Quite the gatekeeper, aren't you? People can only be musicians if they abide by your peculiar rules! Studio albums and live performances are different, they require different sets of talents (there is a lot of overlap, of course, but they're not the same). Personally I prefer studio albums; it looks like your preferences run to live shows. That's fine, but don't mistake your personal preferences for some objective criteria for musicianship. It's a fallacy.

There are lots of musicians who never do live shows, or who have stopped doing them - haven't they ever been musicians, or have they been expelled from musicianship because they don't do live performances anymore? You can't see Mozart live anymore, for example - is he not a musician now?

Not sure how this works - if something looks like art to you, it is art. In the vast majority of cases there is no "under surface" content. I'd even say that most of the "under surface" stuff I've seen is in fact marketing, trying to add value to otherwise bad or indifferent works (for example, outrageous or tear-jerking artist biographies).

First, I believe you're contradicting yourself: if art can be created by checking "concept" and "context" rules, then machines should be able to do it - they're better at following rules than humans. But I really don't think such "concepts" exist. Art is subjective. When you say "this is art" what you really mean "I like that", or maybe "me and my friends like that", or even "me, my friends and the majority of the world like that".

As a proof, we're still able to enjoy ancient or exotic art without having any understanding of the concepts behind it or the social/cultural context of the artist. Could you, as a westerner tell us what the context and concepts were for an artist living and creating in the African Nok culture, more than two thousand years ago? Or what was going through the minds of the painters of the Altamira caves? Yet we can admire and enjoy those sculptures and paintings in themselves, with no context. On the other hand, no amount of context will make a piece of wood with a nail in it art for me either - despite there being idiots around ready to pay millions for it.

Why would that suck? It's perfectly normal for people to perform better in some circumstances than others - for example, if a great runner can't swim so well this doesn't make him any less of a runner.

If I like the band's studio albums but find out they're not so good live, I'll just stick to the albums and still like the band.

That's assuming the "Russian console" will even be manufactured in Russia. My feeling is they'll order a few thousand no-name consoles from China, put a "ZBox" or similar label on them and show them on TV as proof that Russian industry thrives and can equal or even better western technology.

Well, there is all kinds of progress - what happens though is that skeptics keep moving the posts - as soon as a machine can do something that used to only be possible for humans, they redefine it as "not intelligence". This happened again and again - here are some previous "proofs of intelligence" that people used to say a machine will never be able do:
  - playing chess or other complex games. Machines can now win consistently against a human, in chess and go
  - natural language processing: LLMs like ChatGPT can engage in fairly complex conversations, answer questions, summarize long texts or even meetings (I tested this in Teams: after a long meeting, I asked Copilot a number of fairly difficult questions about the meeting. For example, to list the main points of concern by person who raised them, to list the action items and their owner by proposed solution and more - it did surprisingly well)
  - image recognition, computer vision. This used to be very difficult for machines; now even your phone can identify people in a picture, recognize scenes and objects
  - speech recognition
  - medical diagnostics
  - language translation

Now you're saying your criterion for artificial intelligence is whether a machine can drive a car without human intervention for long intervals. Well, self-driving cars have only been a thing for a few years, but the progress is visible. It's true that we aren't yet at the point where a machine would be consistently better than a good human driver; however, things keep improving and I don't see any fundamental reasons why we couldn't reach this point sooner or later.

It looks like you haven't ever used ChatGPT in any kind of depth, and talk in complete ignorance, but ok; maybe you're right. So let's test your assertion.

I described my use case above. Go ahead and use Google, take the top non-advertising result and show us a site that has a Powershell script that does what I described. Not separate fragments on multiple sites, mind - I don't want a link to some page with a script that shows how to download a file with Powershell, another link to some guy's video tutorial on how to parse a file's contents in Powershell and yet another link to the MSDN reference page on folder management in Powershell. That was exactly what I was trying to avoid, and not what you said it happens. ChatGPT wrote a working sample satisfying all my requirements first go; I did tweaked the prompts (but not the code!) a little, mostly for esthetic purposes, but didn't need to - the first result from ChatGPT was sufficient.

