Drove past A Fence field just now, and there's a tractor taking it away.

Sven sent me a video this morning. Coincidentally it's a video that YouTube has wanted me to watch for a while now but, for whatever reason, I have avoided it. I was half right to be avoiding it. I'm tired of hearing about AI being forced into things.

There's an interesting throwaway comment towards the end about wanting AI to do all the boring jobs like working in factories or cleaning the streets or doing your accounting. Those are all also jobs that people do out of either passion or necessity, and replacing them with AI is also a problem in my opinion. For some people, photography is a means to an end just like doing your taxes - why should a photographer be allowed to use AI to do their accounts, but an accountant is bad for using AI to make an image?

The problem is that it's so difficult to draw a line around what's acceptable, and in which scenario, for all this stuff that isn't ever going to be solved without being able to calmly talk about it. In a lot of ways, we've essentially discovered fire again, and we're having two separate arguments about cooking food and burning to death.

The people making these tools aren't doing it so that all the laborious tasks can be replaced and we can all live in some utopia where we're free to indulge creative endeavours all day long, they're doing it as a means of replacing anyone they can in any workforce, to essentially increase shareholder profit in any industry. That's why I hate it - I feel like it has the potential to make life better for a lot of people, but it's not going to do that, and that's not the intention. The problem isn't the product, it's the people in charge (where have I heard that sentiment before?!).

I do, however, like the suggestion that everyone who is using it, should disclose how they're using it as part of their workflow. Whether you like it or not, AI is going to be around for a while, and we need to be able to have civilised discussions about it. Even if you hate any and all AI, someone else using it in some way is (largely, obviously - I've read the news and I know what people are using grok for) not a crime, and it's not productive to leap down people's throats at the sheer mention of it in a workflow.

I'm reading a lot about this in games journalism at the moment, where all AI use is being massively vilified and it's just not productive. If you find out that a developer you like is using AI on a game that you're looking forward to, you have three options: 1. you can ask how they're using it, and try to enter some sort of conversation to see how and why it's beneficial, 2. you can just quietly boycott that studio from now on, or 3. you can kick and scream and call people names and demand that they stop without ever trying to have a conversation about it. Yes, I get that it's bad that pretty much every LLM was trained on copyrighted data, but that genie is out of the bottle now. There's still ways it can be used to make something good; it's not that black-and-white.

I'm tired of seeing people torn down just for using it in some way, without being able to have a grown-up conversation about it first.