“make your own prompts” misses by one step. Use of AI robs you of the opportunity to learn/practice/hone your skills in a certain area. why would someone use ai for any reason other than to get out of having to learn something? do you expect llms to be the best source of how to learn [blank]? which [youtuber/podcaster/old bridgetroll/televangelist/fascist/fishnet chat lightbulb] would you suggest explains [blank] better because frankly at this point i’m fucking invested.
LLMs are a pretty good tool to summarize any subject, or present it with different words or in a different approach… They are a statistical word predictor tool after all.
So yeah, if you understand that LLMs:
don’t possess intelligence;
they are just reproducing patterns from the training material used;
it’s impossible for them to contain ALL “knowledge” from the training material;
the “context” provided directly influences the response
Then, I’d say that LLMs can be used as a very good facilitator to learn about almost any subject that has already been documented in any word format in almost any language.
I have never used a LLM to write any of my comments on the internet, neither here nor in any social network I have an account.
And about the bullet points, in places that accept MarkDown similar syntax I tend to use bullet points because it’s a feature that helps lay out the ideas in a good formatting for the reader when there’s enumerations, lists, or similar things involved.
But yeah, you will never find comments of mine in, lets say, Instagram, with bullet points, because the editor of the app there sucks, you would have to type your comment in a external app which creates the bullet points characters already in a newline (you cannot even normally break lines in Instagram comments lol, it’s really unsanitary haha), and I ain’t gonna do that.
Use of AI robs you of the opportunity to learn/practice/hone your skills in a certain area. why would someone use ai for any reason other than to get out of having to learn something?
This is not really a good argument against AI. Almost everything ever invented was invented to avoid doing something else that would take more time.
Why would anyone use animation software other than to avoid learning to draw your frames in sequence?
Why would anyone use a loom other than to avoid having to learn how to weave?
Why would anyone read a book other than to avoid learning by experience and experimentation?
Look, I don’t want to be in a position of defending the plagiarism machines that are burning the world’s forests whilst simultaneously somehow using all of the world’s fresh water, but come on. The vast majority of people who are using AI image generation are not people who would otherwise have been involved in the creative process.
They are people who want to avoid learning Photoshop (reasonable - it takes a long time to learn, which may or may not be worth it given what you want to do, and also Adobe sucks shit) or want to avoid paying someone who knows how to use Photoshop (understandable - and would obviously be worth consideration if it weren’t for all of the other problems with AI).
When you attack AI on the basis of it making people lazy - rather than any of the other things that are wrong with it - it just comes across as “Luddite”. (Which is ironic, given that Luddism was originally about machinery resulting in worse working conditions for skilled workers, which is one thing AI actually will do.)
I’m a senior full-stack developer of 15 years, and more recently, a new tech lead (specifically a Systems Architect) at an AI startup. I’m definitely not attacking AI as a concept in general.
I, too, am a developer of closer to 15 years than I’d like to admit to myself, though mostly embedded and/or back-end. And while I have no problem with AI in its broad sense (obviously machine learning/spicy statistics, computer vision, and natural language processing and whatnot have potential to be enormously useful), I am generally hostile to generative AI. I thinking using copyrighted material as training data without the copyright holders’ permission should be banned. And while I would have no objection to ethically-trained models in a hypothetical future where we have abundant clean energy to run the data centres and also all the new desalination plants we would need, that also remains a problem, and so I have resisted using such tools at work, too.
Now to generative AI (for the multimedia substrate)…
I agree with everything you’ve said after this point.
No. What I’m judging them for is delegating their critical thinking capacity to an external entity, and stunting their own cognitive growth (their literal reason for existing in the first place, their continuity mechanism to stay in the gene pool, and their sole means of improving at being long-term lazy) by being short-term lazy. Makes sense?
This is the crux of my problem. I find it to be overly judgemental. If you’re self-employed and you need a website for your business or whatever, then you could pay someone to do it for you, but then you only have so much money in the budget. You could also learn how to code and/or graphic design and do it yourself, but then you only have so many hours in the day. If vibe coding produced something viable for you in the quickest, cheapest way, then that is obviously the rational and sensible thing to do. You might even spend the time learning something else instead that is more relevant to your interests.
Using generative AI to do something doesn’t (necessarily) mean that you don’t value the knowledge or skills required to do it the hard way, it only means that you value it less than something else that you might otherwise be doing with your time, and I don’t think that is a moral failing.
As an example, I occasionally like to a bit of shitposting. Were it not for all those other things that I don’t like about generative AI, I would probably be generating AI slop memes with the best of the them. As it is I mostly just stick to text-based comments with bad puns and references to song lyrics no-one will remember. I could put in the hours to learn how to use GIMP so I could do it without AI, but quite frankly I have books on the go, I’ve got a couple of musical instruments to learn/practise, and I spent all day at my software job, where I think critically (or so I claim), so I’d rather being doing those things instead. I don’t think I have neglected my cognitive growth; I’ve just chosen to focus it on something different to what you might have.
