Lime Bar @limebar@mastodon.social
I am a little shocked at the lack of solidarity I see between artists working in different mediums wrt genAI.
Musicians who would never use it to make music use it to make cover art
Graphic artists reach for it to make music over their videos
Writers use it to illustrate their articles
And, considering software development an art, many use it to create web sites or apps to host their art.
None of this is necessary. All of this is harmful to the other artists.
Collaborate ffs.
Stop it.
Aug 09, 2026, 12:17 AM
AI can do any job. Doing the job with finesse and originality, not so much. But it will do it adequately, expediently, and repeatably. It will never get bored, (so long as that is not programmed into it) and does not require rest, food, or recuperation time. If a robot breaks, it can either be repaired and be back to work in hours or days or be replaced instantaneously with no troublesome moral entanglements regarding ending a person’s lively hood.
You can hate them all you want, but from a purely CBA perspective, it’s plain to see why there’s’ a move to it.
As CGP Grey put it in his fantastic video on the subject: Not everyone wants a triple press fair trade soy macchiato with oat milk foam; most just want a decent cup of coffee.
It can’t do every job, or else it would have happened. There’s a lot of limitations that prevent it from accomplishing even the most basic facets of some jobs.
Ironically, especially the manual labor jobs not already replaced by robots are some of the toughest nuts to crack with AI. For example, any task where a human starts to have a hard time just by putting on some gloves, we don’t have ways to feed the AI the usual set of inputs that the human is acting on that is needed to properly imitate the behavior.
On the front of dealing in fact based work, LLMs don’t really deal in ‘facts’ but facts are very highly correlated to the narrative, so it can frequently do a passable job, but it is factually incorrect a fair amount of time and if the facts actually matter, then it’s a tricky scenario. If you can hook it up to a feedback loop where mistakes are both harmless and fed back into the model for a retry, then you can significantly mitigate this drawback, but it’s not always feasible to do this.
Now perhaps it can ‘do’ every purely fictional output of text, audio, images, and video, which would be the topic of the post. The stuff we were kind of hoping to be freed up to do as fun and rewarding art. Instead, it’s the first thing that is ‘nailed’ by AI as far as corporates are concerned freeing up people to be those plumbers and HVAC technicians instead of doing art, and we get stuck with the most milquetoast slurry of slop to consume instead.
LLMs have a key weakness in that they aren’t repetitive. They come up with a new solution to the job every single time they’re prompted. Sometimes it can do the job adequately and expediently, sometimes it produces nonsense, and you’ll never know when.
The c-suite have convinced themselves that LLMs don’t have this flaw and that they can be treated like any other automation, that they can be relied on to do the same thing over and over, and then reality intrudes when they find out these are probability engines.
The chatbots can’t actually do any job.
I’m not talking about chatbots. AI can be tailored to suit the need. You wouldn’t expect a receptionist to do the job of the engineer anymore than you’d expect Excel spreadsheets to operate a CNC machine.
The OP is obviously about chatbots, so, I’m not sure why you aren’t talking about chatbots.
I’m talking about ALL AI. Narrowly defining them to just chatbots skews the scope of the discussion on the matter, IMHO.