Somebody a while back on HN compared sharing AI chat transcripts as the equivalent of telling everyone all about that “amazing dream you had last night”.
The most famous literary expression of this idea comes from F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby. While discussing the tedious nature of listening to others recount their dreams, there is a general literary consensus often attributed to him (and other authors like Mark Twain or Henry James) that:
"Nothing is more boring than other people’s dreams."
> "Nothing is more boring than other people’s dreams."
I disagree. Often their dreams are more interesting than their boring stories about some their "real life" situations, or - God forbid - their gossip.
I would even claim that at least for the phase in my life when I kept a diary of my dreams, and thus got much more observant of my dreams, I did have (somewhat) interesting dreams (even for other people), for example
- dreaming two dreams in parallel (it's basically like having two desktop applications open at the same time)
- having a dream where I additionally have a dream inside it (and I am aware of the latter); it does in my opinion not really feel like the Inception movie, but rather like the feeling of playing a video game where you are basically both a person who plays a video game in which you control a video game character (and are aware of this), and the character inside the video game.
Conversely, I was party to every part of crypto hype and there are some amazing parallels, like right now when people start pretending to be philosophical greeting cards instead of making concrete statements.
I'm making movies with VFX now. (I've been a photons on glass filmmaker for over a decade. This tech rocks.)
I'm basically automating my work and acting as a senior manager. Claude can write my code in my style 100x faster than me. I'm reviewing the code, making adjustments - that means I have to pay back the efficiency gain, but overall this is easily a doubling of my productivity.
I'm making music and images and I've never been able to do those things. I suck at graphics design - now I can actually do it.
Google search sucks. Complicated searches had become impossible. Now I can ask very obscure and hard questions and easily verify the LLM results.
We've effectively jumped 50 years in tech capability, it feels like. I feel like I'm living in the future. This is only the beginning, too.
I don't care if you use AI. In fact, I'm better off if you don't. That gives me even more of an edge.
> I'm making music and images and I've never been able to do those things. I suck at graphics design - now I can actually do it.
I’d argue you still can’t do it, you just have access to cheap enough labour that you can afford to have it done for you on a scale which you couldn’t before. However seeing as you haven’t developed those skills in the first place you also lack the ability to make any deep critique of the output you are given. Instead of guiding it in the way someone experienced would, you’re still the client, except now you’re the client of a machine.
You and every two bit poser, that's the problem. Whatever edge you had as a 'photons on glass filmmaker' is now completely gone. The one thing you should hope for is that it wasn't your skill that was the moat but your ability to tell stories. If not then your goose is utterly cooked because those skills are now so trivial to come by they no longer serve as a barrier to entry for those that are dedicated to the art. So your fine works will drown in slop.
I use plenty of AI, I just don't go around making weird pseudo-intellectual semi-philosophical statements about it.
And as you have pivoted to "Its a really good technology/tool" from "This is an alien brain" I understand that you have completely given up on that framing.
Or maybe it fell outside your context window, lmao.
If its that great it doesn't need weird people advocating for it in comment sections pretending to be buddha or an alien intelligence from an Arthur C Clarke novel.
Are they though? I don't know what I expected, but to me they looked like nothing. Maybe they'd be more impressive if I'd read the transcripts but whatever.
(Science fiction novels excluded, of course.)