alt Hacker NewsThis is why there is growing anti-AI sentiment. It is always extractive. You can never just enjoy a poem, you need to use it. You need to extract its value for shareholders. Get a life.
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Creatives have always found inspiration from what they consume (AI has nothing to do with it). My partner writes, and eventually gets to the point where she has to take a break from plotting and writing and watch tv shows or read books. When she says she needs to refill her well, I know she's about to want to watch tv shows again for a little bit.
I design games. I can't even count the number of times something someone said, or a game I've played or watched a review of, has sparked an idea for new game, especially a board game (which most of the time doesn't work out once it gets in front of players, but that's okay). It's probably been over a hundred times by now.
People love highlighting quotes from poems and stories that they find inspirational for their own lives somehow. You want to know how I know? Kindle used to tell me, with saying how many other people highlighted a specific passage (it might still do that, but I mostly listen to audiobooks right now, so of course I won't see them). Also social media is flooded with people sharing quotes from various books or poems or sayings from people.
That's all this is.
But because it's said by someone who works with A.I. and thus is thinking about the quote with that frame of reference, you had to twist it into some anti-A.I. sentiment, implying that he's doing something perverted or not normal by daring to find inspiration in a quote.
Bukowski was a fan on new technology even towards the end of his life:
> “Yes, you have a strange project: electronic books. It might be the future as more and more people find that the computer is such a magic thing: time-saver, charmer, energizer.”
No one can say what he would have thought of AI for sure but I think he would have appreciated ability to reduce drudgery on this thoughts on factotum[1] work.
1. Why yes, that is a cheesy reference to his book of the same name. ;)
This cracked me up. I only used ~~one~~ two of his poems and enjoyed most of the others. Betting on the Muse was $2.09 on Amazon, which is a good ROI, I think.
Is this a comment toward the author?
Surely the irony isn't lost upon you that they literally are advocating for getting a life.