Right, because you don’t believe art has value or requires thinking. It’s essentially worthless to you.
What people with a critical eye for art can tell you is that the art also has well-defined tasks with explicit perimeters and rules, and generative AI produces uncreative slop that looks amateurish if you have an eye for art. It’s pretty typical for people to believe generative AI is better at tasks that they, personally, know nothing about - it’s a Dunning-Kruger machine.
“make your own prompts” misses by one step. Use of AI robs you of the opportunity to learn/practice/hone your skills in a certain area. why would someone use ai for any reason other than to get out of having to learn something? do you expect llms to be the best source of how to learn [blank]? which [youtuber/podcaster/old bridgetroll/televangelist/fascist/fishnet chat lightbulb] would you suggest explains [blank] better because frankly at this point i’m fucking invested.
LLMs are a pretty good tool to summarize any subject, or present it with different words or in a different approach… They are a statistical word predictor tool after all.
So yeah, if you understand that LLMs:
Then, I’d say that LLMs can be used as a very good facilitator to learn about almost any subject that has already been documented in any word format in almost any language.
your bulleted list has me suspecting you used an llm to write this. TRAITOR
I have never used a LLM to write any of my comments on the internet, neither here nor in any social network I have an account. And about the bullet points, in places that accept MarkDown similar syntax I tend to use bullet points because it’s a feature that helps lay out the ideas in a good formatting for the reader when there’s enumerations, lists, or similar things involved.
But yeah, you will never find comments of mine in, lets say, Instagram, with bullet points, because the editor of the app there sucks, you would have to type your comment in a external app which creates the bullet points characters already in a newline (you cannot even normally break lines in Instagram comments lol, it’s really unsanitary haha), and I ain’t gonna do that.
This is not really a good argument against AI. Almost everything ever invented was invented to avoid doing something else that would take more time.
Why would anyone use animation software other than to avoid learning to draw your frames in sequence?
Why would anyone use a loom other than to avoid having to learn how to weave?
Why would anyone read a book other than to avoid learning by experience and experimentation?
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Look, I don’t want to be in a position of defending the plagiarism machines that are burning the world’s forests whilst simultaneously somehow using all of the world’s fresh water, but come on. The vast majority of people who are using AI image generation are not people who would otherwise have been involved in the creative process.
They are people who want to avoid learning Photoshop (reasonable - it takes a long time to learn, which may or may not be worth it given what you want to do, and also Adobe sucks shit) or want to avoid paying someone who knows how to use Photoshop (understandable - and would obviously be worth consideration if it weren’t for all of the other problems with AI).
When you attack AI on the basis of it making people lazy - rather than any of the other things that are wrong with it - it just comes across as “Luddite”. (Which is ironic, given that Luddism was originally about machinery resulting in worse working conditions for skilled workers, which is one thing AI actually will do.)
Removed by mod
I, too, am a developer of closer to 15 years than I’d like to admit to myself, though mostly embedded and/or back-end. And while I have no problem with AI in its broad sense (obviously machine learning/spicy statistics, computer vision, and natural language processing and whatnot have potential to be enormously useful), I am generally hostile to generative AI. I thinking using copyrighted material as training data without the copyright holders’ permission should be banned. And while I would have no objection to ethically-trained models in a hypothetical future where we have abundant clean energy to run the data centres and also all the new desalination plants we would need, that also remains a problem, and so I have resisted using such tools at work, too.
I agree with everything you’ve said after this point.
This is the crux of my problem. I find it to be overly judgemental. If you’re self-employed and you need a website for your business or whatever, then you could pay someone to do it for you, but then you only have so much money in the budget. You could also learn how to code and/or graphic design and do it yourself, but then you only have so many hours in the day. If vibe coding produced something viable for you in the quickest, cheapest way, then that is obviously the rational and sensible thing to do. You might even spend the time learning something else instead that is more relevant to your interests.
Using generative AI to do something doesn’t (necessarily) mean that you don’t value the knowledge or skills required to do it the hard way, it only means that you value it less than something else that you might otherwise be doing with your time, and I don’t think that is a moral failing.
As an example, I occasionally like to a bit of shitposting. Were it not for all those other things that I don’t like about generative AI, I would probably be generating AI slop memes with the best of the them. As it is I mostly just stick to text-based comments with bad puns and references to song lyrics no-one will remember. I could put in the hours to learn how to use GIMP so I could do it without AI, but quite frankly I have books on the go, I’ve got a couple of musical instruments to learn/practise, and I spent all day at my software job, where I think critically (or so I claim), so I’d rather being doing those things instead. I don’t think I have neglected my cognitive growth; I’ve just chosen to focus it on something different to what you might have.
Removed by mod
Right, because you don’t believe art has value or requires thinking. It’s essentially worthless to you.
What people with a critical eye for art can tell you is that the art also has well-defined tasks with explicit perimeters and rules, and generative AI produces uncreative slop that looks amateurish if you have an eye for art. It’s pretty typical for people to believe generative AI is better at tasks that they, personally, know nothing about - it’s a Dunning-Kruger machine.