“Because we've created a world where effort gets treated like a disease to be cured.”
That pretty much sums it up for me. Well put. I am at a point where I am trying to acquire hobbies to improve my happiness and there is a difficulty modifier now on a lot of things where it’s like “what’s the point”. It reminds me of when X-Box first offered the ability to watch other people play. I was grinding to get like five more points on a course to hit the 200 point requirement, so I downloaded the top ghost video for the course. That person and I were not even playing the same game; they were orders of magnitude better than I was and all I wound up learning was I would never be that good at it.
I think this is why I grasp on to strength training and fitness as one of my main hobbies. There is no current shortcut other than steroids but even then you still need to put in the effort. If I stop, I can feel and see my body atrophy, my stress levels rise, my energy going down, etc. You need to keep learning and adjusting to make progress. You can definitely nerd out about it if you want. And it provides the dopamine rush after a tough workout and looking back and seeing my progress. It helps me connect with my body since I’m in my head all day. It’s also a primal and human activity that has nothing to do with AI.
> ...all I wound up learning was I would never be that good at it.
I suspect that if you had looked at a 98-percentile video instead of the top video, you would also have thought that you would never be that good at it, but in many things, being in the top 2% is attainable with effort for the top 50% or so of the population; practicing for that is just not how they choose to spend their time.
I was a musician (drummer) during my school days and took pride in being the best drummer in my school, and (I thought), probably top 2% in the world. However, if ytube was around at that time, I would have watched videos from around the world and realized that I was mediocre at best. Maybe I would have lost interest? Maybe I would have worked harder at it? Hard to say.
Your example touches on a very related phenomenon. Videogame design.
Anyone who has activated cheats on videogames enough times can attest to the fact that it takes the enjoyment away. We do have games with superficial, skinner-like rewards, probably the majority, but many still rely on the satisfaction of overcoming real challenges to reward players.
Game (video- or other) difficulty is interesting, because the goal (a “fun” game) is so tied to individual skill level (and others’, if multiplayer).
Historically, there wasn’t much technical ability to dynamically adjust difficulty. So the player had to improve to progress.
But now it’s possible to engineer games that are effectively impossible to lose, yet always make a person feel like they’re barely winning (aka “fun”).
I’m not sure that swapping of objective difficulty for subjective difficulty was healthy, though.
This is why I hate when games make you play with the difficulty to deal with broken mechanics. The elder scrolls being one where you can just end up stuck and forced to lower the difficulty because your character is physically incapable of proceeding.
But then it’s hard to be disciplined enough to only use it when strictly required. And it just feels unsatisfying.
One easy-ish solution is to realize that the pseudo-anonymous mass of people doing things on the internet really doesn't matter, and crucially, spend less time on the internet. Already taking 2 days/week away from the net makes my life much better.
> there is a difficulty modifier now on a lot of things where it’s like “what’s the point”.
That is becasue you are still lacking dopamine. One needs to erase all the dopamine stimulation in your life to truly recover. Go to a AA meeting and you will see everyone drinking and smoking saying they are "sober" and wonder why they relapse.
Learn to limit your rewards to slow, natural ones, like he says in the article. It will absolutely suck at first. It is not about the activity, it is about slowing down the strong dopamine pulses.
I'm from early Generation X and was raised with the belief that AI and robotics would—finally!—liberate humanity to pursue nobler endeavors: advanced technology, great art, and, most importantly, philosophy.
But reality has turned out bleaker, and it seems to be aligning more closely with the author's darker vision.
To avoid the dopamine collapse, we must reclaim effort as meaning—design systems that enhance human creativity, not replace it; use AI to challenge and collaborate, not merely to create shortcuts; and incorporate friction into learning, art, and problem-solving—not as inefficiency, but as intentional practice.
We must also teach people not only how to use AI, but how to preserve their humanity while using it.
Philosophy is no longer a luxury—it becomes a necessity.
> We must also teach people not only how to use AI, but how to preserve their humanity while using it.
