Does it occur to any of you who are posting AI slop - AI art - that it's always a slap at the artists and photographers

[usonian]

24. That's a good one.

Looking at my hand-edited works (highly recommended) some of them include AI-generated slop, because "real" photos and drawings aren't as good starting points. That said, about 95% of the work is due to my mousing around with GIMP.

And let me tell you, a magic mouse is a disaster with GIMP, because if one holds down the control key (bottom left corner, duhhhh) the screen zooms in faster than any Star Wars or Carl Sagan movie intro. And there's no damn way to stop horizontal scrolling (maybe some $80 app does this but I don't go there) I resort to some other device, and I now have an ancient marble mouse, a trackpad and a Logitech gizmo, each .... oh well, never mind.

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And I dislike AI in general.
I have deliberately used it once (for fun)
Accidentally used it in image search (they are not labeled as such, but obvious), and
queried some text once for fun.

So, right now, in my own use, my use is transformative, as in copyright law --- "derivative work"
And at a low level.

I have grown through several cycles of "button pushing".
I had people working for me who used GUI's exclusively, and that little 1% bobble led to overlapping disk partitions and disaster.
I repartitioned disks with a 100% accurate command-line tool. I basically undid everything that guy did.
Lots of "educational certificates" but no "Street Skills" as in making computers work in the field.

And this extends to education. You can't stop the flood, so what does one do?
I am OK with labeling stuff (when we know that contents or parts thereof are AI-generated) but I'm not going to backtrack and label all my thousands (?) of witty images. Because the source was not identified. I used the "eyeball" test.

Here's what someone posted on Hacker News in reply to San Francisco adjusting some grades upward. It's to very seriously think about.
Button pushing has encroached, and please don't forget that site builders like DU are to a very large extent "button pushing" ... you get that from someone who put up one of the first websites in the internet, with the original CERN httpd.

What if everything you learned in K-12 were available in an instant? --- except learning how to learn and how to reason through problems --- (not just look up solutions)

Well, we already have the former, even without AI, but I wonder about the latter. I left out "how to express yourself" because we have already reached the "writing event horizon" where it takes considerable "intelligence" to distinguish true self-expression from algorithmic.

I'm not being snide. I grew up through the 4 function calculator, the HP-35, minicomputers, microcomputers, and so on and so forth.

One has to ask "What is education?" I am especially troubled by the post-truth world of unmoderated (anti)social media and by this Matrix world where you can't tell what's genuine and what's algorithmic, with the percentage of material trending quickly towards the latter.

It would seem that the chief skill needed now is the ability to discern fact from fiction, every hour of the day. Case in point. I just looked up products at Amazon and every damn one on the page had a 4.5 star rating. Right.

So, every schoolkid with access to the internet/AI can indeed crank out answers (and tons more) that it used to take a college degree to learn. On the basis of standard exams, they're all straight-A, because they have this "skill" at exam time, and every minute of the day.

So, what's to learn? What the hell do grades mean any more?

This is not a criticism of your post. It's asking the question "How do we sensibly deal with the cat that escaped the bag and the horses that left the barn?" It's G.D. profitable stuff, so like drug trafficking, how do you deal with it?