano and I'm okay like that.

I don't know enough about DJing, but maybe that is also an analogy to GenAI usage that can work.

As a code monkey generative ai helps grow my skills daily, and all I have to do is read the code.

Except Guitar Hero is a game, and is marketed as such. Guitar Hero is like Bitcoin mining, you are doing useless computations to make some number go up, in the case of Bitcoin, your money, and Guitar Hero, your score.

But AI actually does something unlike Guitar Hero. There is a real output that can be used tomorrow even if AI "goes away".

You say AI helps you learn no skills, essentially. I don't know about you, but AI helped me understand Linux better in a way I didn't feel confident I would be able to before AI. I have created code with AI that I can maintain, and understand without it.

AI can go in conjunction with learning manually and can be helpful. Just because many examples exist of AI being unhelpful does not mean the whole technology is unhelpful.

I was trying to figure out what time of day, by UTC, would most people be asleep. Searching I could only pre-slopped answers in hundreds of random blogs.

So I decided to get my own custom slop. Opened Gemini and it said "video generation is free for a few days, try it out!". I uploaded a copy of Neuromancer and asked it to generate a scene.

MF had Cage inserting a power plug in his ear.

Ah and the time zone curiosity question? It went about it for a a minute or so and said "can't help you with that one, anything else?"

I think we've seen the best these LLMs can do and the race to the bottom has started. It's all cost cutting now, and I am very curious to see what will be of OpenAI and Anthropic. Probably will end up absorbed by MS, Amazon and Nvidia.

This seems disingenuous. I can ask a generative AI "explain this ternary operator to me" or "walk me through why this causes a race condition"

I cannot ask the video game why my real guitar is out of tune, or diagnose why I'm holding the fret wrong.