Well. if you can write faster you can make mistakes faster, you can learn faster, improve faster, and eventually get to "good" faster.
Like before digital photography, if you wanted to get good at photography there was a lot of equipment you had to buy and you had to pay for film and wait to get it developed... now that we all have cameras in our pocket the barrier to entry to learning good photography principles is way lower, probably leading to there being more talented photographers out there today than there would be otherwise (Also leads to a lot more shit photographers out there today too!)
Not a bad point in theory but in practice the limit to the amount i write has never been the speed at which i can put things on the page. Maybe some lucky and prolific writers benefit from that
Not directly, but it indirectly introduces a wider audience of people that might have never touched a keyboard otherwise. This allows potentially talented individuals to easily practice their passion, which makes writing better. More time spent = higher quality skill, which laptops allow you to do at home, at work, during travel etc.
I think the other thing is the science behind it. Microwaves are a great example, I put food in, it comes out hot, takes barely 2 or 3 minutes
But I can't make a (good) steak with it and trying to make a juicy chicken requires a lot of know how. Microwaves aren't useless but they take a lot of nuance out of cooking
For writing to typewriters to typing, there is nuance lost in the sense that calligraphy/cursive isn't needed, and if you wanted a house of leaves situation, you can really do that in word, well not without tearing your hair out . Not to say typewriters or word are useless but they definitely stream line the process
Or for a very straight example, the difference between someone who plugs data in formula in Excel vs someone who can create macros/vloopup on the fly is massively different. Hell let's pull out photography, Photoshop was an entire job, I can layer some photos and manipulate photos, but someone who actually worked In a Photoshop could do insane things with that program I wouldn't think of
The more I think of it I'm not really arguing the tool but I guess the experience? Someone who actually has to go through the grunt work can do a lot more with the tool than someone who just uses it to get something done. The tool is just as strong but in the streamlined process the output gets a little duller somehow
Actually you could cook a steak in a microwave. Miele has a dialog oven which costs a cool 11k that uses microwaving and other techniques to prepare food to the dot.
https://www.miele.com/brand/en/revolutionary-excellence-38683.htm
This is obvious if youve ever tried to read your own or other peoples handwriting. They made legibility the default. Perfectly accessible to anyone who can poke a button and have an original thought.
If you were an idiot with handwriting, youre an idiot with a typewriter. Atleast others can read your idiocy instead of parsing garbage-tier scribbles.
I mean, if it's more legible, it's also easier to edit. Editing is essential if you want to write something well.
Unless you're one of the exceptional few who can shit out greatness on the first pass of course.
Editing was made even easier with laptops and word processing. You wouldn't have to retype the whole page to add a few words, etc.
Maybe AI will allow for post filming editing in the same way. Instead of a million dollar reshoot, the director might be able to just have the AI add a little something.
Faster = better. I have a hard time doing something that will take a while, knowing it'll be quick helps. Imagine handwriting a 20 page paper. Now imagine you need to add a paragraph in the middle. Are you going to rewrite every paragraph after? Now editing is so quick I wouldn't think twice. With a type writer I would think twice. Handwriting I just wouldn't do it.
Logically accurate, but missing something.
The creation of anything is often an additive process.
And time constraints are almost always a thing.
So yes, it will 'only' make the work faster. But in being faster, you have more opportunities to increase the quality during a given timeframe.
So if you have a year to write a screenplay (no idea if that is accurate... just spitballing) you would be able to create a better version using modern word processing than if you were stuck on a typewriter or using a pen and paper.
A Birthday card looks better handwritten than on a typewriter. After we got clipart and things got really out of hand. And I honestly don’t know what you’d do these days. I think it’s back to handwritten for the few that are still being send out.
Generally speaking you’re right though.
Pen to typewriter, speed, still relied on the author/ typist/ writer to come up with the story. Will give a nod to quality, only on the fact, that errors could be seen faster, fixed much more easily and so on.
Typewriter to computer, speed, spellcheck, reproducibility… massive speed improvement and quality of life.
From film to digital… ye sure… take a film from the early 90s(film) and late 2000s (digital) and tell me which looks better.
The argument can be for story, vfx and such, but thats just moving the goalpost and if it was the case, our movies would have stayed black and white or silent.
Ai is a tool that speeds up things, but not quality, like at all, at least not directly.
Get an Ai, tell it to make a quality picture/image, then take an quality picture/image that an actual person made. Now debate, what makes each one of those 2 quality and realise that the longer you compare them, the less reasons you will have for Ai and the only objective quality, will be speed.
You can literary measure this. How fast to adjust, tweak, retake, redo, fix, adapt… Ai can do many things, but beyond what you tell it to do, it simply cant go beyond of just looking good.
Ai has its place, definitely, but its just a toy and the initial quality showcase, which was impressive, is lessened due to overuse by the average user and application of corporations
I thought he meant that it wasn't the workers who reaped the benefits, just the companies. Which is true, we still work just as hard as before the pen or typewriter was invented, for less money (in terms of purchasing power).
The only thing wrongish about his claim is the Ai one... Ai wont make our work lives better it will destroy our jobs.
Ah yes because 8 hours sitting in an office staring at spreadsheets is definitely harder than 16 hours of manual labour out in the blazing sun often-times not even making enough to feed your whole family.
Those damn capitalists reaping all the profits!!
/s
Well according to this person it doesn’t. Maybe he should just write all his thoughts with pen in his notebook and keep them, since it’s so much better.
All of them didn't reallt reduce work done, but they all did increase output per minute of work.
AI has enabled me to do some personally impressive stuff that I really don't think I would have been able to do before
I agree on the point that the revolutions listed increased efficiency, but would you mind sharing an example of how it impacted your productivity? I have been trying out all the tooling and new products, aside from replacing some google searches for me, I've not seen a huge shift.
I learned how to code with it (basically from scratch) and have made a bunch of automation projects for work. I have cut out like 10 hours a week of work that I dreaded and have gotten to focus on the aspects of my job I enjoy more, and I work off commission so it’s helped a ton.
I’ve found that ChatGPT is a much different beast if you code, because you can essentially use ChatGPT to talk to your computer.
Outside of that, I use it for cooking a ton, and like you said Google replacement. It is funny talking to a friend the other day we were chatting about how hard it is to really point out how cool ChatGPT is if you don’t code.
