I follow a few different communities related to making visual art and music, and there's quite a bit of brigading against AI in those communities. Moreover I feel there's a lot of dissatisfaction and concern as AI moves into all walks of life, making a lot of tasks and no small number of careers redundant.
Of course, this comes out as a lot of complaining that really boils down to, "AI makes things too easy. If you use it, you're lazy, or you haven't gone through the struggle that is required to be a real artist, or create a real piece of art."
There's this scene in The Matrix where Smith explains to Morpheus that the first matrix was a paradise and humans rejected it, essentially as if it were insufficiently challenging. If you watch basically any sports documentary, or any documentary about anyone who's successful in any capacity, over-and-over the idea is repeated that persistence in the face of adversity is the root of success. Even our best comedians spend a large amount of their time on stage inviting us to laugh at their suffering. The point being that our culture idolizes suffering.
The AI tools that have become available in the past few years really do make life easier, more convenient, and in many cases, alleviate or make redundant a large amount of suffering. And to me it seems that this is what gets a lot of people upset. It's as if they're suffering for not suffering. Like we're addicted to suffering as a species and we can't just sit down and say, "Isn't this nice that so many things got so much easier so quickly?"
So is it just me, or is our affair with AI really kinda pointing out that Agent Smith was basically right?
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