One of the best things you can do is just not use it. There is no way to preserve your humanity while using it, at least not in the long run. Because its nature of mechanizing creativity creates feedback loops in our brains and reduces the magic of having the unclimbed mountain...so to speak. It's like trying to teach your body to feel good after having eaten too much sugar. It is beyond our capabilities and fundamentally incompatible with us.
> But everyone else? You're voluntarily breaking yours. I need medication to feel what you could feel naturally if you stopped training your brain that effort gets you nowhere.
> I was born with this dysfunction. You're choosing it.
This blog pushes the idea of “dopamine deficiency” as a real scientific concept, but it’s not an actual medical diagnosis (unless you have Parkinson’s disease). To be fair, the linked blog post implies that a doctor gave them this idea, which can happen when you go to a doctor who feels like they’re doing patients a favor by telling them they have a “chemical imbalance” or a deficiency of a neurotransmitter to alleviate objections for taking medication.
The other post also implies that a brain scan was used as part of the diagnosis process, so this is a good place to point out that brain scans are not diagnostic for ADHD. There have been a few notable quack doctors who tried to push fMRI misinterpretations as specialty ADHD diagnostic tools such as Dr. Amen, but these aren’t actually validated by anything nor have they even been shown to be repeatable.
As always: When someone starts talking about dopamine as the chemical that explains everything in life or makes claims to have a deficiency of it, realize that they’re talking about dopamine as a metaphor rather than actual science. Unfortunately people start taking the dopamine metaphor too literally and believe that any lack of motivation is equivalent to a physical lack of dopamine, which is not true.
>This blog pushes the idea of “dopamine deficiency” as a real scientific concept, but it’s not an actual medical diagnosis (unless you have Parkinson’s disease).
This needs to be corrected. Parkinson is caused by too much dopamine which after being metabolized creates oxidative stress that kills the dopamine neuron. Which is why l-dopa fails to cure the disorder and actually makes the patent worse in the long run.
> This needs to be corrected. Parkinson is caused by too much dopamine which after being metabolized creates oxidative stress that kills the dopamine neuron
This is not correct. The cause of Parkinson's is not fully understood and a simple Google search or visit to any medical website or Wikipedia could explain that.
The paper you linked is an editorial (it's in the title) commentary on another artificial experiment in mice that were genetically altered to have a hyperactive pathway for generating dopamine. This is not something found in nature nor do they claim it's something found in humans.
They're simply demonstrating that if they geneticially alter mice to overexpress dopamine and induce excess dopaminergic damage in the process, they can produce outcomes that kind of look like Parkinson's
Claiming that this editorial has explained Parkinson's disease is completely wrong.
> I will say one can see dopamine disorders in someone behavior and correlate them to genetics and nutrition if we cared.
Claiming that "if we cared" we'd see that everything is caused by dopamine, genetics, and nutrition is the current generation of pseudoscience that drives blog posts like this one. I don't know when people started reducing everything to dopamine, but it's neither accurate nor helpful. The number of people who have depression or learned behavioral problems who try to explain it away as "dopamine disorder" is becoming a problem.
Eliminate effort in the places you don't enjoy it, concentrate effort in places you do, recognise that sometimes the places that pay aren't the ones you enjoy most, and that sometimes you don't enjoy things until you've pushed through the basics.
I’m not convinced eliminating effort in places you don’t enjoy it is the right course of action. A recent example: I had to rearchitect major parts of my pipeline the other week. I find working on the pipeline very dull and not enjoyable. Since I wrote it all though, and struggled through, it was really easy for me to take it apart and reassemble it in a more efficient manner. Took maybe 30 minutes.
I couldn’t have comfortably done such a substantial refactor without suffering through the process of building it.
(And this refactor was much larger and more substantial than LLMs in their current state can do)
> But everyone else? You're voluntarily breaking yours. I need medication to feel what you could feel naturally if you stopped training your brain that effort gets you nowhere.
> I was born with this dysfunction. You're choosing it.
This ending is worse than a TV show revealing a dream sequence.
