[–] 1 point 1 day ago

I think your view of what a "hobby" is might be a bit too high-level or generic.

For example, I play tabletop RPGs with my friends, it's my hobby. I use AI extensively in the course of that, either as GM or as player, but it isn't doing the hobby for me. It's automating the stuff that would be drudgery or overly expensive. Previously if I wanted a customized image that illustrated a particular scenario or monster I would laboriously piece it together with the Gimp and get a mediocre result. I enjoyed having the end result to show to players, but I didn't enjoy the process. AI now automates that process so I get the good without the bad.

If I was an artist who enjoyed the process of making art, then obviously I wouldn't be using AI for that. But I might use AI to discuss ideas or layout or generate a bunch of mockups, if that was a part of the process that I found tedious. Every hobby has some labor-saving steps that people like to use to skip over the parts they don't like doing. Few artsts mix their own pigments or stretch their own canvases, they go to a hobby store and buy machine-made materials instead.

So, too, in the case of vibe coding. I'm a professional programmer, I'm good at programming, but that doesn't mean I like every aspect of it. Or even most aspects of it! There's a ton of tedium. Why not automate the parts I don't like?

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  • [–] 4 points 2 days ago

    People twist and turn to vilify the things they want to vilify and excuse the things they want to excuse. I've been seeing it increasingly in the context of AI where people draw distinctions between "generative AI" and "machine learning" based on whether they like the individual application or not. It might be fine to use LLMs for assistance with programming, but the same LLM becomes Satan incarnate if it's helping write a fanfic. Photoshop can use AI to do image segmentation for "smart select" but the same AI is taking jobs from artists if it touches one pixel's colour values.

    We're a little way off from optical implants becoming good and popular yet, so I guess we'll just have to see which way the winds are blowing when we get there. Probably it'll be fine, I expect most people will find ways to excuse them.

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  • [–] 20 points 5 days ago (1 child)

    Yeah, I get the impression that this is a clickbait "hey you know that thing that's kind of annoying/problematic/whatever? Well now AI can do it too!" Sort of news story.

    AI didn't "reinvent" sending large amounts of unsolicited email. It was never deinvented in the first place.

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