it’s getting to the point where I notice people say it a lot, especially IRL now for whatever reason recently.
And for clarity I’m not in research or anything, so these people just mean ‘LLM/image gen’, not utilities like OCR or (usually not) transcription.
Some have argued it’s just more efficient (which I can kind of get), while others think you’re actively hindering your intelligence somehow.
On the first point:
I’ve tried it occasionally to see how it compares to my own skill, and while it produces a functional result, it’s always very derivative work to the point where you can find things with the exact same names of other ‘public’ (but not libre) works, and often isn’t the ideal solution to what it targets. So I can see how you can get things out of it, but it never felt really that profound to me.
But for the second… isn’t this supposed to be the tool for people to do things they aren’t experienced in? If anything, you probably need to be able to understand how to write pertaining to the task so the token probabilities are biased toward writing from that area.
And even then, if all you end up doing is prompting AI, then wouldn’t you ultimately serve no purpose outside of being glorified QA?
I guess I’m trying to figure out what exactly non-users would be ‘falling behind’ in that affects them more than those who use AI?
AI is the first major technology that I have have actively worked against.
I am a person who strongly believe that technology should make us better, and I can only see AI/LLMs making us weaker.
I tend to have a vivid imagination, and all I am thinking of when seeing people use AI is, “ok but could you have accomplished the same thing without AI?”
When the AI bubble pops like the overstuffed bubble it is, and prices are going up, will you remember how to do your job without it?
Or, even simpler, what about if the AI service goes down, will you still be able to do your tasks?
For many, I suspect the answer is no.
No. There’s no way I could build a full web app on my own in under a day. AI enables me to do that. You’re basing your whole opinion about AI solely on how capitalism is leveraging it. There is a lot of great potential with AI. Medical fields. Non-profit space. The list goes on.
I’ve got some bad news for you. Even with AI you still can’t make a full web app in under a day.
You can make a fun little demo for sure, but that’s a long way away from a full web app. Even without doing any coding or using the computer, simply describing a full web app using pen and paper would actually take more than a day. And when it comes to actually making such a thing, there’s so many things besides the coding and even with regards to the coding you haven’t considered.
This is a big issue with AI. It provides a shortcut to some sort of end result. Since people get a result, they tend to think they have actually achieved the desired result. But in reality most things are much more complicated and people often have entire careers specializing in one aspect or the other. There’s so much that goes on, without people not in the know realizing. Without being an expert yourself, you wouldn’t even consider those things to be important.
Let me explain using an example. I can write words on a page. I could even think of a story and give it some structure. Does that mean I can write a book? Technically yes. Would that book be any good and people want to read that book? Probably no. That’s because I know enough about writing books, that I know I don’t know shit about writing books and would not be able to without years of learning and failing. Now AI could help me vomit out words faster. More words more quickly means I can get a whole book worth of words out in no time at all. But does that mean I somehow gained the knowledge of how to write a good book? No, because I didn’t learn anything. In fact I would learn less from using the AI than I would have simply writing down the words myself. Using a tool doesn’t magically grant skills that weren’t there before.
A lot of people don’t understand this and shit out shitty AI books anyways, which then nobody likes. They shit out apps, which then nobody likes and they get abandoned almost immediately. They shit out “art”, which then nobody likes. And since they got to some kind of a result, they glaze the AI tools and say it’s amazing, even though the results were shit.
There are teams whose whole job is just to describe web apps. They are product managers and UX.
There are people who’s job it is to describe movies to the crew. They’re called directors and producers.
No bad news for me because it doesn’t pertain to me. Sorry you can’t get AI to work for you. Keep trying! I’ve used AI to build things for me that are totally useful. I’m not selling anything. It’s a tool. It can build full web apps. I’m not talking SaaS. Just simple things. And I’ve learned along the way as well. It’s all about how you use it.
Good job on absolutely completely missing the point of my comment. I’m not even mad, that’s impressive.
You are selling something, you are trying to sell it to yourself.
Show us what it built…
You can delude yourself all you want that the AI is enabling you to do “x”. But all it’s doing is ensuring that you can never do x and keep getting worse at everything related.
And science is proving it. In just a few years of usage, llms are making people stupid and insane.
The brain is like a muscle. Each time you get in a car to travel 5 miles in 6 mins instead of running there in 30 minutes you get weaker. After 10 years your body will be in a horrible shape and much closer to death.
Yes I’m against calculators too for most things. Because of avoiding them I can do small calculations faster in my mind than most people can type into a calculator.
And guess what I’m not left behind. Because of my philosophy I am stronger and sharper than most people half my age.
You seem to confuse speed with ability.
Ok, so you can’t do the task in the same amount of time, that is not what I meant, I am talking about being able to do the task at all.
Could you make a full web app without AI at all?
Do you have that skill?
I mean you could say the same thing about the power loom. Labor-saving technology does matter.
The issue with this comparison is that a power loom is like a computer script, a person built the logic, it just replaces physical labour.
AI/LLMs replace cognitive work while the outcome is not guaranteed.
That’s one thing it can do, but there are other, actually useful things you can have it do. For example I’ve used it as a pseudo-search engine when Google refused to cooperate/when the thing I was looking up was too complex before.
No, LLM’s CAN replace cognitive work. You don’t have to give up all your thinking to an LLM. Think about what you want. Create very specific instructions. Review the output. Challenge it. Refine. Ask questions. Make decisions. