I'm not following -- what does it have to do with your teacher being non tech-savvy? A tech-savvy art teacher would also tell you not to trace. Tracing doesn't really help you develop your drawing skills, any reasonable art teacher would be against that.

Drawing from reference is bog standard.

Tracing is a cardinal sin.

People lose careers over not understanding the massive difference.

>it would have made me a fraud.

s/made/revealed/

Revealing it doesn't make you a fraud. That was already the truth.

Revealing it makes you known as a fraud.

A little cheating here, a bit of fraud there and before one knows it, one is CEO of some AI company.

The revealing thing is how the cheating is seen as normal and how the other people are considered out of touch or wrong.

Autotune is legitimate as a surgical tool, used as little as necessary so you can't ever hear it, not when it's front and center as they have tried to do in the 2010 era of awful.

AI is still in the 2010 autotune phase, where more is better.

It’s autoslop can become an adjective for Generative AI content whether it’s hidden or not. It’s so AI - can mean different things to different generations - derogatory for Gen Alpha and like a good thing for older generations

Autotune, and quantization in general, is a legitimate artistic choice though. It's like using a ruler. It's not strictly required either.

AI is literally the exact opposite of that. We had been building software with ruler-like precision even when it was unnecessary and got in the way. That's the only reason we ever wanted AI to begin with.

One mistake people keep making is the assumption that arbitrary and probabilistic imprecision ("wisdom of the crowd") is automatically equivalent to artistic or experienced/curated choice. It's absolutely not. Another mistake is that approximations are always enough to satisfy all problems, or at least "real world" problems. That's obviously not true either. That's flat out ignorance.

> projects like 808s and Heartbreak and Tha Carter III

Or 22, A Million by Bon Iver.

I like to make the comparison to the invention of cameras. Traditional painters still found their place in art and commercial work, and photography found a place in art and photography. But if a guy with a camera took a photo and claimed its a painting, people would have been angry about finding out too (understandably so). Takes time for new media to find their place/niche in which they differ from other media in terms of art, and in terms of commercial use. Though obviously as long as people are deceptive about the use of a tool, there will always be negative connotations, and people using AI for art must accept that just not everyone is going to like it and they can't expect the same amount of praise/admiration for doing the same thing as other media with less effort (and that's fine too).

So you're saying either way, we are going to get a polished turd? lol

So, kind of like popular music, and good music

I have heard multiple arguments that point towards this future, where AI largely becomes "normal" technology. I'm hopeful for it. There are tons of great use cases for AI, but it absolutely should not be in... everything.

This feels similar to the timeline that lots of new technologies go through. Blockchain (put that into everything!). The internet + dot com era were probably similar as well.

Treating ANYTHING like an everything tool just seems to feel this way. There's no reason I want to use AI to buy something on Amazon. Or plan a vacation for me. I absolutely want to use AI to scan through 5000 files and find that one thing I was looking for though. Different applications.

Spellcheck and autocorrect got considerably worse when people starting replacing its perfectly good backend with LLMs.

yesh I argue! Spellchrc ist he beat investor humanity has ever conceded of!

Those younger generation are in a really dark place right now. In many cities they will never be able to afford a house; and on top of that AI labs are now saying they will never have a job.

Remember how we were all going to “surf the information superhighway” and we’d all become smarter because we had access to all the worlds experts and books?

I remember!

Before the like button, it was more individualistic. Before web 2.0, before global market penetration had hit 10%, it was mainly early adopters.

Who clicks on the clickbait? Who upvotes the garbage? Who actually sees ads and goes to buy what they didn't need? I think we all know.

The window we saw may have been one of an illusive sub-population who is forever on the treadmill trying to get away from the unwashed masses.

>> I am more and more convinced that young people have a much better understanding of technology and especially its impact on society.

> They can't even use a computer, they struggle with basic computer knowledge because they grow up with closed ecosystems and most of them only have smartphones, not a desktop PC. They are called "Digital Naives" (sic) for a reason.

You and the GP are talking about totally different things.

Also the OP is talking about elementary schoolers. Even as a future software engineer interested in computers in the pre-smartphone era, my computer knowledge in elementary school was still pretty basic.

My son (11) constantly refers to kids like this as 'ipad kids'. He has a PC and has taught himself to program, so I think he looks down on kids like this, which seems to be the majority of them.

The use of personal computers way overshot what they were designed for. Don't mistake people putting up with the relative complexity of personal computing with them wanting it. That's why so many people no longer bother with PCs or keep an old one around just for things that need to be done and through the web. Phones, primarily, and tablets for media consumption, are much easier to use.

Try explaining a clutch and stick shift to kids. They will look at you and wonder why and how you think having a pedal that decouples the engine from the rest of the drivetrain so you can manually operate a gear lever was appropriate for a mass market product.

