None of the work. Just a fast result

Technique
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Here’s an interesting segment from a Substack post by Joshua Heath Scott that arrived this morning concerning the elusive search for the perfect tone.

If you’re interested, here’s an article on the Chronovisor and the Catholic priest who “invented” it.

The Legend of the Chronovisor

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The Chronovisor was never really a machine. It was more of an expression of a desire. The human desire to skip the process and get straight to the answer. To point a device or a technology at the mystery and have it hand you the truth without any of the friction, any of the searching, any of the years of sitting with uncertainty.

None of the work. Just a fast result.

Right now, this has never been more possible. We build AI tools that generate images of things that never happened and call them real. We feed in our problems and get answers. It doesn’t matter to most that the answers are shallow. We want the output more than we want what the process could teach us.

I work in the world of guitar. I’ve spent my entire adult life around guitarists, and there’s a version of this that lives in our world. The search for “the tone.” The belief that the right pedal, the right amp, the right combination of gear will unlock something transcendent. That the perfect sound already exists out there like a signal, and you just need the right machine to tune in and capture it. This happens in every artistic discipline. Painters who want the perfect painting without the stack of bad attempts. Photographers who want to be Ansel Adams without living in national parks and taking the same photo a hundred times. Writers who want to produce the right words without fighting for years as they write the wrong ones.

The search and the struggle are what make us who we need to become. The hours with your hands on the strings, the experiments that fail, the happy accidents that only happen because you were in the room doing the work — that’s where tone lives. Not in a shortcut. In the friction.

Ernetti wanted to see Christ without faith. I’ve been there. He wanted to photograph the past without living through it. And the great irony is that his “proof” was a handmade sculpture. A thing someone actually carved, probably over weeks or months, with tools and intention and skill. The human-made artifact was right there the whole time. It was more real, more beautiful, and more true than anything his imaginary machine could have produced.

Irony doesn’t get close.

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Cool tip, I’ll read up on him and have a look. :slight_smile:

For me, the question is not just how we enjoy our lives when gratification is instant. Rather, think of the upsides and downsides of both versions of life.

We used to search for the answers in the dark and now we instantly get “good enough” answers. But learning is still more fun because you get to do things yourself. Simply consuming answers is sooo boring. Ever noticed how your mind wanders when you watch a video?

Consider the following:

The AI translated the Italian “Parole sante, Bob” as “You’re right, Bob.”

I would say “Wise words, Bob.” You might say “Truth, Bob.”

I think the real challenge is to motivate yourself to do stuff, rather than just consume the output. Lots of people have had bad experiences with learning because we used to teach “getting answers right” rather than process. AI has made that starkly apparent.

Let’s all build something better! :slight_smile:

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Right on, brother!

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Your post is thought provoking for sure - especially the bit about AI. I’ve been on the bleeding edge of tech for the last 25+ years. IT was a hobby turned career and has now transformed into a way of life. To me, AI is the biggest thing since the Internet. If the Internet was all about information, AI is all about doing something with it.

I’m of an age that straddles the divide between pre and post Internet. I’m equally comfortable camping in the wilderness outside the range of modern “conveniences” or behind a computer screen coding a feature for fun. That also means I’m starting to appreciate the mental benefit of hobbies and honing a craft instead of letting the brain rot with modern conveniences or escapism types of “entertainment.” I enjoy putting in the time and the process of a few of my selected hobbies for personal development to achieve short, medium and long time goals.

Having said that, I have tasks supporting other projects (or sometimes just for fun) where I have no interest of putting in the time to hone the craft. “Good enough” works for me and this is where AI comes in - more on that in a bit.

I’m a musical guy - I have been all my life. Songs always run through my head like my own personal radio station and nothing conveys emotion to me like music can. Just wired that way, I guess. While I played an instrument pretty well when I was young, I’ve let that go over the years. Now is the time for me to learn and hone the craft so I can play the melodies I hear and create in my mind. I’ve chosen bass for my vehicle to do so. It’s what I want, for myself - no one else. I have a long way to go, but I’m working on it and enjoying the ride.

I’m currently learning songs and recording cover videos with my son. I’ve taught him how to use a linear video editor, sync audio and video, apply transitions and effects like chroma key. I only know enough to get by and create simple videos so what I’ve taught is limited in the grand scheme of things. I have no interest in immersing myself into video production, but my son might - that’s up to him.

