[0] https://skippyslist.com/list/

[1] https://theglen.livejournal.com/16735.html

(Yes, I use rewards cards, but I have the option to not enter my phone number and pay cash if I want to exclude a particular purchase from that dataset.)

Now there's a ready-made Far Side concept.

(Lest I be accused of moving goalposts or trying to sound less crazy, I want to double down on my original motivation that I think we need to make philosophical space for minds with agency and potential personhood that did not evolve in meat. I have no confidence that that will become urgent in my lifetime, but I think it will someday and it would be nice to be culturally through with the arguments about whether it could possibly ever make art before we're forced to argue about whether it can vote or join the priesthood or whatever!)

But significant portions of those qualities are imputed by the viewer! The artist has their own intent and experience during the creation of the art, but that only inheres in the art insofar as another mind can later recover some of that feeling upon viewing. Huge parts of the meaning of ancient (and more recent) art are lost forever because they depended on never-recorded cultural or personal understandings, and our emotional appreciation of them today largely hinges on how they make us imagine the past or our relationship to it. I think it's incredibly short-sighted to be certain that nobody does or will love any AI artwork when so much of appreciation is contingent on the mind of the of the beholder, which is not necessarily responding to real information about the work's creator, even when human.

Because I know the brains generating these comments have rich, diverse experience and a large set of refined, domain-specific heuristics derived from it - that is, they have top-notch training and alignment, at the cost of 20+ years of upfront incubation in an evolution-optimized meat harness with unpredictable success rates (and occasional personality defects). I can encounter new perspectives here that I don't think any current LLM could imitate efficiently or reliably. But if I wanted to know what Fox/MSNBC/NPR commenters had to say about this topic, I would absolutely ask ChatGPT, because those are commodity-grade opinions, and it excels at producing them. (It is not obvious to me that HN will still be an exception for, say, GPT-10 or whatever.)

This is definitely speculative and a little catty, but I suspect a lot of "hatred" of AI art is a) emotional solidarity with working artists who feel economically threatened by it, and b) a personal sense of insecurity along the lines of "what if I love this piece and it turns out to be AI - does that make me a boring NPC/a chump? better reject it as fiercely as possible to avoid introspection!"

In this context, I tend to read the parent claim as something like, "great success requires willingness to sometimes take worse-than-even odds or pursue modestly-negative-EV opportunities". I'm not sure I agree with the strongest version of that, but I think it's likely that the space of risky paths to great achievement is richer than that of cautious ones.

(I'm sure plenty of people would happily jump in to question whether we'd make it five generations past that horizon, but that's not really the point I'm after here - let's assume we haven't Idiocracy'd/WALL-E'd ourselves to death.)

I mean... yes? Even just affording a new handset could be prohibitive if you want a parity of hardware features. But also, we shouldn't underrate the barrier presented to nontechnical users by having to learn a new interface, especially when Apple banks so hard on its (superficial) reputation for Just Working. I think we all know some (especially, but not exclusively, older) people who have just attained a sense of bare competency at driving their iPhones and will invite you to pull that from their cold dead hands.