We get it, you're special, we're sheep, thank you for enlightening us.
I was truly enjoying it until the author decided to throw out a middle finger.
They link to a blog post where they say they claim to have been diagnosed with “dopamine deficiency”, which is not a real diagnosis.
This is a classic example of someone misinterpreting the science and coming to believe that their state is not their fault. They believe it is entirely inflicted upon them by a medical condition, whereas other people are responsible for their actions and outcomes.
Yes, technology is the way we circumvent effort to deliver results (e.g. to live longer, healthier, and with less pain/fear.)
Yes, our civilization rewards and encourages short circuiting effort, depriving us of the basic positive feedback loop of effort to reward.
It's been like this since the invention of the wheel and fire. It's up to us to find and/or create meaningful (and effortful) lives, and it is more sustainable to focus on the path than the destination; every zen text teaches this.
This article started off strong but ended up quippy, spiteful and shallow. Still, I appreciate the effort ;-]
Thank you for your feedback. I appreciate the depth.
You are right, it ended with a spiteful tone and I should have chosen better world.
I see a lot of people questioning if dopamine deficiency is real. And maybe some more context would help.
1. I am one of the early IVF kids in India. My life is tracked.
2. Do you know 80% of IVF kids born in 90s and tracked have mental health disorders?
3. I have struggled socially all 28 years of my life. I only felt two emotions - happy and sad. Never experienced a mania, so never ticked the box of bipolarity.
4. In 2021, I was told that DaTscan might help. But I couldn't afford back then.
5. In 2023, finally got it done. Results showed little to no release of dopamine.
I was forced to learn about dopamine and when I see the younger generation getting into a certain cycle (of course not as dark as my article), it makes me feel sad. Because it reminds me of how hard it is to get out of that space.
I have piles of reports that prove 'dopamine deficiency'. Yet the comment section is not fully convinced.
I am fortunate that my life is tracked.
So yes, this is the thought process that led to that ending. No one teaches us to care about our bodies and I hope that changes some day.
> Yes, our civilization rewards and encourages short circuiting effort, depriving us of the basic positive feedback loop of effort to reward.
To some extent, but so far before AI it has been at a speed and magnitude most people could handle. With AI, they can't.
> It's been like this since the invention of the wheel and fire. It's up to us to find and/or create meaningful (and effortful) lives, and it is more sustainable to focus on the path than the destination; every zen text teaches this.
You are ignoring again the magnitude of the effect of AI, which is much worse than previous technologies. One can always focus on "the path" but Zen teachers also teach practicality: why make your life complicated? AI makes things complicated unecessarily.
"Least effort" is the way of life, it is not just how the brain works, it is how the universe works. From the principle of least action that is maybe the most fundamental law of physics, to chemistry, to biology, to human activity. It is all some form of minimization.
Humanity developed agriculture because it requires less effort than hunting and gathering for feeding a given population. We developed machines because it is less effort than doing things by hand, etc... If your dopamine system rewards doing things with less effort, it is working properly.
The caveat is that doing something with less effort does not mean doing less, it can also mean doing more with the same amount of effort, including personal development. It doesn't mean you should AI everything or be sloppy, just not glorify effort as some intrinsic quality, the result is what matters.
Same, kills the fun. It’s actually made it harder to get started on anything because I know the starting point and most of the work is just prompts which I don’t find fun at all. Handcrafting feels more tedious knowing that prompts could do it so much faster. So I end up just disengaging from the activity all together. This is the second year since about 1995 that my side projects folder has practically nothing new (I’ve built a few things with AI, but I lose interest very fast - like a day or two).
FWIW my context is coding as a hobby/entrepreneur. It’s not my job.
