Hacker News content creation dread
I happened to stumble upon "Thoughts on thinking" by Dustin Curtis some time ago. Dustin is horrified by AI and it's ability to make creation meaningless to him.
I have been stuck. Every time I sit down to write a blog post, code a feature, or start a project, I come to the same realization: in the context of AI, what I’m doing is a waste of time. It’s horrifying. The fun has been sucked out of the process of creation because nothing I make organically can compete with what AI already produces—or soon will. All of my original thoughts feel like early drafts of better, more complete thoughts that simply haven’t yet formed inside an LLM.
I can't help but have had this same thought early this spring. But I ended up concluding that there is something wrong with the premises of this thought. Beware of shooting the messenger, there is nothing AI really brought to the table but the obvious: We're overvaluing the output of a work when the point is the process and joy related to creating new things with your own hands.
I find it irrelevant to the discussion whether AI is really capable of producing it's promises, to me it's just telling the obvious: That the market value of what you produced was low to begin with and that you're valuing everything you do with a narrow idea of what's valuable to you.
The solution to this dread, in my opinion, is to re-evaluate what you put value to. Is it money and work solely? Why so? Do you look at the flower field and only see it's market value as ingredients to a parfume or something like that? You do realise that you yourself decide what's valuable to you?
If content creation is no longer valuable to you because something makes better results than you faster than you with fraction of the cost. What were you doing exactly and for what reason?