How I phrase it is: my phone is for utility, not pleasure.

I check emails, I ePay, SMS/Discord messages, utility apps like hobby score tracking or taking notes, necessary company apps like airlines or resorts, etc.

I never use my phone for pleasure. If I look up a YouTube video, it's for a purpose and it ends at that purpose. If something takes me to a social media site, I read the post and end there.

I keep pleasure on my computer. When I step away from my computer, I'm disconnected from all the carcinogenics of the modern online life.

+1

My phone is ideally for

- Call

- Text messaging / WhatsApp / Discord of few groups, etc

- Alarm clock

- Taking pictures or videos. (Likely family oriented)

- Booking tickets - document, shows, travel (the main reason I have email setup on my phone)

- Travelling - Geolocation / map (gmaps, etc)

- Exception: Internet if working on laptop with no internet (ie in cafe) (This could also be youtube videos or similar)

If smart phones were banned tomorrow then my life would not change that much. The above is mostly for better convenience of what is other methods and requiring a some paper or printer, etc.

I do wonder what the percentage is today that rely on their smartphone (even if not serving a decent purpose other than "social") and struggle with daily life if a ban started tomorrow.... waking up to no smart phone. I think it will be pretty high even for people in their 40s. Its rather sad.

> Knowing where to choose the right words, and at what moment, can make video gen turn out magical. The AI is processing millions of tokens a second, but a prompter often finds just ONE perfect prompt to capture some scenes. Some people appreciate the “art” in that. :)

I do. It can take hours to make the vision in your head be replicated by the AI. Sure you can spit out generic scenes, but the game changes when the goal is expressing a specific vision with the prompt; choosing the right synonyms, phrasing, etc to make it spit out the closest image.

Do I think I'm an artist for that? Not particularly. I like to think of myself as a prompt engineer, a completely different skill for sure, after all I do think overly logical and practical in life in general so it meshes well with my skills plus my artistic background.

I dislike the term "prompt engineer," particularly if you're not setting up systems on a technical level. And it's still artistic, without necessarily making prompters artists. Because the process is one closer to curation rather than creation, I like to think of prompters as "curators". You're reaching into latent space (a collective visual history), pulling out a collapsed possibility, and deciding if it fits your needs or not.

there’s a reason i put “art” in quotes. I don’t mean the traditional definition, but rather the less commonly used definition from the dictionary:

“a skill at doing a specified thing, typically one acquired through practice.”

I agree that a photographer is not a true artist. It’s not hard to understand why people might appreciate their skill and creativity though?