My brother and I are playing the Pokémon card game and could use a hand real quick figuring something out: Does a Choice Belt affect ALL V type Pokémon, or JUST V Pokémon? (He is using a Mew VMax at the moment and we can't find a straight answer online.)
Well, what triggered this thought is my dad showed me this website yesterday that can generate any image for you almost instantly. And the details of the pictures were insane. In a matter of seconds, a computer had generated four images that would normally take me about an hour or two to do (each!) in not nearly as high quality. Similarly, there's also a website that will write ANYTHING for you. Literally anything. You just tell it what you want and it'll write it (I did manage to stump it by asking for a limerick in the style of Spamton, so I guess that's a small consolation). It wrote a 500-word short story in less than a minute whereas I would take a couple hours to write one.
Yet with both of these things and their amazing speed, there was something about them that wasn't... real. It's like comparing a bowl of real fruit to a bowl of fake fruit. There's a difference, but it's subtle. There's something that just feels off about them. Additionally, the fake can't exist without the real already being there. The AI in these sites was simply cobbling together existing pieces to make something ""new."" You could tell it what to draw, what to write, but in the end, it's just going through the motions. It follows the letter of the law, not the spirit.
What REALLY makes me sad is that these things exist in the first place. It means that people are using them. Some people would rather use a computer-generated story, essay, photo or art piece than something handmade. In Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, he uses an analogy that fits this situation perfectly.
When someone creates something, it's founded with six basic steps. I won't list them all, but the two important ones for this are the first and last: The idea, the core message or value or purpose behind the thing itself, and the surface, which is what you see at first glance. People used to not care as much how whatever they were creating looked, and more about the content of the thing itself. It's like choosing between an apple with perfect skin and one with a less appealing outside. The one with the perfect skin (the computer-generated things) may LOOK nice, but on the inside, they're hollow, whereas the one that has a less enticing exterior (something done by hand) is actually better for its inside, or what's at its core.
But because these websites exist, generating apple after perfect apple, the things made by hand seem to be less appealing because these websites are fast. "Why do something myself when a computer can just do it for me?" And it's not just in writing and drawing. America doesn't really grow its own produce anymore. We rely on others. And have you heard about the scientist who managed to 3D print edible meat? Or maybe all those plants being grown in warehouses on shelves without soil instead of out in the open sun? These... fabrications and imitations are really only just that: an imitation. You can look at something in a mirror, but what you see in a mirror isn't the real thing. It's slightly less than the original. Yet, we've become so wrapped up in efficiency, speed and laziness that few people will take the time to do things by hand or for themselves. Those websites, quite frankly, scared me a little bit. A machine is never going to be able to think on the same level as a human being.
(Sorry, I didn't mean to ramble so long lol.)