Doing the Lord’s work in the Devil’s basement

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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: May 8th, 2024

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  • The only reason people are throwing bitch fits over AI/LLM’s is because it’s the first time the “art” industry is experiencing their own futility.

    I would even go further and argue that the art industry doesn’t really care about AI. The people white knighting on the topic are evidently not artists and probably don’t know anybody legitimately living from their art.

    The intellectual property angle makes it the most obvious. Typically independent artists don’t care about IP because they don’t have the means to enforce it. They make zero money from their IP and their business is absolutely not geared towards that - they are artists selling art, not patent trolls selling lawsuits. Copying their “style” or “general vibes” is not harming them, just like recording a piano cover of a musician’s song doesn’t make them lose any tickets sales, or sell fewer vinyls (which are the bulk of their revenue).

    AI is not coming for the job of your independent illustrator pouring their heart and soul into their projects. It is coming for the job of corporate artists illustrating corporate blogs, and those who work in content farms. Basically swapping shitty human made slop for shitty computer made slop. Same for music - if you know any musician who’s losing business because of Suno, then it’s on them cause Suno is really mediocre.

    I have yet to meet any artist with this kind of deep anti-AI sentiment. They are either vaguely anxious about the idea of the thing, but don’t touch it cause they’re busy practicing their craft - or they use the hallucination engines as a tool for inspiration. At any rate there’s no indication that their business has seen much of a slowdown linked to AI.




  • Honestly the use case i’m working on is pretty mind blowing. User records an unstructured voice note like “i am out of item 12, also prices of items 13 & 15 is down to 4 dollars 99, also shipping for all items above 1kg is now 3 dollars 99” and the LLM will search the database for items >1kg (using tool calling) then generate a JSON representing the changes to be made. We use that JSON to make a simple UI where the user can review the changes - then voilà it’s sent to the backend which persists the change in database. In the ideal case the user never even pulls up the virtual keyboard on their phone, it’s just “talk, check, click, done”.



  • I’m currently a guy working on something like this ! It’s even simpler as you can have structured output on the chatgpt API. Basically you give it a JSON schema and it’s guaranteed to respond with JSON that validates against that schema. Spent a couple weeks hacking at it and i’m positively impressed, I have had clean JSON 100% of the time, and the data extraction is pretty reliable too.

    The tooling is actually reaching a sweet spot right now where it makes sense to integrate LLMs in production code (if the use case makes sense and you haven’t just shoe-horned it in for the hype).