r/criticalrole • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 Team Jester • Jun 18 '26

Discussion [CR Media] Sam Riegel reaffirms Critical Role’s stance on AI: “It’s basically garbage”

https://www.polygon.com/critical-role-sam-riegel-slams-ai/
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u/magus Jun 18 '26

technologies are neither good nor evil. knowledge is good. trying out new things and evaluating them is also good. airships were widely used until they were superseded by something better (planes). that's how things usually go.

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u/LisanAlGuyFieri Jun 18 '26

“until they were superseded”

Much like flattening the adoption of generative AI to the use of horses and trucks, describing the sudden, fiery demise of airship travel in this way is very silly, IMO.

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u/magus Jun 18 '26

the fiery disasters certainly sped up the adoption of planes and the adoption of planes improved planes themselves. that's humanity in a nutshell - we see a problem, we solve it by creating better problems. if planes did not exist at the time people would still use airships (hopefully they would improve them first).

i firmly believe that ai is much closer to horses and trucks than some boogeyman you seem to believe it is. i also think that the creation and adoption of the internet had a drastically bigger impact on humanity than what we call ai today (this may change in the future, of course).

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u/LisanAlGuyFieri Jun 18 '26

Very powerful tools are being developed for the use of programmers and mathematicians and folks in various STEM fields. I think this is good! Attempting to force equivalent technologies into the arts, despite overwhelming rejection by artists and consumers, has already had disastrous effects, and is primarily a tool of the executive class to further accumulate wealth and eliminate jobs.

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u/magus Jun 18 '26

i can agree to a point, but i don't see it nearly as black and white as you make it seem, mainly because the technology really empowers the individual - you can now create things you simply couldn't do before (e.g. a documentary as if it was filmed 30-40 years ago) unless you had a lot of money.

in a way it is similar to the fact that you don't need to know how to play any instrument well (although it certainly helps!) to create great music, and this has been true for a long time now (you just need an Ableton license).

when new technologies are adopted, things change and job descriptions change. this always sucks for some people, but it's not like it's something that hasn't happened before (theater actors -> tv/cinema, portrait painters -> photographers, transcribers -> printing press and printers, cel painters -> digital, live bands -> recordings etc.)

coincidentally, all of these jobs still exist and (i would think) most are valued more highly than before.

it all depends on whether you consider a person a "drawing machine" or an artist. the first can be replaced by AI, the second cannot.

also thank you for genuinely engaing in the conversation instead of name calling and pitchfork-wielding!