So here's the thing: I will sing the praises of AI up and down the street and all day long when it's helping me automate some tedious process like spinning up a quick recon workflow, or chaining together tools during a pentest so i'm not manually typing the same nmap flags for the 48th time, etc. Major time savers. Offensive security work especially, being able to have something help triage findings or build attack chains, brainstorm some org-specific social engineering pretexts, one-shot a bruteforcer script for the odd in-house custom web app, explain some weird, unexpected service response, etc. But in general, just being able to automate the boring 80% of the job so i can focus on the challenging stuff? Incredible... and would recommend.
And then art comes up and I turn into a different person entirely. This person:
ink on graph paper painstakingly scribbled into existence
I'll catch an AI generated illustration at some point during my daily internet feed ingestion ritual and something in me just deflates. It's not even that it necessarily looks bad (because sometimes it looks amazing, which is almost worse?). It's that art was never just "output" to me. The point was never just the image. It was my hands, my bad decisions, my (what felt like) infinite number of discarded versions sometimes, my taste built over years of looking at things and being influenced and rebelling against influences. When a model spits out an image, it's skipped all of that. It's like getting a mounted trophy fish from a taxidermist instead of catching one yourself (sure it's shaped like the thing, but you didn't do the thing). So the question is, is the process the point, or is the output the point?
For automation / security work, output is the point. I don't need the "experience" of manually writing boilerplate or executing the same commands over and over again. Get me to the interesting parts faster.
For art, and for me, process is the point, quite possibly the *entire* point. The meaning comes from a human having something to say and figuring out how to say it.
So yeah. I'm not going to pretend this is some perfectly principled stance. There's definitely vibes here. It's "tool when i want efficiency, betrayal when i want meaning". Maybe that's fine. Maybe everyone's AI ethics are secretly just vibes and we're all pretending otherwise...
Anyway, </EndRant>
. Back to automating the things I don't want to think about, so I have more time to make things i do.