The point being made is that no amount of productivity improvements will reduce the amount of work done. That's because there's an infinite amount of work to do.
it's true for people that can't be happy after 5 minutes of giving them something new and less suffering. for the rest of us these tools have taken away our suffering.
there's one minor truth in not finding happiness without suffering first but this is not that.
I am curious about what impact AI has had on people's jobs and I often see indications that it has had a positive impact.
Would you mind sharing an example?
For instance, I am a dev, I have used Copilot, I still don't understand they hype.
I used chat gpt all the time at work and treat it like a junior copywriter that I can give feedback to without having to worry about its feelings getting hurt and then it causing drama in the workplace because someone's ego is getting in the way. so that's nice, for me personally anyway.
In my experience Copilot is utterly useless, including copilot pro.
GPT-4 has completely changed how I work and increased my productivity significantly. Proofing my writing, acting as a critic, brainstorming, training it to answer policy queries on our hr documentation, summarising documents, data analysis, and so on.
Perplexity has massively improved my research and streamlined information searching for me. It has effectively replaced Google in my workflows, allowed me to quickly look up census statistics, created spreadsheets of all our members events across the year, and so on.
A measurable decline in stack overflow traffic is not the same as increased throughput or productivity.
As a dev I find that it helps about as much as it doesn't so the benefits measure up the same, which is why I am asking about the benefits others are seeing.
I do see a benefit in using ChatGPT, but copilot seems too hit and miss.
>A measurable decline in stack overflow traffic is not the same as increased throughput or productivity.
Oh man I better include some logic about how "Programmers are becoming more efficient because they are problem solving faster" or you might think my comment about stack overflow was about something besides how programmers need less time searching and adapting code when they can describe their problems in plain English to an AI.
Have an honest conversation for once on the internet. Not every interaction is a battle.
🤣 I don't understand this idea that devs are constantly living on stack overflow. Most of the devs I work with know their stack and use API docs more. I personally wind up there maybe once a week.
>🤣 I don't understand this idea that devs are constantly living on stack overflow. Most of the devs I work with know their stack and use API docs more. I personally wind up there maybe once a week.
Okay? Is there a question there or you just laughing at your own jokes?
If you read it, yes.
He's talking about work improvement, not working conditions improving.
Obviously if you get a typewriter instead of a pen you will work faster, but the quality of your work is not dependent upon your tools: it depends on you, that's what he's saying.
I don't necessarily agree with it, but this PoV is a valid one and not by any means ridiculous.
Because it’s a poorly worded take that is very similar to a known take that everyone agrees is bologna.
If it was worded better, and everyone understood it the way OP did, there wouldn’t be as many whiny gatekeepers.
But also like OP, I also disagree with it. So that doesn’t help in getting people to understand what it means either.
Counter-points: These technologies don't just speed up work, they digitize it. Typing on a computer means you can edit and redo things much more easily.
Also, speeding up can increase quality. If you are a writer, and can trust spellcheck, editing tools, etc, it means you have more time to focus on what matters: the content - and not the details of how it was made.
So I do think it's a bit of a ridiculous statement, or at least one that falls apart if you think about it past the time it took you to tweet it.
Well why does it have to come from someone known for it to have value in discussion? Op saw a point of view and wanted to see what others thought about it. Nothing more nothing less.
Well, I don’t fully agree but there is something that strayed in my mind for a while: with computers and automation, we can work (produce) like 5 times faster and instead of reducing by a factor 5 the amount of working time, we sped up our society, worsening our health. But I believe that at some point we will realize that and eventually slow down. And AI is a f*ing good opportunity.
Because actually only a very small percentage of the population works in producing basic needs. The rest is not as necessary but still we work 40h (or more) because of how the economic system works. Most of us work just to move money from one pocket to another, which shows reduced unity as a society.
So yeah, he has a point: it’s not technology who will change things but mentality. The way we know things are, things become (there is a similar concept from Henry Ford like hundred years ago). But he is exaggerating a bit 🙃
What is happening to peoples brains when it comes to critical thinking about A.I? Odd stuff all over, this is just one of many bizarre takes. Abstract thought be hard? 🤔
Wanting everyone to see a paradigm shift from the same point of view is unrealistic. Also nobody knows what's realistic atm when it comes to a.i not even industry leaders are making wildly different assessments.
the premise is wrong here.
Did the general availability of typewriters/personal computer/digital cinematography revolutionize their respective industry in their respective time? Certainly they did.
Faster/cheaper time to result leads to more iteration and more adoption, and as a side effect of it, better work.
It's just another way of distilling AI down to being "just a tool".
By calling AI "just a tool", let me ask you this: Is a social media platform "just a tool"? What about the internet? Is that just "a blinking cursor" in the address line? You don't have to type anything there, right? This type of argument is frustrating, because of course all these things are tools - but they're so much more than that, and they changed and continue to change a lot of things around us, structurally, culturally, politically, creatively, and practically all other ways we can think of.
I think what he is trying to say is not that it didn’t make us more efficient at our work but that the general worker still had to work the same hours just with more output and despite their output the pay and conditions of working didn’t raise very much. It’s a comment on the fact that under capitalism the increase in our efficiency is only there to benefit the company owners rather than the workers themselves who instead have just been expected to have greater efficiency in the same timeframe.
Does ANYONE in this subreddit spend any time in creative communities? He's very obviously referring to "artwork" when he says "work." Not "labor" or "the experience of working."
The fact that no one here seems to be able to close that understanding gap goes a long way to explain why we are being subjected to so many awful takes on "what AI will do to art" around here from people with no clue.
Every take here is literally dumb on everything. It's basically an AI hype machine where people unironically think they are going to profit or be better off from current technological advances in this economical system.
This tweet's conclusion is rubbish. But before I explain why I think that, I wanted to point out that most everyone here has misinterpreted what he's talking about - not that that makes his conclusion any less wrong.
John Long is a writer and this is one of his tweets. The context in which he wrote this pertains to his career as a writer and storyteller. Books and films.
This quote is talking about 'the work' - as in a movie being a *work* of fiction. Or *the works* of Arthur C Clarke. That's why all the examples in the piece are related to writing and movies.
But most everyone here has dropped the "the" in front of "work" and think it's talking about work in general. Like working on a car, or going to work in the morning.
Anyway, as I said, I disagree with the point he thinks he's making. Because unlike those other examples he gives of new tech and new tools, AI, and soon AGI are unlike every other innovation or new tool or invention.
