I wanted to discuss the reaction during the interview to the Ocarina app found in
Artful Design This strongly reminds me of when large language models started becoming popular. The immediate reaction from many people was concern about how the new technology would displace writers and artists. We've never before had the ability to automatically generate text or images at a quality similar to how humans can do it. Maybe people would stop learning how to paint or draw in favor of using AI instead, and a part of our past would be lost.
But of course, with the Ocarina and other virtual instruments, people didn't stop learning physical instruments. It still seems like they are as popular as ever. And I think that in a similar vein, the advent of AI writing and art also won't bring about the end of humans doing these things. I believe it will most likely just become another genre, or another medium for human creativity. People will still be learning to draw and write by themselves as much as ever, and there will still be demand for people who know how to do those things.
A couple weeks ago, I read an essay by Brian Eno, one of the pioneers of electronic music. He was discussing the advent of the studio for music composition, and he notes:
It doesn't mean that suddenly the world is open, and we're going to do much better music, because we're not constrained in certain ways. We're going to do different music because we're not constrained in certain ways we operate under a different set of constraints.
I think this also applies perfectly to both the Ocarina and AIs. These new tools can't replace previous kinds of music because they are actually entirely separate things. They'll mainly allow us to get around previous constraints, like not being able to buy an instrument. As Ge put it in
Artful Design