I am trying to get to a normative theory of fun.
Right now, it seems to me that generative AI, while enabling amazing creations and quick explorations (like me making a MTG proxy deck, Yudkowsky illustrating their story idea), also may suck fun out of creativity. I am undecided about it, because I am very wary of claims like "Working gives us meaning" which I do not endorse.
More generally, I am still unsure about what to tell a well-aligned AI what not to optimize. If I want it not to dictate who I should go talk to to have a better day? The cooperationist part of me wants to just say "Then I delegate to this AI and it is me", but it doesn't solve the question of what I would like to do once death has been eradicated and there is no more urgency and wrong in the world to be corrected.
This is all very related to Fun Theory. But everything I've read about it so far is extremely descriptive. I wonder if I can have the same approach to it that I have had with cooperationism: asking myself how I could have come to the concept of fun if I lived in the void.
So what does a utopia look like? What does fun look like, and what challenge do I want to impose on myself?
Related questions
I think you would want to separate problems into two types: fun and non-fun. The fun problems are things that you enjoy working on, so you don't want an AI to just do them for you. The non-fun problems would be things no one likes doing. If we're imagining a far-future scenario where we have advanced AGI, then you could probably train it to recognize which problems are "fun" by observing humans. What things do humans like doing for fun? It doesn't necessarily have to be black and white - some problems have fun and not-fun parts, so you might ask the AI to only help with the not-fun parts.
For creative endeavors specifically, I think the optimal level would be something different than just telling the AI an idea and having it generate an entire project on its own. It would be more fine-grained than that, where you come up with the ideas yourself but have the AI help you with some specifics. Maybe the AI would act as a helper that gives suggestions at each stage of the process. E.g., imagine a more advanced version of Microsoft Word that, instead of just underlining misspellings and grammatical mistakes, says, "This paragraph sounds a little boring. Here are some suggestions to make it more interesting."