The mainstream writing assistants are dog-shite, but so is everything else! If your idea of writing with AI is ChatGPT and no harness, you're only making a statement about the largest common denominator of AI tooling—from a position of ignorance. I'd previously helped multiple pen-pals of mine to properly harness the AI tooling with low-code platforms such as Dify. I'm sure there's plenty more out there, but re: Dify specifically, they took to it rather well. When carefully prompted, some models excel in "editing" moreso than writing from scratch. Not having to rely on professional editors is a huge advantage for aspiring authors that would otherwise struggle with keeping on-form. In my experience, progressively refining ideas, maintaining notes on development of characters in long-winded stories, and soon enough, persistent agents with proactivity, interruptible work capabilities—would vastly reduce the cognitive load that has very little to do with "creativity," that writers have to deal with all the time.
You cannot blame "AI" for your own lack of trying...
I wrote a "funny" email to a colleague who asked for a formal request to do a task I asked him for. I took it seriously and wrote extremely formal ("Dearest Steven... " Etc). He laughed and said "did chatgpt write that?".
It made me irrationally angry, no, I spent two minutes of my own brain power to come up with those five sentences. This kind of thing happens constantly now, everyone assumes everyone else uses gpt's for everything and I find it a bit depressing to be honest.
You've either let AI help you with the 'struggle' of this post or you've spent so much time with chatgpt that you've internalized it's cadence and patterns. This is straight chatGPT.
It also reduces the enjoyment of a finished product. You used to write a story or report and be proud of the work. Now your neighbors have done the same with AI and feels like it isn't worth it.
This has been the effect of technology for a while, at least mass communications technology. It exposes you to a pseudo-anoymous world of millions of people doing things but for which you have no context for their creation, only their output.
AI however brings it to a horrific next level, and really emphasizes the mass production of art.
> The AI helps, but it doesn’t replace the work. The dopamine’s still there — because I’m still in the loop.
The problem is that most people need to feel that they are doing something original, and AI takes that away. AI doesn't help anything, except in the short term and maybe for some people who can compartamentalize it. But those people are few and far between indeed.
Why does the author use a computer and the Internet to write and distribute his thoughts?
Certainly it would be more rewarding to create paper from scratch and walk the earth handing his ideas to people? He could even create his own written language from scratch!
The way to get the most out of AI is not to simply automate away things you love; it’s to go bigger and try to solve bigger actual problems while using AI.
I teach an advanced university level course in how to write books with AI. It’s amazing to watch students (some traditional published authors) unlock new levels of flow and creativity.
What if the ”tool” is marketed as something that can replace not just labor, but taste, decision making, and craft? Another recent tech development: Whose fault is it that social media is full of engagement bait and influencer social posturing? Is social media a tool? Are the recommendation systems, which promote thin perfect bodies to teenagers with low self esteem, just a tool? After all, they just ”help” you find content you’re likely to engage with.
Note I both agree and disagree with you here. I use AI too but I am very cautious to not let it ”take over”. It’s even hard to define what that means exactly. And that’s for someone who grew up without it. Imagine school today, with all the pressures of being a teenager from peers and teachers, and having access to free AI from companies who plan to rent it back to you later once they turn the value extraction knob.
> I use AI too but I am very cautious to not let it ”take over”
I think this is the key. Who’s driving?
If you are deliberate about what you want to own, focus on, and create yourself, you can consciously decide how AI help you bootstrap, scaffold, and critique your work to help you go farther.
If you aren’t, and you just tell AI to do it for you, you’re just ordering that Biryani. And heck, maybe that can be OK too. Sometimes you just need a meal you aren’t wanting to work at.
If someone markets a hammer as a spaceship, that’s bad marketing. Not a bad tool.
Social media can be a tool.
The recommendation systems are not tools to help you as much as they are a tool to increase shareholder value - occasionally those goals align, often they diverge.
Some people get great results with AI, others don’t.
But it doesn’t follow that for those for whom it doesn’t work “they’re using it wrong”. Maybe it’s the wrong tool for the job, while it’s the right tool for another job (like the one you described).
Stop pretending AI is universally useful for every use case and it must be the user’s fault if it doesn’t actually help.
Re: “slop”, can’t help you there. But if you’d like to join 6 figure advanced / published authors who have come to me for 1:1 coaching and support in how to integrate AI tools into their workflows, sure you are welcome to apply.