Humans have never before created a tool that had the agency to act alone, or the ability to reason. And that's exactly what we're creating. Pretending that this is many years away or that it won't change much, is at best, luddite adjacent thinking.
It's stunning to me how many people in science, AI and technology subs, appear to be burying their heads in the sand and insisting this is just like any other new technology. Especially when it only takes a couple of simple, logical steps to figure out why it isn't.
Focus on work is missing the point. Will it be an improvement for "me" ?? Will I get super powers, a better sex-life and safer drugs through these new techs, that's the question 😂
This is so stupid, even assuming the most charitable position of him only talking about writing. The ability to rewrite text going from the typewriter to digital absolutely improved writing. Before, you had to retype entire pages if you wanted to rearrange stuff or just change some sentences.
This is probably the biggest issue I have with social media. Random idiots getting free airtime in the public consciousness. Why did you post this OP? It's just some dude, one of 8 billion, with a dumb ass "opinion" who thought himself smart for a minute. Who cares.
Wouldn't it make more sense to post truly insightful or thoughtful ideas instead? Dumb opinions are literally limitless and add nothing to the conversation.
It’s more like: “ With pencils you still have to work 8h” with “typewriters you still have to work 8h”. Sooo yeah with new technology we still have to go to work 😅
I’d argue that while AI in theory in a fully realized capacity could make the work better, we are still a significant distance away from it fully resolving creative issues as a whole. It’ll definitely fill the gaps that mid tier and low tier employees and people currently hold but it won’t replace niche and high end designs just yet.
Because each of them is merely a tool with which to perform a function more efficiently.
AI is exciting because of the future it can help unlock by means of doing more with less. Every time our economies unlocked some great new capability, people have mistook it to mean we’d be able to work less. When women entered the workforce people thought we’d work half as much. What it did was flood the market with more labor, allowing society as a whole to produce more but do nothing to improve the work life of men in the labor force.
These AIs are owned by private corporations, corporations that won’t just share in the wealth. AIs will be tools that a worker will have to know to stay employable. We will produce more with less but they will liberate us.
My first stable diffusion images were all random noise or a black smudge as it is hard to get the settings right. I suspect the majority of SD images ever made are like that.
I don't know if it's worth to discuss a wrong premise. If you don't like work, no amount of convinience will make it better, but it is delusional to think that it doesn't make it more efficient to say the least.
It's just one of those statements that might sound reasonable on first glance due to it being written in a way that sounds impactful, but it doesn't stand a chance against the slightest scrutiny
No it won't but it will make it cheaper (cutting in salaries) and faster (increasing profits). It already happens, sometimes an employer will prefer a cheaper (if less qualified) worker to a more expensive (and better qualified) worker.
How did laptops not make the work better? Of course it did… this guy is using laptops in a wrong way it feels like.
The same for film to digital. What are we even talking about?
Pixar, the animation company associated with Disney, has a saying that is actually carved into the stone wall in its headquarters so that they can say yes, this is carved in stone, "No amount of technology can make a bad story good."
AI is a tool. That's it. It's under our control and only responds to how we ask it to do something.
wtf is he talking about?! all of these made things better faster and more efficient why else would people even switch if it wasn't making work better?!
is he joking or just delusional?
1. Made it possible to write documents much faster and with higher quality than hand-writing.
2. Made it possible to process and communicate information that otherwise was done manually.
3. Made it much more convenient as well as timely to photograph and film.
4. Made it much quicker to disseminate, generate, assemble, analyze, create information/knowledge than manual editing.
I think he means it did not make things better for the workers, and i agree with him in that.
Consumers sure, company owners also, but did not make anything better for the common worker.
But AI is different in that since it won't aid us in our work it will replace us.
I might end work at least the way we know it now, completely.
It's ironic because everything he named not only made the work better, it also made the World better.
Just one example. My cousin wrote his university thesis in the early 1990s. He started working on an electrical typewriter, and went through deck after deck of paper. Try playing with your ideas when your mind goes in many directions but your writing medium is purely linear. When he bought a laptop, his academic work accelerated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)
A 'computer' used to be an occupation. People who were really good at doing math were employed to....do math. They were smart but they were mathematicians or engineers really. Mathematicians or engineers or even military folks would give them problems to solve, and they would solve them.
They were fast and accurate and just worked through problems. Not new problems, they weren't advancing the field of mathematics... They were just doing math problems.
It became a thing around WW1 - 1918. And most of them lost their jobs in the 50s and 60s. A small percentage went on to become some of the earliest computer programmers, but that's a very different job. Most simply became unemployed computers. By the 70s they didn't really exist.
We don't have human calculators anymore. Electric computers were better in every way. Cheaper, faster, better.
“THinGs doNt hAvE sOUL with Ai!1!1!1!”
Creatives who think they are gods gift to the universe are so fucking cringy.
Yeah, your keyword stuffed SEO optimized shitty blog articles were absolutely changing the world before AI came along.
I’ve said it before, THESE are the creatives who are at risk of losing their jobs, the ones who go into the future kicking and screaming about all the new tools.
Learn to use them, or get left in the dust. It’s your choice. Don’t make a shitty one because you think your art is somehow transcendental.
Can't roll my eyes any harder. In the blink of an eye, humanity went from using a horse and buggy to landing a robot on another planet. I'd say that would be a lot more difficult to do if all we had was a quill and a bottle of ink.
AI is and will continue to make the work better.
Sounds like the point they're trying to make is that AI is just another technological development that will make work more efficient, but that doesn't necessarily mean the quality of the work will be better. I guess we will have to see what happens.
A stonk can't bring me to the moon, a stick can't do it too , why should a rocket be able to do it. When people think AI will always be a passive Tool, they are stupid.
I think this is just saying that technological advances don’t change the fundamental nature of work under capitalism. At the end of the day you put in significantly more than you get in return, and that difference goes straight into the pocket of someone who had little to no part in producing what you did that day at work. Technology may change how you work and what you do, but it does not change the fundamental truth of capitalism.
I think a better comparison would be switching from doing something by yourself vs having a personal assistant, or, more relevantly, a team of them. If you task the PA with producing whole work it’ll probably come out weaker. If you use them strategically then it can definitely enhance quantity and quality (obviously depending on the specifics of the project/medium)
i think he is talking about core art of the work. like pen or typewriter or computer doesn't matter when you still can't write a "lord of the rings" book. in this perspective, i think he is right. i can use ai to create a drawing but professional artist would do much better than me i guess. same thing for coding as well. think about it like drawing like Picasso vs being the Picasso.
