A survey of more than 2,000 smartphone users by second-hand smartphone marketplace SellCell found that 73% of iPhone users and a whopping 87% of Samsung Galaxy users felt that AI adds little to no value to their smartphone experience.
SellCell only surveyed users with an AI-enabled phone – thats an iPhone 15 Pro or newer or a Galaxy S22 or newer. The survey doesn’t give an exact sample size, but more than 1,000 iPhone users and more than 1,000 Galaxy users were involved.
Further findings show that most users of either platform would not pay for an AI subscription: 86.5% of iPhone users and 94.5% of Galaxy users would refuse to pay for continued access to AI features.
From the data listed so far, it seems that people just aren’t using AI. In the case of both iPhone and Galaxy users about two-fifths of those surveyed have tried AI features – 41.6% for iPhone and 46.9% for Galaxy.
So, that’s a majority of users not even bothering with AI in the first place and a general disinterest in AI features from the user base overall, despite both Apple and Samsung making such a big deal out of AI.
I think you nailed it. In the grand scheme of things, critical thinking is always required.
The problem is that, when it comes to LLMs, people seem to use magical thinking instead. I’m not an artist, so I oohd and aahd at some of the AI art I got to see, especially in the early days, when we weren’t flooded with all this AI slop. But when I saw the coding shit it spewed? Thanks, I’ll pass.
The only legit use of AI in my field that I know of is an unit test generator, where tests were measured for stability and code coverage increase before being submitted to dev approval. But actual non-trivial production grade code? Hell no.
Even those examples are the kinds of things that “fall apart” if you actually think things through.
Art? Actual human artists tend to use a ridiculous amount of “AI” these days and have been for well over a decade (probably closer to two, depending on how you define “AI”). Stuff like magic erasers/brushes are inherently looking at the picture around it (training data) and then extrapolating/magicking what it would look like if you didn’t have that logo on your shirt and so forth. Same with a lot of weathering techniques/algorithms and so forth.
Same with coding. People more or less understand that anyone who is working on something more complex than a coding exercise is going to be googling a lot (even if it is just that you will never ever remember how to do file i/o in python off the top of your head). So a tool that does exactly that is… bad?
Which gets back to the reality of things. Much like with writing a business email or organizing a calendar: If a computer program can do your entire job for you… maybe shut the fuck up about that program? Chatgpt et al aren’t meant to replace the senior or principle software engineer who is in lots of design meetings or optimizing the critical path of your corporate secret sauce.
It is replacing junior engineers and interns (which is gonna REALLY hurt in ten years but…). Chatgpt hallucinated a nonsense function? That is what CI testing and code review is for. Same as if that intern forgot to commit a file or that rockstar from facebook never ran the test suite.
Of course, the problem there is that the internet is chock full of “rock star coders” who just insist the world would be a better place if they never had to talk to anyone and were always given perfectly formed tickets so they could just put their headphones on and work and ignore Sophie’s birthday and never be bothered by someone asking them for help (because, trust me, you ALWAYS want to talk to That Guy about… anything). And they don’t realize that they were never actually hot shit and were mostly always doing entry level work.
Personally? I only trust AI to directly write my code for me if it is in an airgapped environment because I will never trust black box code I pulled off the internet to touch corporate data. But I will 100% use it in place of google to get an example of how to do something that I can use for a utility function or adapt to solving my real problem. And, regardless, I will review and test that just as thoroughly as the code Fred in accounting’s son wrote because I am the one staying late if we break production.
And just to add on, here is what I told a friend’s kid who is an undergrad comp sci:
LLMs are awesome tools. But if the only thing you bring to the table is that you can translate the tickets I assigned to you to a query to chatgpt? Why am I paying you? Why am I not expensing a prompt engineering course on udemy and doing it myself?
Right now? Finding a job is hard but there are a lot of people like me who understand we still need to hire entry level coders to make sure we have staff ready to replace attrition over the next decade (or even five years). But I can only hire so many people and we aren’t a charity: If you can’t do your job we will drop you the moment we get told to trim our budget.
So use LLMs because they are an incredibly useful tool. But also get involved in design and planning as quickly as possible. You don’t want to be the person writing the prompts. You want to be the person figuring out what prompts we need to write.