Readit News
That pretty much sums it up for me. Well put. I am at a point where I am trying to acquire hobbies to improve my happiness and there is a difficulty modifier now on a lot of things where it’s like “what’s the point”. It reminds me of when X-Box first offered the ability to watch other people play. I was grinding to get like five more points on a course to hit the 200 point requirement, so I downloaded the top ghost video for the course. That person and I were not even playing the same game; they were orders of magnitude better than I was and all I wound up learning was I would never be that good at it.
I suspect that if you had looked at a 98-percentile video instead of the top video, you would also have thought that you would never be that good at it, but in many things, being in the top 2% is attainable with effort for the top 50% or so of the population; practicing for that is just not how they choose to spend their time.
Anyone who has activated cheats on videogames enough times can attest to the fact that it takes the enjoyment away. We do have games with superficial, skinner-like rewards, probably the majority, but many still rely on the satisfaction of overcoming real challenges to reward players.
I reckon all puzzle games are like this.
Historically, there wasn’t much technical ability to dynamically adjust difficulty. So the player had to improve to progress.
But now it’s possible to engineer games that are effectively impossible to lose, yet always make a person feel like they’re barely winning (aka “fun”).
I’m not sure that swapping of objective difficulty for subjective difficulty was healthy, though.
But then it’s hard to be disciplined enough to only use it when strictly required. And it just feels unsatisfying.
That is becasue you are still lacking dopamine. One needs to erase all the dopamine stimulation in your life to truly recover. Go to a AA meeting and you will see everyone drinking and smoking saying they are "sober" and wonder why they relapse.
Learn to limit your rewards to slow, natural ones, like he says in the article. It will absolutely suck at first. It is not about the activity, it is about slowing down the strong dopamine pulses.
Dopamine doesn’t work like this. You don’t “run out” of dopamine by engaging in stimulating activities.
This is pop-science metaphor stuff, not actual dopamine science.
Deleted Comment
Every time I got competitive with my hobby, it stopped being one. I relate to you.
But reality has turned out bleaker, and it seems to be aligning more closely with the author's darker vision.
To avoid the dopamine collapse, we must reclaim effort as meaning—design systems that enhance human creativity, not replace it; use AI to challenge and collaborate, not merely to create shortcuts; and incorporate friction into learning, art, and problem-solving—not as inefficiency, but as intentional practice.
We must also teach people not only how to use AI, but how to preserve their humanity while using it.
Philosophy is no longer a luxury—it becomes a necessity.
One of the best things you can do is just not use it. There is no way to preserve your humanity while using it, at least not in the long run. Because its nature of mechanizing creativity creates feedback loops in our brains and reduces the magic of having the unclimbed mountain...so to speak. It's like trying to teach your body to feel good after having eaten too much sugar. It is beyond our capabilities and fundamentally incompatible with us.
expanding fractals. the past in the present and the inverse...
darker vision and negativity bias / optimism bias
u have the freedom of being unhappy with an AI
you still have infinite value
this may be the beauty of being disposable... ;)
> I was born with this dysfunction. You're choosing it.
This blog pushes the idea of “dopamine deficiency” as a real scientific concept, but it’s not an actual medical diagnosis (unless you have Parkinson’s disease). To be fair, the linked blog post implies that a doctor gave them this idea, which can happen when you go to a doctor who feels like they’re doing patients a favor by telling them they have a “chemical imbalance” or a deficiency of a neurotransmitter to alleviate objections for taking medication.
The other post also implies that a brain scan was used as part of the diagnosis process, so this is a good place to point out that brain scans are not diagnostic for ADHD. There have been a few notable quack doctors who tried to push fMRI misinterpretations as specialty ADHD diagnostic tools such as Dr. Amen, but these aren’t actually validated by anything nor have they even been shown to be repeatable.
As always: When someone starts talking about dopamine as the chemical that explains everything in life or makes claims to have a deficiency of it, realize that they’re talking about dopamine as a metaphor rather than actual science. Unfortunately people start taking the dopamine metaphor too literally and believe that any lack of motivation is equivalent to a physical lack of dopamine, which is not true.