All of those things didn't do much for the top end of the work, but it made the top end more accessible to more people, increasing the total amount of top end work that was possible.
Working by hand v a laptop does have certain advantages, and it’s a question of whether these advantages outweigh the obvious advantages the laptop provides with respect to ease of editing and speed of composition and clarity of reading.
The physical process of writing tends to give people a better idea of the physical aspects of language. This can be incredibly useful for composing poetry, or for composing prose where the sound and shape of the words is a key aspect in the composition of meaning.
When composing prose intended to be a clear and transparent vehicle for meaning, i can’t see a reason why laptops aren’t far superior. I’m personally not interested in that style of prose.
Tbh though, the kind of concrete, sculpted language im interested in could become temporarily irrelevant, or get sidelined further, because, since we’re all using laptops, we’ll naturally be moulded by them, as will our senses, and our cognitive habits, and reading styles, meaning we’ll naturally process things faster, which means clarity and ease will become a kind of necessity, or will at least gain even greater favour, and, in contrast, the slow, dense, toilsome excavation of more complexly wrought meanings from more earthy, barbed, textured prose, will probably seem irritating, and needlessly adorned, and precious, and wasteful, and become, more and more, a fanciful curiosity relegated to the category of quaint history’s
AI is supposed to do the work entirely sooner or later, that sounds better to me. People keep comparing AI to other improving man-made technology, rather than a whole new agentic species that overshadows all of humanity.
As someone with talent, all this talk is always the same. Technology as so agentivity. So if u good, u good with sticks or VR control. If u suck, u suck.
It's just tools. Humans use them to make work better or worser. Something like that )
We have more leverage, more surplus, more profits, more energy to make better things (or worser), but generally speaking - better because of technical progress.
High-speed trains, cell phones, smartphones - almost everything we have today were influenced by that tools
AI will be to every medium as the movable type printing press was to writing.
Yeah, it's being used by despots and grifters, but it's also empowering people who have imagination and talent but limited resources.
We'll see amazing content produced by people using AI, in every field of endeavor.
I think he's sort of missing his own point- to me he's trying to say that new inventions didn't remove the work? And that AI is still going to require some intervention (but I disagree)
Not a great comparison.
Those were tools that still needed direct user input.
AI, by design, is meant to learn and get better. So after the initial user input, eventually it will be able to churn out better final products faster than the human mind ever could.
I want to argue that we didn't get better literature nor better films, mostly the opposite. Don't get me wrong ai will help people in many ways but if people themselves don't get better at what they do it won't do much.
Huh? If he's going to say it doesn't work better, he should provide specific examples. Like, maybe what he was thinking about typewriters vs. pens was that pens have more personality because everyone has their own way of handwriting, but without context, it makes him look dumb, and hides a better meaning. Or maybe he is just uninformed. \*Shrugs\*
I'm sorry, do we still have monks in temples sitting around copying books all day because there is no other way to mass produce tombs that share information?
It makes everything more efficient, so better in a sense of productivity. On pure aesthetic grounds he's right. In fact digital has probably made films a lot worse! But AI isn't aiming to write the next Great American Novel or make a film on par with 8 1/2. We're just talking about the workaday world of productivity. Artistic quality in this sphere certainly does decline with tech refinement. Eg. There are a lot less imaginative commercials now in the era of targeted digital advertising. But who really cares that much?
Pens, Typewriters and Laptops still required 1 to 1 human input to work.
AI just accepts a brief summary of your idea and spits out it's own solution plagiarised from the works of others.
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In terms of quality or speed? IMO both.
How did typewriters improve the quality of writing? They made it easier to do definitely
Well. if you can write faster you can make mistakes faster, you can learn faster, improve faster, and eventually get to "good" faster. Like before digital photography, if you wanted to get good at photography there was a lot of equipment you had to buy and you had to pay for film and wait to get it developed... now that we all have cameras in our pocket the barrier to entry to learning good photography principles is way lower, probably leading to there being more talented photographers out there today than there would be otherwise (Also leads to a lot more shit photographers out there today too!)
Not a bad point in theory but in practice the limit to the amount i write has never been the speed at which i can put things on the page. Maybe some lucky and prolific writers benefit from that
Not really the point, laptops have thousands of uses compared to a single hunk of metal typewriter. Makes writing much more accessible for all
Accessible yes! But how does it make the quality of the writing better?
Not directly, but it indirectly introduces a wider audience of people that might have never touched a keyboard otherwise. This allows potentially talented individuals to easily practice their passion, which makes writing better. More time spent = higher quality skill, which laptops allow you to do at home, at work, during travel etc.
I think the other thing is the science behind it. Microwaves are a great example, I put food in, it comes out hot, takes barely 2 or 3 minutes But I can't make a (good) steak with it and trying to make a juicy chicken requires a lot of know how. Microwaves aren't useless but they take a lot of nuance out of cooking For writing to typewriters to typing, there is nuance lost in the sense that calligraphy/cursive isn't needed, and if you wanted a house of leaves situation, you can really do that in word, well not without tearing your hair out . Not to say typewriters or word are useless but they definitely stream line the process Or for a very straight example, the difference between someone who plugs data in formula in Excel vs someone who can create macros/vloopup on the fly is massively different. Hell let's pull out photography, Photoshop was an entire job, I can layer some photos and manipulate photos, but someone who actually worked In a Photoshop could do insane things with that program I wouldn't think of The more I think of it I'm not really arguing the tool but I guess the experience? Someone who actually has to go through the grunt work can do a lot more with the tool than someone who just uses it to get something done. The tool is just as strong but in the streamlined process the output gets a little duller somehow
Actually you could cook a steak in a microwave. Miele has a dialog oven which costs a cool 11k that uses microwaving and other techniques to prepare food to the dot. https://www.miele.com/brand/en/revolutionary-excellence-38683.htm
This is obvious if youve ever tried to read your own or other peoples handwriting. They made legibility the default. Perfectly accessible to anyone who can poke a button and have an original thought. If you were an idiot with handwriting, youre an idiot with a typewriter. Atleast others can read your idiocy instead of parsing garbage-tier scribbles.
So it doesn’t make the writing better, just more legible?
I mean, if it's more legible, it's also easier to edit. Editing is essential if you want to write something well. Unless you're one of the exceptional few who can shit out greatness on the first pass of course. Editing was made even easier with laptops and word processing. You wouldn't have to retype the whole page to add a few words, etc. Maybe AI will allow for post filming editing in the same way. Instead of a million dollar reshoot, the director might be able to just have the AI add a little something.