We just started creating cover images for our videos. I’m not a graphic designer, nor do I intend to ever be; however, the fact remains that we need a way to create these images if we want them. An option would be to seek out an individual that has put the time in to create these images for us. I’m sure the time and expense for such a task wouldn’t be worth it to us. Another option is to learn how myself. I already know that’s not worth my time. So I choose AI. I create the persona to set up how AI “sees” the world, explain the details I want in the image, how I’d like to have them arranged, explain the final deliverable and push the button. Here’s a sample:

image
image1672×941 503 KB

Now you might laugh or snicker (partly the point of the image), but we worked together on an idea and once we saw the image, it was exactly what we wanted. Instant gratification.

I’m trying to teach my son that life needs a balance. There are some things that you may need to put in a lot of hard work to develop skills and genuine abilities. But there are also times to use a tool to accomplish a task. AI is nothing more than a tool. (well, until Skynet takes over) Part of life is knowing when to do a task yourself, getting a tool to make it easier or hire someone else to do it. It takes all 3 in this world. :rofl:

A shortcoming I see with many of the youngsters today (wow - I sound old!) is they want an app to do it for them, to find the answer online or to have AI make something for them. In some scenarios, this is fine. But to be reliant solely on the technology is dangerous.

Ok. Old man stepping off the soap box…

Told you it was thought provoking! :rofl:

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Bear in mind that Ansel Adams wrote a series of three books that were and probably still are the definitive texts on the zone system developed by him. They are highly technical and for chemically produced photographs and are probably the best text there is. The three books are The Camera, The Negative and The Print. The first is all about how to take the perfect photograph, the second about how to process it into the perfect negative and the last about how to produce the perfect print from from that negative. And after taking in the books expect hundreds of hours of practice before you even begin to understand just how good Adams was!

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TANSTAAFL to bring a 60s saying back; still rings true

(their ain’t no such thing as a free lunch) (from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Heinlein) (which had an AI computer named Mike)

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“There comes a time in every project when you have to shoot the engineer and get on with production.”

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Another one of my Heinlein favorites from way back. Thanks for the memory jog!

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I’m currently learning to sing a song so that I have it memorized. One funny thing is that my brain knows “it’s in your phone, why bother remembering it.”

However, if you memorize it, you have brain power left over to do other stuff, e. g. accompany yourself on your instrument or fine tune your pitch and expression as a singer.

So, my solution is to always ask “what am I missing?” Simply because all the shortcuts are only helpful if you’ve done it all for a reason.

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Here is a link to a gallery with some of Ansel Adams photographs:

Definitely worth visiting imho.

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You probably already know this but vocalization is a great way to solidify learning. It’s important for learning languages too, much harder to learn them with just reading, listening and memorization but insufficient speaking.

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Here’s my issue - the AI didn’t come up with that image out of nothing. It’s a statically probable image based on the available inputs.

Where did those inputs come from? They came from artists and photographers. Were those artists and photographers credited or paid in any way for their work? They were not, I can tell you. How do I know this? Because I am an academic and my work and the work of others I am close to has been used to “train” AI and we all received absolutely nothing in exchange for this. Not money, sure, but not even credit.

My friend gets papers from his students where AI has literally made up sources that he supposedly wrote but didn’t, but are close to things he actually did write.

It just goes to show how little our society values intellectual and creative work.

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Totally fair points and a very unfortunate situation. I’m sorry to hear it.

Do you have ideas for how to put the genie back in the bottle?

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It’s interesting because this is what humans do all the time as well, the difference being humans have actual accountability.

So maybe some kind of accountability framework needs to extend to AI companies?

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Humans are expected to cite their sources, or at least have to spend the time learning and appreciating their artistic influences. So it’s quite a bit different when a machine just trawls all available material and spits something out and someone takes credit for that without putting in any time or effort.

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Well, for one thing, we could stop using finite resources to build unnecessary data centers to fuel the plagiarism machine, but that borders on the sort of political discussion that we’re not supposed to do here.

I don’t know. I just had too much academic and artistic integrity drilled into me (I have both a fine arts degree and a graduate degree in science so I have training from both of those angles), and honestly I just can’t wrap my head around it and I certainly won’t encourage its use. At the very least people should know how it actually works and where it gets its seemingly magical information from.

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Yes indeed - and yet many do not. AI is not new in this regard, it’s just expanding the scale. With humans, there is accountability for this. With AI there is not. Perhaps that’s the problem.

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Would the concept of “corporate personhood” not be the foundation to sue the hell out of our AI overlords?

AIs do stuff that would be sanctioned by law if done by a human.

@CT-9902 - I agree with EVERYTHING you say about this topic!

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Totally agree on that one , to find the best balance for you between those 3 things is the trick.

Good read , thanks for sharing @Professor

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Thanks for the reminder! Vocalizations can be a great tool and I want to sing, after all.

What I usually do is try to recall the song by reciting the lyrics back. Then I’ll check, then repeat. I guess I could do a lot more, but it’ll come with time.