Generative "AI": The Guitar Hero of Creativity

"But, like Guitar Hero, no outside creative skill has been acquired or developed."

Spoken like someone who never actually played the games. GH developed my interest in music as a kid, and Rock Band actually taught me how to drum in real life. It also garnered my interest in picking up and learning real guitar.

Those who forget that Rock Band not only a) existed and b) did everything GH did but a thousand times better + created by real musicians (Harmonix) do the genre, industry, and this article, injustice.

This article is written by someone stretching and reaching to relate two unrelated things. I'm offended by this.

Scalzi has developed an almost religious sort of dogmatic hatred of AI. He seems to acknowledge none of the benefits, even those that are obvious. Likely because he feels it's harmful to the way he earns his living.

He is rapidly coming to define himself through opposition, rather than promotion. Which is a dangerous and fruitless game.

Throughout human history there has never been a still useful technology that we as a species chose to stop using, and AI very much is. Maybe we'll come to regulate it, but the genie will never go completely back into the bottle and folks are going to need to get used to the new world.

As a code monkey generative ai helps grow my skills daily, and all I have to do is read the code.

I don't know enough about DJing, but maybe that is also an analogy to GenAI usage that can work.

This is a bad analogy by somebody who never played the game. Guitar hero is not harder or easier than guitar, it's just different.

I don't know how to play guitar, yet I can play guitar hero. My friend who plays guitar cannot play guitar hero. I'm not interested in playing guitar and I don't find GH to be a "shortcut" to learn it. In fact, I play the piano and I'm okay like that.

Bad analogy. In GH you have to press the buttons at the exact time that is prescribed and you're scored on that. With AI there is no such prescribed goal. The world is your oyster. You can use it in boring ways, but you can use it in immensely creative ways too. You can chain together AI agents, image generators, video generators, 3D asset generators, computer vision models, text embeddings etc. etc. and prompt all the orchestration into existence with your ideas, taste and direction. It's the opposite of a constrained game.

Boring people use it in boring ways, interesting people use it in interesting ways.

The rest is old man yells at cloud, like how people criticized "laptop music" or photography.

And to keep fluffing the control narrative, 0 mention of open weight models were made.

Except Guitar Hero is a game, and is marketed as such. Guitar Hero is like Bitcoin mining, you are doing useless computations to make some number go up, in the case of Bitcoin, your money, and Guitar Hero, your score.

But AI actually does something unlike Guitar Hero. There is a real output that can be used tomorrow even if AI "goes away".

You say AI helps you learn no skills, essentially. I don't know about you, but AI helped me understand Linux better in a way I didn't feel confident I would be able to before AI. I have created code with AI that I can maintain, and understand without it.

AI can go in conjunction with learning manually and can be helpful. Just because many examples exist of AI being unhelpful does not mean the whole technology is unhelpful.

“ Being a Guitar Hero player did not — and does not! — equal being a guitar player.”

Has anyone ever claimed otherwise?

Calculators have never improved my ability to do long division.

And yet, I am still quite good at mathematics.

I'm making a LED Camel Totem for Burning Man. I had the idea to make a Koons-style balloon animal.

I explored this idea with ChatGPT, asking it to make some reference images. I also asked for some prompt generation. I have weak sketching abilities (it's on my list to improve), so this is how I "storyboard".

To be cheeky, I asked Claude to make balloon simulator from which I could eventually drop into Fusion360 to muck with and 3D print. CamelKoons was born! [1]

I wanted a Golang backend and web frontend. Fable pretty much one-shotted the step-one scaffolding: Golang physical simulation of a single balloon, streaming geometry to a Web application. Vibed through various issues and then step two was multiple balloons with twists (which were just choke points).

In the world of disposable, hyper-focused software, this tool remained static to Dromedary Camel topologies. A generalized topology feature is left as an exercise for the reader's LLM.

I like empowering my agents to loop [2]. So, I used Claude-in-Chrome to do some loops where Claude positioned the Camel and could screenshot it. I also gave it an HTTP endpoint to position the camera for itself and me.

Eventually, I wanted to push views and comments from the Web page, so I added a comment box. Claude Code used its new-to-me "monitoring" feature to watch for that action and react to it in the session. Claude made itself a "look-at-camel" skill, so cute! [3]

While the balloons were looking interesting, I noted it wasn't very Koons-like and Claude reminded me that Koons was art and we were doing physical simulation. So then we started distorting the physical model. Of course we also added model export, etc.

After tokenmaxxing, I ended up with something that was a cross between a poop emoji and an alien dildo.

I'm now learning the Forms feature in Fusion360 and following a great balloon-dog tutorial on YouTube. I think this guitar approach will win out over my Guitar Hero approach.

[1] https://github.com/cameltopia/CamelKoons

[2] https://github.com/ConAcademy/WeaselToonCadova

[3] https://github.com/Cameltopia/CamelKoons/blob/main/.claude/s...

This seems disingenuous. I can ask a generative AI "explain this ternary operator to me" or "walk me through why this causes a race condition"

I cannot ask the video game why my real guitar is out of tune, or diagnose why I'm holding the fret wrong.

If you press the button on a camera, you are not a painter.

Don't worry, there's still room for paintings in human culture, even though photos outnumber them billion to one.

I was trying to figure out what time of day, by UTC, would most people be asleep. Searching I could only pre-slopped answers in hundreds of random blogs.

So I decided to get my own custom slop. Opened Gemini and it said "video generation is free for a few days, try it out!". I uploaded a copy of Neuromancer and asked it to generate a scene.

MF had Cage inserting a power plug in his ear.

Ah and the time zone curiosity question? It went about it for a a minute or so and said "can't help you with that one, anything else?"

I think we've seen the best these LLMs can do and the race to the bottom has started. It's all cost cutting now, and I am very curious to see what will be of OpenAI and Anthropic. Probably will end up absorbed by MS, Amazon and Nvidia.

These folks are completely unaware that they have witnessed creative and high quality generative AI content without realizing what it was. Because that's the thing. Good generative AI is invisible per se. And it is a lot more ubiquitous than people think by now.