In other words, in many ways, AI (or rather llms) is the very thing that Brett Victor has spent his whole career imagining and creating - a computing interface that closes gap between human imagination and creation. But here, he’s focusing on the negatives while neglecting, IMHO, the vast potential of AI to allow people to connect, create, and express themselves. As in truly having a PERSONAL computer.

At Dynamicland, he was attempting to build a system that non-technical people like me can interface in a way that makes sense to us.

Taking your unnecessarily disparaging microwave analogy - Using CHATGPT, I can understand it, reprogram it, and do fun stuff, like I don’t know - set up a basketball hoop that sets the timer based on how many shots I make, despite having limited or no technical background. Like I can tell chatgpt my crazy vision, and it will give me step by step approach, with proper resources, and respond in a way that I can grok to build this thing.

THIS is why I'm awestruck.

My anecdote is just my personal reaction to the post. Besides, what’s wrong with people expressing themselves freely here?

we are never ready for seismic changes. But we will have to adapt one way or another, might as well find a good use for it and develop awareness as a child would around handling knives.

Since I’ve literally been working on this project for two days, here’s a somewhat related answer to your question: I’ve been using chat gpt to build art for TCG. Initially I was resistant and upset at AI companies were hoovering up people’s work wholesale for training data (which is why I think now is an excellent time to have serious conversation about UBI, but I digress).

But I finally realized that I could develop my own distinctive 3D visual style by feeding GPT my drawings and having it iterate in interesting directions. It’s fun to refine the style, by having GPT simulate actual camera lens and lighting set up.

But yes I’ve used AI to make numerous stylistic tweaks to my site, including building out a tagging system that allows me to customize the look of individual pages when I write a post)

Hope I’ll be able to learn how to build an actual complex app one day, or games.

I feel like, AI makes learning way more accessible, at least it did for me, where it evoked a childlike sense of curiosity and joy for learning new things.

I’m also working on a Trading Card Game, where I feed it my drawings and it renders it into final polished form based on visual style that I spent some time building in chat GPT. It’s like an amplifier / accelerator.

I feel like, yes while it can augment us, at the end day it depends on our desire to grow and learn. Otherwise, you will end up with same result as everybody else.

But, basically I wanted a way to have a custom repository of fonts a la Google Fonts (found their selection kinda boring) that I could pull from.

Ran fonts through transfonter to convert them to .woff2, set up a GitHub repository (which is not designed for people like me), and set up an instance on Netlify, then wrote custom CSS tags for my ghost.org site.

The thing that amazes me is that aside from my vague whiff of GitHub, I had absolutely no idea how to do this. Zilch. Nada. Chat GPT gave me a clear step by step plan, and exposed me to Netlify, how to write CSS injections, how ghost.org tagging works from styling side of things. And I’m able to have back and forth dialogue with it, not only to figure out how to do it, but understand how it works.