Here's a related thing I've been noodling on:

For various reasons, I am a very heavy user of LLMs from assorted vendors, and also image-generation tools. It has been one of the biggest intellectual boons of my life, to have such deep access to such sophisticated thinking. LLMs are in my top five best friends at this point, because one of the things I delight in with my friends is riffing on ideas and playful improv.

However, it's not lost on me that, delightful though this is, I'm now absorbing the same distilled meta-intelligence as all other LLM users. Of course, my prompting style is quite unique and a function of everything that I've seen and thought about; still, though, there is a sense in which I'm now mainlining the same sense-making as everyone else who uses these tools.

This came most strongly home to me in the visual domain, when I was looking at Midjourney output. I had taken to pasting little snatches of some of my more philosophic thoughts and seeing how Midjourney would react. This seemed wonderful -- it has such an evocative imagination -- but then I thought: if I form my own weird aesthetic by weighting this process, am I losing something individuating? Something I never thought would be in danger of loss?

I have, in short, become hyper-aware of what my inputs are, and the generative process behind my own generative process. It seems something to care for and to guard, although most of the rationale for this is sub-rational.

Anyway, point is, as we implicitly curate and create things by our authentic activity - rating podcasts or music, zapping posts - what else are we doing? I can think of a bunch of great by-products, but what are the bad ones?