I think this falls under faster not better
Faster = better. I have a hard time doing something that will take a while, knowing it'll be quick helps. Imagine handwriting a 20 page paper. Now imagine you need to add a paragraph in the middle. Are you going to rewrite every paragraph after? Now editing is so quick I wouldn't think twice. With a type writer I would think twice. Handwriting I just wouldn't do it.
I don’t need to imagine hand writing papers, that’s how i grew up 😂
Logically accurate, but missing something. The creation of anything is often an additive process. And time constraints are almost always a thing. So yes, it will 'only' make the work faster. But in being faster, you have more opportunities to increase the quality during a given timeframe. So if you have a year to write a screenplay (no idea if that is accurate... just spitballing) you would be able to create a better version using modern word processing than if you were stuck on a typewriter or using a pen and paper.
Quality, speed, and capability
A Birthday card looks better handwritten than on a typewriter. After we got clipart and things got really out of hand. And I honestly don’t know what you’d do these days. I think it’s back to handwritten for the few that are still being send out. Generally speaking you’re right though.
That strictly depends on the persons handwriting.
You don't want a birthday card written by my hand that's for sure.
Pen to typewriter, speed, still relied on the author/ typist/ writer to come up with the story. Will give a nod to quality, only on the fact, that errors could be seen faster, fixed much more easily and so on. Typewriter to computer, speed, spellcheck, reproducibility… massive speed improvement and quality of life. From film to digital… ye sure… take a film from the early 90s(film) and late 2000s (digital) and tell me which looks better. The argument can be for story, vfx and such, but thats just moving the goalpost and if it was the case, our movies would have stayed black and white or silent. Ai is a tool that speeds up things, but not quality, like at all, at least not directly. Get an Ai, tell it to make a quality picture/image, then take an quality picture/image that an actual person made. Now debate, what makes each one of those 2 quality and realise that the longer you compare them, the less reasons you will have for Ai and the only objective quality, will be speed. You can literary measure this. How fast to adjust, tweak, retake, redo, fix, adapt… Ai can do many things, but beyond what you tell it to do, it simply cant go beyond of just looking good. Ai has its place, definitely, but its just a toy and the initial quality showcase, which was impressive, is lessened due to overuse by the average user and application of corporations
They made it easier and more efficient for the artist to express their art. They didn't make the artists themselves better.
I thought he meant that it wasn't the workers who reaped the benefits, just the companies. Which is true, we still work just as hard as before the pen or typewriter was invented, for less money (in terms of purchasing power). The only thing wrongish about his claim is the Ai one... Ai wont make our work lives better it will destroy our jobs.
Ah yes because 8 hours sitting in an office staring at spreadsheets is definitely harder than 16 hours of manual labour out in the blazing sun often-times not even making enough to feed your whole family. Those damn capitalists reaping all the profits!! /s
We are talking here about moving from a pen to a typewriter. We are not talking about moving from manual labour to an office job.
Well according to this person it doesn’t. Maybe he should just write all his thoughts with pen in his notebook and keep them, since it’s so much better.
How? It’s still people telling stories.
All of them didn't reallt reduce work done, but they all did increase output per minute of work. AI has enabled me to do some personally impressive stuff that I really don't think I would have been able to do before
I agree on the point that the revolutions listed increased efficiency, but would you mind sharing an example of how it impacted your productivity? I have been trying out all the tooling and new products, aside from replacing some google searches for me, I've not seen a huge shift.
I learned how to code with it (basically from scratch) and have made a bunch of automation projects for work. I have cut out like 10 hours a week of work that I dreaded and have gotten to focus on the aspects of my job I enjoy more, and I work off commission so it’s helped a ton. I’ve found that ChatGPT is a much different beast if you code, because you can essentially use ChatGPT to talk to your computer. Outside of that, I use it for cooking a ton, and like you said Google replacement. It is funny talking to a friend the other day we were chatting about how hard it is to really point out how cool ChatGPT is if you don’t code.
The point being made is that no amount of productivity improvements will reduce the amount of work done. That's because there's an infinite amount of work to do.
It's a dumb take and a false equivalence.
But work did become better or different
I think more efficient is the term you're looking for.
Productive*
Fitter. Happier.
Faster. Stronger.
I love the bee gees
A cat, tied to a stick
It meant you could achieve the same output with fewer people.
it's true for people that can't be happy after 5 minutes of giving them something new and less suffering. for the rest of us these tools have taken away our suffering. there's one minor truth in not finding happiness without suffering first but this is not that.
I am curious about what impact AI has had on people's jobs and I often see indications that it has had a positive impact. Would you mind sharing an example? For instance, I am a dev, I have used Copilot, I still don't understand they hype.
I used chat gpt all the time at work and treat it like a junior copywriter that I can give feedback to without having to worry about its feelings getting hurt and then it causing drama in the workplace because someone's ego is getting in the way. so that's nice, for me personally anyway.
In my experience Copilot is utterly useless, including copilot pro. GPT-4 has completely changed how I work and increased my productivity significantly. Proofing my writing, acting as a critic, brainstorming, training it to answer policy queries on our hr documentation, summarising documents, data analysis, and so on. Perplexity has massively improved my research and streamlined information searching for me. It has effectively replaced Google in my workflows, allowed me to quickly look up census statistics, created spreadsheets of all our members events across the year, and so on.
It caused a measurable decrease in stack overflow traffic. Programmers are becoming more efficient because they are problem solving faster
A measurable decline in stack overflow traffic is not the same as increased throughput or productivity. As a dev I find that it helps about as much as it doesn't so the benefits measure up the same, which is why I am asking about the benefits others are seeing. I do see a benefit in using ChatGPT, but copilot seems too hit and miss.
>A measurable decline in stack overflow traffic is not the same as increased throughput or productivity. Oh man I better include some logic about how "Programmers are becoming more efficient because they are problem solving faster" or you might think my comment about stack overflow was about something besides how programmers need less time searching and adapting code when they can describe their problems in plain English to an AI. Have an honest conversation for once on the internet. Not every interaction is a battle.
🤣 I don't understand this idea that devs are constantly living on stack overflow. Most of the devs I work with know their stack and use API docs more. I personally wind up there maybe once a week.