This needs to be corrected. Parkinson is caused by too much dopamine which after being metabolized creates oxidative stress that kills the dopamine neuron. Which is why l-dopa fails to cure the disorder and actually makes the patent worse in the long run.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34184261/
I will say one can see dopamine disorders in someone behavior and correlate them to genetics and nutrition if we cared.
This is not correct. The cause of Parkinson's is not fully understood and a simple Google search or visit to any medical website or Wikipedia could explain that.
The paper you linked is an editorial (it's in the title) commentary on another artificial experiment in mice that were genetically altered to have a hyperactive pathway for generating dopamine. This is not something found in nature nor do they claim it's something found in humans.
They're simply demonstrating that if they geneticially alter mice to overexpress dopamine and induce excess dopaminergic damage in the process, they can produce outcomes that kind of look like Parkinson's
Claiming that this editorial has explained Parkinson's disease is completely wrong.
> I will say one can see dopamine disorders in someone behavior and correlate them to genetics and nutrition if we cared.
Claiming that "if we cared" we'd see that everything is caused by dopamine, genetics, and nutrition is the current generation of pseudoscience that drives blog posts like this one. I don't know when people started reducing everything to dopamine, but it's neither accurate nor helpful. The number of people who have depression or learned behavioral problems who try to explain it away as "dopamine disorder" is becoming a problem.
I couldn’t have comfortably done such a substantial refactor without suffering through the process of building it.
(And this refactor was much larger and more substantial than LLMs in their current state can do)
Is the language I’m using bad? Should I rewrite this other thing? Is it my colleague’s bad? Is this codebase rotten?
I see a lot of people label this as “I’m creative, I don’t do grunt work”, “I’m good at greenfield projects”, “I’m a builder” etc.
> I was born with this dysfunction. You're choosing it.
This ending is worse than a TV show revealing a dream sequence.
We get it, you're special, we're sheep, thank you for enlightening us.
I was truly enjoying it until the author decided to throw out a middle finger.
This is a classic example of someone misinterpreting the science and coming to believe that their state is not their fault. They believe it is entirely inflicted upon them by a medical condition, whereas other people are responsible for their actions and outcomes.
This might change your mind: https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1010930108
It is quite possible he has genetics that make Dopmaine much ore of a problem for him.
I have written several articles about my problem in depth. Dopamine deficiency is the simplest way to put it.
Just keep an open mind that others are struggling there with you ;)
Yes, technology is the way we circumvent effort to deliver results (e.g. to live longer, healthier, and with less pain/fear.)
Yes, our civilization rewards and encourages short circuiting effort, depriving us of the basic positive feedback loop of effort to reward.
It's been like this since the invention of the wheel and fire. It's up to us to find and/or create meaningful (and effortful) lives, and it is more sustainable to focus on the path than the destination; every zen text teaches this.
This article started off strong but ended up quippy, spiteful and shallow. Still, I appreciate the effort ;-]
You are right, it ended with a spiteful tone and I should have chosen better world.
I see a lot of people questioning if dopamine deficiency is real. And maybe some more context would help.
1. I am one of the early IVF kids in India. My life is tracked. 2. Do you know 80% of IVF kids born in 90s and tracked have mental health disorders? 3. I have struggled socially all 28 years of my life. I only felt two emotions - happy and sad. Never experienced a mania, so never ticked the box of bipolarity. 4. In 2021, I was told that DaTscan might help. But I couldn't afford back then. 5. In 2023, finally got it done. Results showed little to no release of dopamine.
I was forced to learn about dopamine and when I see the younger generation getting into a certain cycle (of course not as dark as my article), it makes me feel sad. Because it reminds me of how hard it is to get out of that space.
I have piles of reports that prove 'dopamine deficiency'. Yet the comment section is not fully convinced.
I am fortunate that my life is tracked.
