"Why so serious?" the Joker asks. "Why so serious?"

I feel a little bit like the Joker, wanting to ask Mr Goia: "You want to know how I learned how to write?...Why so threatened?"

I write like I do because I've had access to the cultural firehose of the internet. My writing is shaped by the tools I use: even though I hand write (on paper) most of my stuff, the ability to speedily check allusive connections is fundamental to how I write. Before me, authors had to have a good library and, before that, a good memory.

So now, ai tools let people turn ideas into reality without any craft (or not much more craft than prompt engineering).

Quil and parchment -> pen and paper -> typewriter and ribbon -> keyboard and word processor -> prompt and llm. It seems like a continuum to me. Each new tool can be used well or badly. But any tool can always be used to produce art.

People like Mr Goia (and Mr Beato) seem to feel that this ai stuff is not on the continuum of tools we have all been using, but rather something new.

I have yet to hear the convincing argument for what makes llms so different from the rest of the tools we use.