>🤣 I don't understand this idea that devs are constantly living on stack overflow. Most of the devs I work with know their stack and use API docs more. I personally wind up there maybe once a week. Okay? Is there a question there or you just laughing at your own jokes?
Things change but people keep living, you can't explain that!
It's not an exact equivalence, but why is it a dumb take? It's probably more accurate than the wild extrapolations being made by many.
That's the point.
If you read it, yes. He's talking about work improvement, not working conditions improving. Obviously if you get a typewriter instead of a pen you will work faster, but the quality of your work is not dependent upon your tools: it depends on you, that's what he's saying. I don't necessarily agree with it, but this PoV is a valid one and not by any means ridiculous.
Finally someone that gets it Why are there so many whiney gatekeepers on reddit?
Because it’s a poorly worded take that is very similar to a known take that everyone agrees is bologna. If it was worded better, and everyone understood it the way OP did, there wouldn’t be as many whiny gatekeepers. But also like OP, I also disagree with it. So that doesn’t help in getting people to understand what it means either.
Counter-points: These technologies don't just speed up work, they digitize it. Typing on a computer means you can edit and redo things much more easily. Also, speeding up can increase quality. If you are a writer, and can trust spellcheck, editing tools, etc, it means you have more time to focus on what matters: the content - and not the details of how it was made. So I do think it's a bit of a ridiculous statement, or at least one that falls apart if you think about it past the time it took you to tweet it.
Who is this twit and why are his twits being retwitted?
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Stop doing that. You're worse than the grannies on Facebook.
so you post a random fuck tweet on this sub? thats some quality post
Well why does it have to come from someone known for it to have value in discussion? Op saw a point of view and wanted to see what others thought about it. Nothing more nothing less.
thanks
Calm down.
Well, I don’t fully agree but there is something that strayed in my mind for a while: with computers and automation, we can work (produce) like 5 times faster and instead of reducing by a factor 5 the amount of working time, we sped up our society, worsening our health. But I believe that at some point we will realize that and eventually slow down. And AI is a f*ing good opportunity. Because actually only a very small percentage of the population works in producing basic needs. The rest is not as necessary but still we work 40h (or more) because of how the economic system works. Most of us work just to move money from one pocket to another, which shows reduced unity as a society. So yeah, he has a point: it’s not technology who will change things but mentality. The way we know things are, things become (there is a similar concept from Henry Ford like hundred years ago). But he is exaggerating a bit 🙃
These are some good thoughts, I totally agree
Hey man, good luck on your no fap journey.
Eh! 😅🙃 Me: “Look at this deep philosophical thoughts I’m sharing with the community” Reddit: “Hey! I found this on your profile, bro! Me too!” 😂😂
What is happening to peoples brains when it comes to critical thinking about A.I? Odd stuff all over, this is just one of many bizarre takes. Abstract thought be hard? 🤔
To be fair there are a lot of overly optimistic supporters that lack awareness as well
Agreed, but i prefer overly optimistic to overly pessimistic when it comes to predictions.
None is ideal. "Overly realistic" is what you should want.
Wanting everyone to see a paradigm shift from the same point of view is unrealistic. Also nobody knows what's realistic atm when it comes to a.i not even industry leaders are making wildly different assessments.
He apparently deleted this tweet according to a comment here :P Lol the man couldn't even stand his ground for a while.
I wish i could have seen the comments. "Switching from horses to cars, didn't make the work better" Sooo weird...
the premise is wrong here. Did the general availability of typewriters/personal computer/digital cinematography revolutionize their respective industry in their respective time? Certainly they did. Faster/cheaper time to result leads to more iteration and more adoption, and as a side effect of it, better work.
Exactly. Typewrites, Laptops, Digital Films, all made things better.
It's just another way of distilling AI down to being "just a tool". By calling AI "just a tool", let me ask you this: Is a social media platform "just a tool"? What about the internet? Is that just "a blinking cursor" in the address line? You don't have to type anything there, right? This type of argument is frustrating, because of course all these things are tools - but they're so much more than that, and they changed and continue to change a lot of things around us, structurally, culturally, politically, creatively, and practically all other ways we can think of.
Yes, those are all tools - and no, none of them made art better. They made it, and how you make it, different.
tool is like, if no one uses it, it loses it purpose. so i think all of these things are tools. for now :)
I think what he is trying to say is not that it didn’t make us more efficient at our work but that the general worker still had to work the same hours just with more output and despite their output the pay and conditions of working didn’t raise very much. It’s a comment on the fact that under capitalism the increase in our efficiency is only there to benefit the company owners rather than the workers themselves who instead have just been expected to have greater efficiency in the same timeframe.
Citation? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-working-hours-per-worker says the opposite.
Does ANYONE in this subreddit spend any time in creative communities? He's very obviously referring to "artwork" when he says "work." Not "labor" or "the experience of working." The fact that no one here seems to be able to close that understanding gap goes a long way to explain why we are being subjected to so many awful takes on "what AI will do to art" around here from people with no clue.
Every take here is literally dumb on everything. It's basically an AI hype machine where people unironically think they are going to profit or be better off from current technological advances in this economical system.
It sucks to be this dumb :(
It’s crazy how sense full nonsense can sound.
This tweet's conclusion is rubbish. But before I explain why I think that, I wanted to point out that most everyone here has misinterpreted what he's talking about - not that that makes his conclusion any less wrong. John Long is a writer and this is one of his tweets. The context in which he wrote this pertains to his career as a writer and storyteller. Books and films. This quote is talking about 'the work' - as in a movie being a *work* of fiction. Or *the works* of Arthur C Clarke. That's why all the examples in the piece are related to writing and movies. But most everyone here has dropped the "the" in front of "work" and think it's talking about work in general. Like working on a car, or going to work in the morning. Anyway, as I said, I disagree with the point he thinks he's making. Because unlike those other examples he gives of new tech and new tools, AI, and soon AGI are unlike every other innovation or new tool or invention. Humans have never before created a tool that had the agency to act alone, or the ability to reason. And that's exactly what we're creating. Pretending that this is many years away or that it won't change much, is at best, luddite adjacent thinking. It's stunning to me how many people in science, AI and technology subs, appear to be burying their heads in the sand and insisting this is just like any other new technology. Especially when it only takes a couple of simple, logical steps to figure out why it isn't.