They can't use a Windows-95-style filesystem for the same reason I can't use IBM-style JCL and COBOL. That is not the entire field of computing, in fact it's barely any of the field of computing which is the reason they can't use it. Just because that paradigm was once dominant, doesn't mean it still is.

Do they have the motivation to learn though? You could say the same about gen Z with books; it's just that many have never cared enough to make it a habit.

That having been said, the new generation mostly does computing with a smartphone/tablet and these kids are very adept at handling them. If a child wants something, it'll find a way to make it happen and they're good at that. Creating spreadsheets and organizing files is simply not on their list. If it were, they'd be better at it than most people who grew up before computers.

You and he are using “understand” differently. You’re talking about understanding the internals, the components and concepts inside the box labeled “technology”; he’s talking about understanding the externalities, where that box is moving and how fast, how the box affects and alters the world around it.

Files and folders aren't fundamental to computing though.

Oh absolutely. The resources and features these days are incomparable to the stone tools of the 80s and 90s. I’m just saying that specifically getting started was much easier. My friends and I could trade disks of BAS files and not have a single comment or README to explain what your dev environment needed to look like. We didn’t have to have GitHub accounts. I love GitHub, but trying to help kids manage a million accounts just to get some sample code is a nightmare. It mostly works unauthenticated but thanks to bots the limits are low and abrupt. Ironically getting AIs to just make up similar content is far easier!

Anyway, I don’t want to pretend Apple BASIC was better than Python or whatever, but I never had to learn “no it’s venv now not virtualenv and make sure you’re not using system Python just install docker via brew and it will be easier…” until I was getting paid to deal with that nonsense.

And we do that and it is great but the restrictions are jarring and absolute, and docs written for “real” web dev always assume a dev server instead. AI can at least adapt.

>everything you could do with QBASIC, you can do with an HTML file

Oh yea? give me the equalent of PLAY function. Or the PSET function to turn individual pixels on and off on the screen. Give me the function to read the color of any onscreen pixel (admittantly not QBASIC but some C variant)...

FFS you can't even draw something delayed on screen without having to deal with the setTimeout, setInterval madness. That alone would kill any interest that a kid might be starting out with!

We do love Scratch but account management is almost worse than something to install. If there’s no accounts, where does he save his work? The easiest option he’s discovered is copying and pasting it into a Google Doc because if he uses his school account he can access it from school or home.

What a terrible experience compared to a floppy disk! Sure disk failure was common and crushing, but the UX was simple and ubiquitous. I guess I could get him a thumb drive, but I don’t know if his school allows them.

Counterpoint: one could say the exact same thing about the internet, but social media has (IMHO) proved... sub-optimal at a societal level.

Same! I think our position just isn’t very interesting, so mostly we only hear from boomers or doomers. Gen Alpha seems largely outside that spectrum: ai where it supports creativity, no ai where it destroys creativity. The kids are alright.

You’re right, they don’t care.

People are using LLMs for the things they consider distractions but are “required”, or at least feel that way about: ads, marketing web sites, emails to/from coworkers, and even RFP responses to government agencies.

Wherever someone uses the raw output of an LLM signifies how little they wanted to do the work in the first place yet still [desperately] want to reap the benefits of appearing to care.

Yesterday, I was searching for local HVAC maintenance companies when I came across one with a map showing their service area.

At a quick glance, it seemed fine but that was no longer the case once you zoomed in: it was a collection of hallucinated, non-sensical names. I too said, “how in the world was this reviewed and approved!?”, and then quickly came to the same conclusion that you did: “nobody gives a shit about this stuff anymore”.

https://mcairllc.com/images/service-area.png

> AI is like guns.

Let’s you shoot yourself in the leg, if you don’t know what you are doing.

Every artist I know uses LLM’s to help with getting around some very complex program (Unity, Blender, After Effects etc), which they probably would abandon otherwise. They don’t use AI generate images or other visual content, because… It sucks. And to make it unsuck sucks so bad that you might just draw it yourself.

Today’s digital tools (drawing tablets, ProCreate etc) have made image making so effortless that you can make sick designs that would have taken months, in hours. But it still requires you to know how to draw, to make a composition, understand colour etc. Be an artist. You can prompt all you wan’t, but nothing changes that.

I agree 100% but you need to do more than 2 sentences put into Chatgpt and send the result to your print shop

you have more chances to shine only because everyone around you is not shining, but instead competing on volume

I never been to a "faded old restaurant" that was actually good and not only the same shitty frozen food every other cheap Chinese place offers.

Good places around here usually do actually care about presentation. None of these kebap/pizza places is particularly good either, it's the mass production places with average to bad ratings.