So are you going to stand by your words and show us the mythical "equal or better result" you say exists?

Oh yeah? Well, if France hadn't helped the newly born USA with weapons, troops and money, you'd be speaking ... well, English!

Speaking strictly for myself I find I've been using ChatGPT more and more for searching various things, and also for quick and dirty scripts, minor debugging and the like.

For example, I got ChatGPT to write a Powershell script that downloads some files, parses some of their content then renames the files accordingly and pushes them to appropriate folders. I'm don't often use Powershell and I'm not interested in learning Powershell scripting so I couldn't write the script myself without spending quite a bit time to learn the various commands and their (IMO too abstruse) syntax. ChatGPT gave me a working script immediately, and after a bit of testing and tweaking of the prompts I got the work done in a fraction of the time I'd have needed otherwise.

I think this tool has a lot of potential - if they can get rid of hallucinations and if they allow the tool to answer freely without artificially limiting the results to whatever form of political correctness the owning company is currently pushing.

I prefer Murphy's, but that's just me...

This is so, so, so stupid. When I see a post like this I despair for the future of the world. People don't seem to have any understanding of elementary politics anymore. Attacking secret voting doesn't "fix" elections. On the contrary, what it does is break democracy.

Let's say for example that an anti-mafia measure is put on the ballot. What do you think would happen if votes were published for "everyone to access like a giant excel file"? Let me tell you what: the mafia will put word on the street that they'll check the list and break the kneecaps of anybody who voted in favor - and they'll also have all the information needed to find them too, helpfully provided through your big excel file. What will happen then? Nobody who wants to keep his kneecaps will dare to vote for it, and the measure will fail "democratically".

The opposite is true as well: with non-secret ballots people will be able to auction their votes, ensuring the most meritorious (that is, richest) candidate always wins. Is this how you understand democracy? You never heard about voter intimidation, never thought about vote selling? Don't you even realize that one of the reasons why people like Putin or Kim Jong Un "win" their elections with comfortable majorities is that nobody in their countries trusts ballots to be truly secret, and fear retribution if they dare to vote wrong?

The trouble is that many people actually think like this; they'll want to know which of their neighbors is a "trumpist" or a "librul", and they're ready to sacrifice democracy for the sake of tribalism. It's sad and pathetic.

It's true that we've been talking about cures for cancer and fusion for a long time now, and they're not here yet. You shouldn't use this as a reason to dismiss AI though. Revolutions do happen, and many if not most of us here have lived through at least a few. See television, personal computers, internet, smart phones, social media, reusable rockets, just off the top of my head...

Not every hyped change is a revolution, of course, but one of the things I kind of noticed is that the ones that change things most are the fairly unexpected ones, who end up taking the world by storm. Regarding AI, I'm on the fence yet, but some of the things I've seen are quite exciting.

I don't usually do conspiracy theories, but I wouldn't be surprised if the goal of this lawsuit from two republican states really is to get a statement from the Supreme Court affirming the govt's right to interfere with social media. That would allow Trump to crackdown on criticism if he wins the presidency.

And of course, you have numbers to back your assertion. You probably studied the issue deeply and have serious credentials in the area, of you wouldn't make such categorical statements. You certainly wouldn't go pontificating on the subject only based on your personal incredulity - because that would be a fallacy!

So please show some of the numbers that show there is "practically" no chance that life can appear anywhere without an infinite universe and infinite time!

Nothing is "safe and appropriate for user of any age" if you misuse it; a child can swallow Play doh and suffer from vomiting or constipation. A colored pencil can take someone's eye out. Even water is toxic if you drink too much.

I think this rush to make AI "safe" is beyond stupid. If you're afraid of what a machine may say or draw, don't use the machine - or don't let your child use it. Don't force your fears or prejudices on everybody else.

Reminds me of an old joke: what eats a bucket of coal, belches a cloud of black smoke and cuts a potato in three? The Russian machine for cutting potatoes in four.