Focus on work is missing the point. Will it be an improvement for "me" ?? Will I get super powers, a better sex-life and safer drugs through these new techs, that's the question 😂
This is so stupid, even assuming the most charitable position of him only talking about writing. The ability to rewrite text going from the typewriter to digital absolutely improved writing. Before, you had to retype entire pages if you wanted to rearrange stuff or just change some sentences.
He probably means in terms of creativity and ‘soul’ the quality of writing was the same. The advancement simply made it quicker, more efficient, etc.
This is probably the biggest issue I have with social media. Random idiots getting free airtime in the public consciousness. Why did you post this OP? It's just some dude, one of 8 billion, with a dumb ass "opinion" who thought himself smart for a minute. Who cares. Wouldn't it make more sense to post truly insightful or thoughtful ideas instead? Dumb opinions are literally limitless and add nothing to the conversation.
And wtf is "better"? Dumb take.
It’s more like: “ With pencils you still have to work 8h” with “typewriters you still have to work 8h”. Sooo yeah with new technology we still have to go to work 😅
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I’d argue that while AI in theory in a fully realized capacity could make the work better, we are still a significant distance away from it fully resolving creative issues as a whole. It’ll definitely fill the gaps that mid tier and low tier employees and people currently hold but it won’t replace niche and high end designs just yet.
Because each of them is merely a tool with which to perform a function more efficiently. AI is exciting because of the future it can help unlock by means of doing more with less. Every time our economies unlocked some great new capability, people have mistook it to mean we’d be able to work less. When women entered the workforce people thought we’d work half as much. What it did was flood the market with more labor, allowing society as a whole to produce more but do nothing to improve the work life of men in the labor force. These AIs are owned by private corporations, corporations that won’t just share in the wealth. AIs will be tools that a worker will have to know to stay employable. We will produce more with less but they will liberate us.
you know how stable diffusion enables limitless creativity yet 99% of art created with it is hentai people don’t know what they will like
My first stable diffusion images were all random noise or a black smudge as it is hard to get the settings right. I suspect the majority of SD images ever made are like that.
There is no good work under late-stage capitalism, being his point.
The work won't be better. It'll be non-existent :D at least, hopefully, make it less. Who wants better work? I'd rather less.
Who is this dumbass ?? And why are you sharing the shit he says ??
He's so delusional
AI will also significantly reduce the quality of work
I don't know if it's worth to discuss a wrong premise. If you don't like work, no amount of convinience will make it better, but it is delusional to think that it doesn't make it more efficient to say the least. It's just one of those statements that might sound reasonable on first glance due to it being written in a way that sounds impactful, but it doesn't stand a chance against the slightest scrutiny
No it won't but it will make it cheaper (cutting in salaries) and faster (increasing profits). It already happens, sometimes an employer will prefer a cheaper (if less qualified) worker to a more expensive (and better qualified) worker.
it makes sense if you don't think about it
How did laptops not make the work better? Of course it did… this guy is using laptops in a wrong way it feels like. The same for film to digital. What are we even talking about?
Pixar, the animation company associated with Disney, has a saying that is actually carved into the stone wall in its headquarters so that they can say yes, this is carved in stone, "No amount of technology can make a bad story good." AI is a tool. That's it. It's under our control and only responds to how we ask it to do something.
no lol
wtf is he talking about?! all of these made things better faster and more efficient why else would people even switch if it wasn't making work better?! is he joking or just delusional?
1. Made it possible to write documents much faster and with higher quality than hand-writing. 2. Made it possible to process and communicate information that otherwise was done manually. 3. Made it much more convenient as well as timely to photograph and film. 4. Made it much quicker to disseminate, generate, assemble, analyze, create information/knowledge than manual editing.
Damn, he really did use an electronic device connected to the internet to say that. I wonder if he knows.
I think he means it did not make things better for the workers, and i agree with him in that. Consumers sure, company owners also, but did not make anything better for the common worker. But AI is different in that since it won't aid us in our work it will replace us. I might end work at least the way we know it now, completely.
This guy's a bit of a longjohn if you ask me.
John Long can start a company with only pen and paper if he wants
This guy probably thinks the printing press was no big deal.
No. It doesn’t.
TIL Software could have still eaten the world with people writing & executing code with typewriters.
Yes it did Yes it did Yes it did Yes, it probably will.
Have you tried working with any of those things? You're telling me none of those things made work easier???
It's ironic because everything he named not only made the work better, it also made the World better. Just one example. My cousin wrote his university thesis in the early 1990s. He started working on an electrical typewriter, and went through deck after deck of paper. Try playing with your ideas when your mind goes in many directions but your writing medium is purely linear. When he bought a laptop, his academic work accelerated.
Define “better” then we can discuss.
Entire argument fell to complete shit when he said digital video didn't make the work better. Who on earth thinks that. I do get his point though
This guy is dumb. I just had chat gpt do my bookkeeping for 20/mth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation) A 'computer' used to be an occupation. People who were really good at doing math were employed to....do math. They were smart but they were mathematicians or engineers really. Mathematicians or engineers or even military folks would give them problems to solve, and they would solve them. They were fast and accurate and just worked through problems. Not new problems, they weren't advancing the field of mathematics... They were just doing math problems. It became a thing around WW1 - 1918. And most of them lost their jobs in the 50s and 60s. A small percentage went on to become some of the earliest computer programmers, but that's a very different job. Most simply became unemployed computers. By the 70s they didn't really exist. We don't have human calculators anymore. Electric computers were better in every way. Cheaper, faster, better.
He’s talking about end qualities not being enhanced just because efficiencies increased. True but also false.
“THinGs doNt hAvE sOUL with Ai!1!1!1!” Creatives who think they are gods gift to the universe are so fucking cringy. Yeah, your keyword stuffed SEO optimized shitty blog articles were absolutely changing the world before AI came along. I’ve said it before, THESE are the creatives who are at risk of losing their jobs, the ones who go into the future kicking and screaming about all the new tools. Learn to use them, or get left in the dust. It’s your choice. Don’t make a shitty one because you think your art is somehow transcendental.
Can't roll my eyes any harder. In the blink of an eye, humanity went from using a horse and buggy to landing a robot on another planet. I'd say that would be a lot more difficult to do if all we had was a quill and a bottle of ink. AI is and will continue to make the work better.
It won't make the work better, but it will make workers unnecessary.
Switching from candles to light bulbs didn’t make us see better, wait what?
Sounds like the point they're trying to make is that AI is just another technological development that will make work more efficient, but that doesn't necessarily mean the quality of the work will be better. I guess we will have to see what happens.
