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Generative "AI": The Guitar Hero of Creativity

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/08/06/generative-ai-the-guitar-hero-of-creativity/
21•cheeaun•3h ago

Comments

chromanoid•43m ago
I don't know enough about DJing, but maybe that is also an analogy to GenAI usage that can work.
VCFundedGenYer•36m ago
"But, like Guitar Hero, no outside creative skill has been acquired or developed."

Spoken like someone who never actually played the games. GH developed my interest in music as a kid, and Rock Band actually taught me how to drum in real life. It also garnered my interest in picking up and learning real guitar.

Those who forget that Rock Band not only a) existed and b) did everything GH did but a thousand times better + created by real musicians (Harmonix) do the genre, industry, and this article, injustice.

This article is written by someone stretching and reaching to relate two unrelated things. I'm offended by this.

sumeno•30m ago
Did you learn to play guitar playing guitar hero?

No, you didn't.

You're straw manning an argument that doesn't exist in the article

dizlexic•30m ago
As a code monkey generative ai helps grow my skills daily, and all I have to do is read the code.
unfocso•29m ago
This is a bad analogy by somebody who never played the game. Guitar hero is not harder or easier than guitar, it's just different.

I don't know how to play guitar, yet I can play guitar hero. My friend who plays guitar cannot play guitar hero. I'm not interested in playing guitar and I don't find GH to be a "shortcut" to learn it. In fact, I play the piano and I'm okay like that.

sumeno•27m ago
He's not saying playing Guitar Hero is worthless. He's saying it won't teach you guitar, which is 100% true
skeledrew•12m ago
So, given this is all obvious, the article is basically saying nothing.
createful•9m ago
Guitar Hero is a "rhythm game", perhaps calling it a "guitar simulator" is a bit incorrect. A rhythm game is one where you, for example, push buttons in tune with a song, exactly what Guitar hero is.

So you are good at different things. Maybe not at a real guitar but perhaps at reaction times.

I say this as someone who had one of those plug-in guitars but never knew how to use it, hah.

peakdunningkrue•54s ago
> I don’t know how to play guitar.

> Guitar hero is not harder or easier than guitar.

Ladies and gents, peak dunning krueger moment.

gliall_err•26m ago
I was trying to figure out what time of day, by UTC, would most people be asleep. Searching I could only pre-slopped answers in hundreds of random blogs.

So I decided to get my own custom slop. Opened Gemini and it said "video generation is free for a few days, try it out!". I uploaded a copy of Neuromancer and asked it to generate a scene.

MF had Cage inserting a power plug in his ear.

Ah and the time zone curiosity question? It went about it for a a minute or so and said "can't help you with that one, anything else?"

I think we've seen the best these LLMs can do and the race to the bottom has started. It's all cost cutting now, and I am very curious to see what will be of OpenAI and Anthropic. Probably will end up absorbed by MS, Amazon and Nvidia.

mapontosevenths•18m ago
You are bad at it. Don't get mad, get good.

edit: https://share.gemini.google/hvH2A3Yva5Uj

First try.

quietbritishjim•1m ago
Wow, you typed out their question first try? What skill!

I doubt their attempt failed because they wrote the question poorly. It was probably just the service being flaky.

Drakexor•22m ago
This seems disingenuous. I can ask a generative AI "explain this ternary operator to me" or "walk me through why this causes a race condition"

I cannot ask the video game why my real guitar is out of tune, or diagnose why I'm holding the fret wrong.

borzi•16m ago
That implies that you did more than prompt the AI and actually learned whatever activity it is you are asking the AI about, because otherwise you wouldn't know to ask those questions. A person making music solely with AI won't ask about tuning their guitar because they don't have one and don't intend to use one.
mapontosevenths•20m ago
Scalzi has developed an almost religious sort of dogmatic hatred of AI. He seems to acknowledge none of the benefits, even those that are obvious. Likely because he feels it's harmful to the way he earns his living.

He is rapidly coming to define himself through opposition, rather than promotion. Which is a dangerous and fruitless game.

Throughout human history there has never been a still useful technology that we as a species chose to stop using, and AI very much is. Maybe we'll come to regulate it, but the genie will never go completely back into the bottle and folks are going to need to get used to the new world.

latexr•6m ago
> Likely because he feels it's harmful to the way he earns his living.

Absurd. Scalzi fans are not going to stop reading his works because LLMs exist. If anything, established authors are the ones with the least to fear.

This talking point that when people dislike something it’s because it affects their personal finances is getting really tired. Not everyone is a greedy selfish prick who only thinks of themselves, people are allowed to dislike things for other reasons. That’s normal, it’s not an anomaly.

> but the genie will never go completely back into the bottle and folks are going to need to get used to the new world.

And apparently we’ll never share another original idea, either. “Genie is out of the bottle”, “you’re going to get left behind”. Apparently the people who called LLMs parrots got it wrong, they instead turn people into them, mindlessly repeating whatever the labs want them to.

createful•16m ago
Except Guitar Hero is a game, and is marketed as such. Guitar Hero is like Bitcoin mining, you are doing useless computations to make some number go up, in the case of Bitcoin, your money, and Guitar Hero, your score.

But AI actually does something unlike Guitar Hero. There is a real output that can be used tomorrow even if AI "goes away".

You say AI helps you learn no skills, essentially. I don't know about you, but AI helped me understand Linux better in a way I didn't feel confident I would be able to before AI. I have created code with AI that I can maintain, and understand without it.

AI can go in conjunction with learning manually and can be helpful. Just because many examples exist of AI being unhelpful does not mean the whole technology is unhelpful.

skeledrew•14m ago
And to keep fluffing the control narrative, 0 mention of open weight models were made.

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