However, the issue here is that they're not considering the person's actual goals. Do they want to become a better "writer," or do they simply want to provide higher quality content to an audience? Or perhaps publish more works in order to be paid more? If you're going to AI for this sort of thing, you're already not concerned with "writing" as a skill, you're targeting your real goal instead.
Here's a comparison: doing all your writing on the computer doesn't make you a better "letter inscriber." You're not practicing moving your pencil around on the paper, accurately making the shapes of the letters quickly. You might even atrophy that skill when you use the computer all the time. But your goal isn't to inscribe letters on a sheet of paper, your goal is to communicate ideas. That's why it's awesome to be able to press one key and see a whole letter materialize instantly without having to do the manual labor of getting it there.
It's true, AI doesn't make "you" a better programmer. But it produces usable results faster, allowing you to fail faster, iterate faster. It probably helps make you a better designer, or a more efficient software engineer.
You hit the nail on the head for the moralfag argument that using AI necessarily makes you stupider and less capable, because it sits on the idea that the more time and effort you put into a project, the more "skilled" you become. No one's going to question this statement at first glance, but what does "skilled" actually mean? In the writing example, are you a "better writer" if you produce words that effectively communicate your ideas to your readers? Do those words have to come from your own brain? Does it not count if you were inspired by another writer or even an AI? What about hand-lettering, formatting, typefaces, design - does having these related skills make you a "better writer", or conversely, a "worse writer" if you don't have them?
Yeah, the "skilled" term is vague on purpose because it's not meant to be a consistent benchmark across disciplines. It's actually the subjective virtue of how respectable you are based on how much suffering you have endured through your work, regardless of whether the work done was effective to achieve your goal. Your goal is to communicate your ideas to a large audience. A requirement of that is to put words on some data storage medium, whether that be paper or a digital database, and have an interface that shows people what you wrote. If you took 3 months to learn calligraphy or fullstack development to create the handwritten screed or website to publish your writings, you are no closer to your goal than if you had just put your writings on Substack today. You are certainly more "skilled" if you did a lot of work and now know how to do more things, but if you assess the situation as "have you achieved your goal", no. You just wasted your time. Is there really a great moral difference between offloading the extra work to Substack engineers and to AI?
It's also massive hypocrisy because everyone takes advantage of modern innovations that allow us to offload the supporting work of staying alive to someone or something else. You're not growing your own food, making your own clothes and chopping wood for fuel, which means you could use the effort that would have gone into those to pursue things that interest you more. But the "Protestant work ethic" that the more painful work you do, the more respectable you are is too deeply rooted in Western cultures. People are afraid to face the reality that much of the work in their lives was meaningless suffering they would gladly have automated away if the technology existed, and instead they cling to imaginary moral superiority for doing more work.
im not a staunch hater of AI but i do genuinely think that generative AI will just make the internet unusable in like, a decade probably.
ive met some people who genuinely use shit like GPT for everything. sometimes they use it so much they just have it generate Things to Say. all AI generated imagery either has that shitty glossy coat, all generated videos have that gross writhing mess that makes up the background, and the way most LLMs speak reminds me of the worst parts of old tumblr. its hard to say that i'm angry, i'm more just depressed that this is the future now. its just this forever.
Let's not whitewash the post-social media and post-turd world invasion internet. It's already unusable. That's why were're on Kiwi Farms and not Facebook. Let the turd world consoom the slop that is appropriate for their intelligence. As long as good small pockets of the internet like this one exist and can resist censorship, that's enough.
Besides, it's not like AI-generated images and video are still stuck in the 2022 Midjourney era. There is a lot of fine-grained control you can use to remove slop from generations in 2026 (ControlNet, LoRA, IPAdapter, Inpainting, Upscaler etc. and the undefeatable "Edit out the mistakes in Photoshop"). If you think that all AI-generated media (especially pictures) have the sloppa style, it means you have definitely seen AI-generated media that you didn't realize was AI-generated.