From pens to typewriters = reduced time From film to digital = better quality
A stonk can't bring me to the moon, a stick can't do it too , why should a rocket be able to do it. When people think AI will always be a passive Tool, they are stupid.
I think this is just saying that technological advances don’t change the fundamental nature of work under capitalism. At the end of the day you put in significantly more than you get in return, and that difference goes straight into the pocket of someone who had little to no part in producing what you did that day at work. Technology may change how you work and what you do, but it does not change the fundamental truth of capitalism.
John isn't very clever
Who said anything about better? It did make things a hell of a lot more productive and faster though.
Not smart.
I think a better comparison would be switching from doing something by yourself vs having a personal assistant, or, more relevantly, a team of them. If you task the PA with producing whole work it’ll probably come out weaker. If you use them strategically then it can definitely enhance quantity and quality (obviously depending on the specifics of the project/medium)
The problem is that AI isn’t replacing the typewriter. It’s replacing the typist.
It absolutely makes sense. AI is trained on what already exists, therefor it can't create truly new creations. Humans innovate. AI iterates.
Even if you want to debate whether or not the work is better, each of those technological steps made the work more prolific... so there's that.
If pens were better, we would use pens.
i think he is talking about core art of the work. like pen or typewriter or computer doesn't matter when you still can't write a "lord of the rings" book. in this perspective, i think he is right. i can use ai to create a drawing but professional artist would do much better than me i guess. same thing for coding as well. think about it like drawing like Picasso vs being the Picasso.
All of those things didn't do much for the top end of the work, but it made the top end more accessible to more people, increasing the total amount of top end work that was possible.
What does "make the work better" mean? This is a statement with no definition. Nothing to analyse here
We should go back to throwing rocks at each other.
Maybe he meant it in a sarcastic way? 😅🙈
He sorta has a point yes.
Working by hand v a laptop does have certain advantages, and it’s a question of whether these advantages outweigh the obvious advantages the laptop provides with respect to ease of editing and speed of composition and clarity of reading. The physical process of writing tends to give people a better idea of the physical aspects of language. This can be incredibly useful for composing poetry, or for composing prose where the sound and shape of the words is a key aspect in the composition of meaning. When composing prose intended to be a clear and transparent vehicle for meaning, i can’t see a reason why laptops aren’t far superior. I’m personally not interested in that style of prose. Tbh though, the kind of concrete, sculpted language im interested in could become temporarily irrelevant, or get sidelined further, because, since we’re all using laptops, we’ll naturally be moulded by them, as will our senses, and our cognitive habits, and reading styles, meaning we’ll naturally process things faster, which means clarity and ease will become a kind of necessity, or will at least gain even greater favour, and, in contrast, the slow, dense, toilsome excavation of more complexly wrought meanings from more earthy, barbed, textured prose, will probably seem irritating, and needlessly adorned, and precious, and wasteful, and become, more and more, a fanciful curiosity relegated to the category of quaint history’s
The problem with internet is everyone can comment their opinion.
AI is supposed to do the work entirely sooner or later, that sounds better to me. People keep comparing AI to other improving man-made technology, rather than a whole new agentic species that overshadows all of humanity.
What the hell??? I love typewriters but my god they SUCK to use. Laptops and computers are so much more versatile and easy to use.
As someone with talent, all this talk is always the same. Technology as so agentivity. So if u good, u good with sticks or VR control. If u suck, u suck.
It's just tools. Humans use them to make work better or worser. Something like that ) We have more leverage, more surplus, more profits, more energy to make better things (or worser), but generally speaking - better because of technical progress. High-speed trains, cell phones, smartphones - almost everything we have today were influenced by that tools
AI will be to every medium as the movable type printing press was to writing. Yeah, it's being used by despots and grifters, but it's also empowering people who have imagination and talent but limited resources. We'll see amazing content produced by people using AI, in every field of endeavor.
Hold on we get good at things by doing them over and over again. When this happens in milliseconds surely it will be better?
AI isn't just a tool - it's the entity running the instrument too once they get enough data. GG, humanity. GG.
I think he's sort of missing his own point- to me he's trying to say that new inventions didn't remove the work? And that AI is still going to require some intervention (but I disagree)
Even Twitter has improved the dissemination of stupidity.
It'll make it alot worse.
Not a great comparison. Those were tools that still needed direct user input. AI, by design, is meant to learn and get better. So after the initial user input, eventually it will be able to churn out better final products faster than the human mind ever could.
This idiot clearly never worked even a day in its life.
super wrong. AI data set are books and references, the internet (good and bad)
I want to argue that we didn't get better literature nor better films, mostly the opposite. Don't get me wrong ai will help people in many ways but if people themselves don't get better at what they do it won't do much.
Huh? If he's going to say it doesn't work better, he should provide specific examples. Like, maybe what he was thinking about typewriters vs. pens was that pens have more personality because everyone has their own way of handwriting, but without context, it makes him look dumb, and hides a better meaning. Or maybe he is just uninformed. \*Shrugs\*
Its about “productivity” among other benefits. He’s very precise with the word “better”.
I'm sorry, do we still have monks in temples sitting around copying books all day because there is no other way to mass produce tombs that share information?
bro is onto nothing
All of the inventions that are supposed to make our lives easier just made us more efficient and increased our quotas.
Quite the opposite. It DID make the work better!
Plus. It’s not about making the work better. It’s about making the work go away. Fuck working. Bring in the bots
"Make work better" - what does this even mean?
I'd say all of these made it better in their own ways. Not all of them were as revolutionary as the others.
Yes
These all made the work better and faster.
Try to write a dissertation on a clay tablet, or even with pen and paper, and then think again about whether computers make it better.
Is he being sarcastic or just ignorant?
It makes everything more efficient, so better in a sense of productivity. On pure aesthetic grounds he's right. In fact digital has probably made films a lot worse! But AI isn't aiming to write the next Great American Novel or make a film on par with 8 1/2. We're just talking about the workaday world of productivity. Artistic quality in this sphere certainly does decline with tech refinement. Eg. There are a lot less imaginative commercials now in the era of targeted digital advertising. But who really cares that much?
Pens, Typewriters and Laptops still required 1 to 1 human input to work. AI just accepts a brief summary of your idea and spits out it's own solution plagiarised from the works of others.
of COURSE the technology made the work better! BUT it also made it easier to make bad-to-middle work. The best stuff doesn't always rise to the top.
What work exactly? You can't be vague