derwaro

God Mode

I think I finally know the best analogy for using AI tools:
I really like(d) to play video games. Some many years ago I spent entire summers at home (2 months of summer vacation here), sweating of the heat, since my room was right under the roof (Europe, many years ago, no AC), playing and playing and playing videogames. At some point in any game I felt that I just could not advance any more. There were dead ends all around and I couldn’t manage to get my skills right to finish this or that task. Enter, cheat codes. I was not alone in using them. I distinctly remember sharing cheats with friends, buying magazines with walkthroughs and cheatcodes, printing pages from the early internet to have them handy when playing offline,… As much as I enjoyed playing games, I enjoyed cheating at games¹.

Suddenly I could do anything. Everything was possible. From endless health, to endless ammo to endless resources, to endless arrows, endless repair kits, endless tanks, endless everything! And for a short time also endless fun!

However the endless fun always stopped abruptly and was actually quite finite. To be able to do anything without any effort, without learning curve, no grinding; gets boring real quick. It ain’t easy playing in god mode.

Now, when I think about all those AI tools (and I really don’t use them that much. I mostly used the text based tools, and have only ever generated around 10 images with text to image tools. I have never generated videos.) I see how everything right now is exciting and possible as in I can do a whole lot of stuff for which, a few years ago, I would have had to study and practice a lot to be able to even remotely be able to accomplish similiar stuff. With all those AI tools I feel like all it takes is to enter the right cheat code, i.e. the prompt, and get to wherever I want. It’s a nice dopamine rush, since I merely have to imagine what I want and have to formulate the basic content/finished output in some very basic words to get the result within seconds. How convenient. How boring! It’s not me accomplishing all those things. It’s a statistical mind pushing out what everybody else would have done given this of that situation (with added errors, hallucinations and so on). One should think about the old and beaten saying: the way is the goal and really appreciate the way in all it’s meandering ways. Don’t take the easy and maybe quick rewarding shortcut (as in god mode, AI tools), all those learnings, the grind, the repetition to perfection is the most rewarding way to reach goals.