So yes, this is the thought process that led to that ending. No one teaches us to care about our bodies and I hope that changes some day.
To some extent, but so far before AI it has been at a speed and magnitude most people could handle. With AI, they can't.
> It's been like this since the invention of the wheel and fire. It's up to us to find and/or create meaningful (and effortful) lives, and it is more sustainable to focus on the path than the destination; every zen text teaches this.
You are ignoring again the magnitude of the effect of AI, which is much worse than previous technologies. One can always focus on "the path" but Zen teachers also teach practicality: why make your life complicated? AI makes things complicated unecessarily.
Humanity developed agriculture because it requires less effort than hunting and gathering for feeding a given population. We developed machines because it is less effort than doing things by hand, etc... If your dopamine system rewards doing things with less effort, it is working properly.
The caveat is that doing something with less effort does not mean doing less, it can also mean doing more with the same amount of effort, including personal development. It doesn't mean you should AI everything or be sloppy, just not glorify effort as some intrinsic quality, the result is what matters.
I don’t think so.
I still spend the hours — because it needs to sound original. It needs to feel authentic. I have to add my own personal parts to the story.
I still struggle writing it.
The AI helps, but it doesn’t replace the work. The dopamine’s still there — because I’m still in the loop.
FWIW my context is coding as a hobby/entrepreneur. It’s not my job.
You cannot blame "AI" for your own lack of trying...
But I have to guide it: “just list the changes,” “use English English,” and so on.
The fun’s still there — because the thinking is still mine.
It made me irrationally angry, no, I spent two minutes of my own brain power to come up with those five sentences. This kind of thing happens constantly now, everyone assumes everyone else uses gpt's for everything and I find it a bit depressing to be honest.
Dead Comment
AI however brings it to a horrific next level, and really emphasizes the mass production of art.
The problem is that most people need to feel that they are doing something original, and AI takes that away. AI doesn't help anything, except in the short term and maybe for some people who can compartamentalize it. But those people are few and far between indeed.
Certainly it would be more rewarding to create paper from scratch and walk the earth handing his ideas to people? He could even create his own written language from scratch!
The way to get the most out of AI is not to simply automate away things you love; it’s to go bigger and try to solve bigger actual problems while using AI.
I teach an advanced university level course in how to write books with AI. It’s amazing to watch students (some traditional published authors) unlock new levels of flow and creativity.
It’s not the tool. You’re just using it wrong.
Famous techno-optimist trope.
What if the ”tool” is marketed as something that can replace not just labor, but taste, decision making, and craft? Another recent tech development: Whose fault is it that social media is full of engagement bait and influencer social posturing? Is social media a tool? Are the recommendation systems, which promote thin perfect bodies to teenagers with low self esteem, just a tool? After all, they just ”help” you find content you’re likely to engage with.
Note I both agree and disagree with you here. I use AI too but I am very cautious to not let it ”take over”. It’s even hard to define what that means exactly. And that’s for someone who grew up without it. Imagine school today, with all the pressures of being a teenager from peers and teachers, and having access to free AI from companies who plan to rent it back to you later once they turn the value extraction knob.
I think this is the key. Who’s driving?
If you are deliberate about what you want to own, focus on, and create yourself, you can consciously decide how AI help you bootstrap, scaffold, and critique your work to help you go farther.
If you aren’t, and you just tell AI to do it for you, you’re just ordering that Biryani. And heck, maybe that can be OK too. Sometimes you just need a meal you aren’t wanting to work at.
Social media can be a tool.
The recommendation systems are not tools to help you as much as they are a tool to increase shareholder value - occasionally those goals align, often they diverge.
No.
Some people get great results with AI, others don’t.
But it doesn’t follow that for those for whom it doesn’t work “they’re using it wrong”. Maybe it’s the wrong tool for the job, while it’s the right tool for another job (like the one you described).
Stop pretending AI is universally useful for every use case and it must be the user’s fault if it doesn’t actually help.
Ah yes, a slop teacher. Teacher of how to make slop. Can I buy your online course on how to make money from my slop?