The Enchanted Pencil at home - AI generators

Everyone had at least once a period of constant thought loop, a really hot and relevant topic, which is so exhausting that your brain just can't stop repeating a bunch of strong and obvious hot takes to convince itself that you are sooo smart. I have such thought all the time, both about current private stuff and global internet topics. AI is the current one, I'm munching it for a past month, watching all the youtube videos about each and every way that corporations will screw us with the AI tools, flood us with AI slop, lie to us with AI content. Just AI, AI and AI everywhere, it never ends. I'm reading more and more strong statements that whole AI fad must stop and any case of using it is wrong. Now I'm blaming myself for all the environmental damage and valuable data I provided for free for evil big tech lords when I generated a bunch of faces of fake politicians of my worldbuilding political project on some random free website in 2021.

The Enchanted Pencil is a cute little cartoon made in Poland in the 60's, that I've never watched, but was so influencial that I somehow always knew the premise of it, and I bet all the aging folks that used to watch the only one channel on TV instead of an iPad, knows what the enchanted pencil do. The pencil was a magic tool that materialized all the things drawn with it, either a marvelous hack that could solve almost all the problems of humankind, or a cool party trick during some fun adventures in the woods. Check out that silly cartoon if you want, it doesn't even have any dialogs, it's a truely universal fairytale from Polish capital of film of Łódź.

60 years later, we have "enchanted pencil" but the lame ones. Instead of drawing objects with the pencil on any sheet of paper and magically peel off fully materialized and working object, we can only use expensive and complicated 3D printers to 'create' material obejcts. That's still pretty cool but the most accessible 'pencil' is just a chatbot that can yield a somewhat working code that needs to be rewritten anyway, or the uninspired and uncanny piece of "content" that is just a burp of a machine that ate billions of actual human art work.

Magic tools of the future are awesome, but in this sad real world everything comes with the price. I don't know whether it was ever mentioned how that magic pencil was made, but I'm guessing it wasn't the story of cutting down all the remaining ancient forest of Białowieża National Park and killing all the wisents just to forge that one special wand that can be applied everywhere. Another reason why the pencil did better in the cartoon is that it actually encouraged the user to be creative, the boy had to draw by hand stuff that he want, if he did it poorly, he won't get what he wants. Prompt engineering is not creativity, it's just guessing what will make the computer give something a little bit more usable.

What I'm getting at with those disjointed paragraphs? In short: I'm consuming a lot of media and it exhaust my ability to focus on creating stuff myself. Still, I want to make stuff anyway so when the time and attention span is limited, cheating a bit with AI seems enticing. However, a very clever and totally relevant cartoon from the 60's shows that the true magic actually comes from the visualizing the desired thing by yourself.

I'll finish that text tomorrow I hope...