Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…This is certainly the most extreme example of it because AI is just so far ahead of prior technologies, but similar fears were had in every other industry. There’s a fear that digital music synthesis would obsolete musicians. There was a very brief period of time in which songs with digital music instruments, like the early Minimoogs and Yamaha synthesizers weren’t allowed to win certain music industry awards because they weren’t considered real music. Then over time, the people were educated and realized these are just instruments people are playing and they’re controlling them the same way they did before. There are similar questions about is computer art built in Photoshop really art, or is it just goofy computer stuff? I think nowadays digital artists have gained respect. I think if you look at just the tools that have existed in Photoshop, some of them are pretty sophisticated and nowadays they have AI features. But I think AI is ultimately going to be another tool in the artist’s tool set. I think it’s going to become a more powerful directable and human serving tool in the future. I think a lot of the alienation comes from the prompt either being immensely powerful at giving you an entire creation, but then being completely unwilling to let you control the nuances of it. That feels alienating. You give it an image, but you’re like, replace the image of this part of it with this thing or make that object green and it just, it can’t do it. Often it can’t be convinced with any number of words in the prompt. That makes it feel like the computer is taking control away from us, humans and artists, and is refusing to do what we want and has its own opinions. It feels like a competitor. I think when we have much, much, much more nuanced control of it and artists can join and just like let’s enhance this object, do this, do that, do that, it’ll feel like some of the tools that exist in Photoshop, which are in some ways compared to a paintbrush or superpowers already. AI will come to feel like that too, and will increasingly serve creators creating and enhancing a work in a way that feels just a natural extension of their own bodies and minds. Of course, there is a real human pain to layoffs and there’s a hype around AI and then companies might try to implement AI systems, and in so doing, layoff a bunch of folks and the pain that those folks feel is real. I think there’s always going to be pain with these kinds of transformation that’s happening and it’s a terrible pain. Pain in general in the human experience is terrible. But I think I’m personally excited by the human AI collaboration as you’ve described in this whole process. I think if you just keep being open to using the tools, constantly trying the cutting edge tools, how they can make you more productive, how can they empower you as a creator, as an artist, or as an engineer, I think you’re going to just keep winning. There’s a lot of complicated trends underway. It can be hard to break them down and distinguish them. I think a lot of people like the theories that get the biggest traction on social media often don’t capture the real underlying motive forces at play there. But I think AI involved in code production will probably create a net benefit for the need for humanity to be involved in coding. It may change parts of jobs. I don’t think it’s going to obsolete anybody who’s willing to learn new ways of doing things. It’s always been this way. I think that there’s also a lot of over hype in AI. AI is really great at spewing out code that does something that a million GitHub repositories already do because it’s learned the underlying pattern. It’s notoriously hard to get to do something new that hasn’t been done before, especially when it’s a complex task. The bigger amount of code you ask AI for, the more it leaves you with just a mess of code that sort of works. Then that’s the problem with code, it like 99% works, but the 1%, it might be harder to get to 100% with AI than with hand coding. Everybody who’s looking at this topic should actually try using the coding assistants on hard problems and see how they do there.…

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