Technical Crutches - good or bad or necessary evil?

I built a custom graphics editor almost entirely using AI.. took me a couple of evenings (and I knew nothing of graphics nor desktop apps, but now I know a little, from just observation of the AI operating).

The reason I wanted a custom editor is because I've got hundreds of photos to tweak manually, and so I'd like to create my own shortcuts dedicated for my needs.

Sure, Adobe Photoshop could do it all, but I'd probably spend longer dealing with that.

With my editor, I have a list of all the images in the left window, and I can launch into the main editor, and then use my custom keyboard shortcuts to perform the things I need (like resizing, cropping, panning, etc), it saves in the filename formats I want, and performs checks that I want before doing some of the operations.

Also, bonus, it auto-saves a text file in my desired format, with additional data that I want (which Photoshop probably wouldn't do!). The editor is really fast. It's lightweight, so there's no hanging around waiting for toolbars etc to load, because there are no toolbars.

If I didn't use AI, I could not have managed this in anywhere near a 2-evening timeframe, and it taught me a little along the way.

Well said.... and I agree that we have to find the time to practice our creativity.

It is the motivation behind the reason for using anything that counts, in my opinion.

Some will use tools like AI because they are lazy (the negative) while others will exploit tools like AI because they want to achieve breakthroughs (the positive). The hesitation to jump in is most likely motivated by not knowing the consequences of using it (there's no undo or reboot in the real world...).

1) I think this debate came up with the written word (what, one doesn't memorize The Iliad and the Odyssey anymore?), the printing press, ... 

 We use technology to do things so our brains can specialize in other things.

2) Again, the abacus, the slide rule, the calculator, the computer...

These are Luddite concerns. One of the original research thrusts in AI was "autoprog" or automatic programming: 

A.W. Biermann, "On the Inference of Turing Machines from Sample Computations, Artificial Intelligence, Volume 3, 1972.

There will always be those who avoid thinking. I don't suspect that will be a common characteristic of success, other than in politics. (See "When I was a Lad" -- HMS Pinafore G&S).

I'm going with "No" and "No".  I do believe that it requires that we (humankind) improve our ability to discern what is truth or fabrication.  It doesn't matter if the image is AI generated but is the content Confirmed, Plausible or Busted?  My grandchildren will not enjoy the luxury of being able to trust sources like I did.  They will actually have to dig deeper to validate the information.  It's the "easy" that ends up being really hard - like a "shortcut".

Is generative AI cheating?  I am always impressed with someone who can see the statue inside the stone or see the carving inside the block of wood.  If you can figure out how to get generative AI to create exactly what you want... I think that's a bit of an art form.  It's definitely a "skill".

Good questions Douglas.

I always seek people who really know things. I still remember dealing with people who insisted they had to have all of the latest tools before they could do the task assigned. If you have not guessed, I was not sympathetic. We only hired people who could do the job quickly and had the knowledge to solve problems.

If you have to look things up, it is only a question of when you encounter a problem some place where you do not have access to your search capability. That mentality also makes you a very unproductive person. 

A lot of people just want enough knowledge to get by. It is sad, but true. Both of my brothers fell into this category. Neither succeeded like I did.

Those of us who want to understand and know will always search for the true knowledge.

The type of person you are, will determine which path you choose.

From what I recall, very few school kids were particularly avid book readers. It took me a while to get into them but perhaps that was mainly because there was a lack of non-fiction material available.

In some respects, the presentation format of educational content on YouTube is little different than that of the lecture, except that you can pause/rewind/etc. It's still a pretty poor example when it comes down to multimedia content delivery.

dougw said:

There is something about reading books that really allows imagination to flourish

Perhaps partly due to the linear delivery of text. The information is being drip fed to you in the order that the author has presented it. The brain has to store it word by word, paragraph by paragraph, whilst its auto-predict (imagination) anticipates what's coming next trying to build up the incomplete mental image.

With a photograph, all the information is available at once and it's up to the viewer to consume it in which order they want. However, a lot of people miss things in photographs, or misinterpret them due to bias. Also there is no creator confirmation of what it is that you are looking at. 

dougw said:

where video is coming at you with so much information

With a video you can have multiple events occurring simultaneously like the flash and the bang of the explosion and the screams and alarms all going off together. Or something more subtle like the simultaneous body language between two subjects. These are difficult to convey in a text based format but are more like the way most perceive the real world with our eyes and ears.

There are strengths and weaknesses in each format.

dougw said:

It is important to exercise our imaginations and let them explore the tendrils that grow from material we read.

I recall back at school, most of the school books contained printed text with little in the way of illustrations or photographs. I'm not sure that was always a good thing, as it lacked real-world context to help steer the imagination.

There is something about reading books that really allows imagination to flourish, where video is coming at you with so much information, there may not be enough time for imagination to fully develop offshoots. It is important to exercise our imaginations and let them explore the tendrils that grow from material we read.

There is no question that the Internet and AI provide a giant boost to productivity, and there is no question that AI can create new material.

One of the things I find most enjoyable is creating - which often involves transplanting a concept from one field and applying it to a completely different field or making linkages between different ideas where no linkage existed in the past. This type of creativity requires knowledge, it simply cannot occur without knowledge of things that might be linked, and the more knowledge we have the more new linkages we can dream up. AI can do this too, but if humans want to continue to be creative (and we do) we need to continue to learn and exercise the creative process. If it isn't exercised, it atrophies.

Of course people use the internet to learn things - it is spectacular for supplying things to learn. We just need to remember learning is a crucial part of creative performance. Hopefully AI offloads time-consuming tasks and provides us more time to learn.