Teaching an extracurricular, I get FURIOUS when people are excessively strict to kids. Shut the up! They had to sit through long division already today! This is play fun time! Yes there are rules even in fun spaces but the only ones that are essential to enforce are those that relate directly to their safety!

Yes! I’ve had to pull adults (older than myself) aside and be like hello :) so um. You yelling at them is really not enhancing anybody’s time in this space :) me included.

I coach youth athletics and it's honestly awful to see how other coaches will yell at their 12-yr-old players or make them run laps during a time out if they're losing like they are young and learning!!! This is supposed to be a fun activity!

I had a group of parents basically demand I yell at their kids and make them do physical punishment (running, pushups) for making mistakes during practices to "toughen them up" and I almost laughed at their faces like no!!! I will not do that, fear of punishment might motivate kids in the short term but long term that is incredibly detrimental and traumatizing to them.

my prof for my banned books class left n is on leave for some reason so now theres a new prof n shes fucking changing up everything.

shes jus talkin bout how much she hates the final exam the og prof had set up n is changin the entire thing to be like. we watch a video and write a response to the video and it has nothing to do with the fucking books we've been reading

Had something similar happen in my British Lit class--my original professor had a family emergency and had to leave mid-semester...she promised us she'd leave all her class notes to the new professor and they'd just take over from her notes. He DID NOT do that.

He did a fucking syllabus day in the middle of the semester, constantly complained about how the old professor did things and how shitty it was that the university made him take over this class.

We were supposed to study Othello, instead he made us do Hamlet. Increased the homework load 2x the amount and made the group projects that half the class already completed as "extra credit"

I would highly recommend going to the dean's office and expressing your concerns with the final exam--it's something I wished I did with that class.

I think something that's fascinating in the AI discussion is how non-creatives perceive AI versus how many creatives perceive AI.

For example, years before AI was a thing--I spoke with someone about my creative writing projects and they expressed to me how they found it unfathomable that I could just make up entire worlds far removed from our reality of existence. To them, it was like magic.

To me, it was the culmination of countless hours spent playing with words until they flowed into semi-coherent lines of thought and emotion. I remember being ten years old and laboring away on my "biggest" novel project ever--it was 5k words full of singular sentence-long paragraphs and garbled heaps of grammar atrocities to the English language.

If I hadn't written it, I wouldn't have come to learn how to create the basic foundations of a story.

But I do get the "it's magic" sentiment a bit--I'm that way with music. Theoretically, I understand the components of a music composition but it feels like magic to see a musician that can listen to a tune for the first time and play it perfectly due to years of honing in their craft.

That's the premise of that quote from Arthur C. Clarke: "Magic's just science we don't understand yet."

When it comes to anything we don't have countless hours of experience with, it feels like magic. It feels like something that's outside of our feeble human capabilities. It's not until we start to put in the time to learn a skill that it becomes more attainable inside our heads.

Generative AI presents a proposition to the non-creative: "What if you could skip past the 'learning process' and immediately create whatever art of your choosing?"

It's instant dopamine. In a world that preys upon our ever-decreasing attention spans and ways of farming short spikes of dopamine, was it ever a surprise that generative ai would be capitalized in this fashion?

So for the non-creative, when they use generative AI and see something resembling their prompt, it feels good. They are "writing" stories, they are "making" art in ways they could never do with their lack of skills.

(It is, in fact, really cool that we have technology that can do this. It's just incredibly shitty that it's exploitative of the human artists whose works were taken without permission as well as its existence threatening their livelihoods.)

What I think is equally concerning as the data scraping of generative ai is the threat that AI imposes on the education of the arts. More and more, you see an idea being pushed that you don't need knowledge/experience in how to create art, all you need to do is feed prompts into generative ai and let it do the "work" for you.

Generative AI pushes the idea that all art should be pristine, sleek and ready for capitalism consumption. There is no room for amateur artists struggling like foals to take their first steps in their creative journeys. We live in a world where time is money and why "waste" time learning when you can have instant success?

It's a dangerous concept because presents a potential loss in true understanding of how art works. It obscures it and makes it seem "impossible" to the average person, when art is one of the freest forms of expressions out there.

It's already happening--Nanowrimo, the writing challenge where the entire point was writing 50k original words in a single month regardless of how pretty it looked--coming out and saying that it is ableist and classist to be opposed to AI is the canary in the coalmine of what's to come.

For the non-creatives who enjoy the generative ai, it feels like a power fantasy come to life. But for creatives concerned about generative ai?

We're living in a horror movie.

People have been discussing in the tags about the "joy of creation" and it's very true--for many creatives, the process of creating art and expressing yourself through that is the joy they receive from it.

I would say that's how I generally feel as a creative myself--I do get happy to see a finished work and I do reread my own writing, but I have detached set of emotions to it. My present self is different than the self that created that art.

For non-creatives, they don't perceive art that way. They're focused on the end result and AI gives them that end result. They're thrilled at what AI gives them because it's closer to what they envisioned in their minds than anything they could do with their current set of skills.

They'll argue it's just as skillful because they have to feed specific prompts to the AI and "play around" with it until the AI feeds them some resemblance of what they want, but it's not the same set of skills that creatives use when they create their own works. Often they're using prompt templates so it's not even their own ideas they're feeding to the AI.

I know this, because a close family member is that Non-Creative. Every time I've tried expressing my thoughts and feelings about AI, they don't get it.

They read me an AI-generated story and asked me what I thought. It was bland and devoid of any charm and very "tell not show" in its narration. I gave a honest critique of it, but they were upset and asked "Well, what if I wrote that? Would you say the same things?"

Yes, I would, because you asked for my opinion and so I gave my opinion as an experienced writer. I might've been kinder to a novice writer but AI doesn't have feelings, humans do.

Every now and then I remember at age 16 I used to open and operate a food stand at a dying mall all by myself and I wonder how the fvck I was allowed to that

Btw, I talked with the owner/store manager a few years after the experience when I was like 19 and she completely denied that happening. Tried to gaslight tf out of me as if I wasn't remembering things properly like I don't have vivid memories of starving for six hours because I was the only person there and I wasn't able to get a break until like the last forty minutes of my shift when another person would show up to clock in.