Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 5 seconds
I’ve written before about how learning to crochet (literally, but also I think anything, any craft we do by hand) has helped me reflect on AI and what we can lose when we don’t go through the process of learning something the “hard” way.
Today, I came across this video of someone letting people know how to identify “AI-generated crochet” scams. Basically, people who create AI-generated images of crochet products, then attempt to sell the crochet patterns (which of course are also AI generated). I’ve seen AI-generated crochet patterns before and for the most part, they’re hallucinations. They look like a crochet pattern, but they’re making mistakes. As the speaker here (Elise Rose) says is that a newbie crocheter trying this would think that if the pattern does not work out for them, the problem lies within them, not the pattern. Which is the same I think as with anything we use genAI in – if we use it for something we don’t have much expertise in, we may not recognize mistakes/hallucinations/fabrications it makes.
What I think is important here is that I feel like we could use this example in class. In terms of how AI can be easily used to scam people when they aren’t experts in something… in ways that some people are trying to use AI to replace humans and in this case scam people into paying for something that is not real, but also about how real human work does not get replaced by this stuff. I’m not sure if someone will one day create a custom AI that can generate stuff for you with crochet. I can imagine this being cool and useful. For example, I want to create a scarf that is a mix between multiple different patterns, and an AI could build on multiple existing real patterns to put them together seamlessly. Maybe. But this is also very doable as a human, so I’m not sure. What do you think? Does this video make you think more about how AI might replace human labor, or does it actually highlight the shortcomings of GenAI in replacing human labor? What about non-handiwork type labor, that is more text-based – can we make the leap there, or is it less of a leap and a lot of low-level writing work is truly being replaced by AI and working out well?
Featured image of a crocheted sweater from DALL-E3 via poe.com