Im really tired, and exhausted of reading simple takes.
Grok is a very capable LLM that can produce decent videos. Why are most garbage? Because NOT EVERYONE HAS THE SKILL NOR THE WILL TO DO IT WELL!
I don't know if they will ever get there, but LLMs are a long ways away from having decent creative taste.
Which means they are just another tool in the artist's toolbox, not a tool that will replace the artist. Same as every other tool before it: amazing in capable hands, boring in the hands of the average person.
This matters less for text (including code) because you can always directly edit what the AI outputs. I think it's a lot harder for video.
I wonder if it would be possible to fine train an AI model on my own code. I've probably got about 100k lines of code on github. If I fed all that code into a model, it would probably get much better at programming like me. Including matching my commenting style and all of my little obsessions.
Talking about a "taste gap" sounds good. But LLMs seem like they'd be spectacularly good at learning to mimic someone's "taste" in a fine train.
It's driven by it in the sense that better tools and the democratization of them changes people's baseline expectations.
It's independent of it in that doing the baseline will not stand out. Jurassic Park's VFX stood out in 1993. They wouldn't have in 2003. They largely would've looked amateurish and derivative in 2013 (though many aspects of shot framing/tracking and such held up, the effects themselves are noticeably primitive).
Art will survive AI tools for that reason.
But commerce and "productivity" could be quite different because those are rarely about taste.
How can I proclaim what I said in the comment above? Because Ive spent the past week producing something very high quality with Grok. Has it been easy? Hell no. Could anyone just pick up and do what Ive done? Hell no. It requires things like patience, artistry, taste etc etc.
The current tech is soul-less in most people hands and it should remain used in a narrow range in this context. The last thing I want to see is low quality slop infesting the web. But hey that is not what the model producers want - they want to maximize tokens.
With Opus 4.6 I'm seeing that it copies my code style, which makes code review incredibly easy, too.
At this point, I've come around to seeing that writing code is really just for education so that you can learn the gotchas of architecture and support. And maybe just to set up the beginnings of an app, so that the LLM can mimic something that makes sense to you, for easy reading.
And all that does mean fewer jobs, to me. Two guys instead of six or more.
All that said, there's still plenty to do in infrastructure and distributed systems, optimizations, network engineering, etc. For now, anyway.
