It’s kinda nice seeing more nuanced takes from folks as the bubble kinda deflates and both sides realize their idealized vision isn’t coming to pass. AI isn’t going to replace all the jobs, but it’s also not going away; finally, it is merely a tool in our toolchest.

What does amuse me to no end, however, is how many craftsfolk in AI circles are loudly rejecting AI imagery and video in favor of humans. The only folks who seem fine with that are the grifters looking to slop out a bunch of adverts quickly for commercial gain rather than do actual art, or folks who want “art” but don’t want to pay a human to make it for them or learn the skills themselves. Both of those camps are viewed with disdain and loathing by both sides of the AI Boom/Doom arguments, so I’ll take whatever allies I can get on those fronts.

AI music…man, I live with artisans and musicians and we have a number of “artists” we suspect are AI but whose music is pretty solid. We’re waiting for the shoe to drop, but I’m trying to look at it as a kind of turbocharged Fruity Loops/Logic as opposed to a human replacement. I hope I’m right on that, but time will tell.

The game changer I think more doomers need to experience is agents. It sounds like a recipe for disaster (a bunch of models known to hallucinate and allowed to run roughshod over a computer unattended? What could go wrong?), and it often (hilariously) is for the scammers out there giving it full access to production and fucking off to hawk their latest Masterclass on X or LinkedIn, but that first time you give it a reasonably achievable prompt and come back to a halfway decent product you can review and refine into production in 15m or less?

Absolutely magical, doubly so when it’s just 27B Qwen via Hermes and not some souped up stack in a frontier lab costing you thousands a month in tokens. If I were to evangelize AI, that’s how I’d do it. Fuck subscriptions, fuck cloud compute, fuck frontier labs and token buckets and whatever slop Sundar/Scam/Dario/Elmo et al are hawking this week; run that locally, give it a reasonable prompt that solves a real problem, and show them the results.

Then do the right thing and go for a walk with the two hours of free time the AI just freed up for you. Don’t ask for permission to take back your time.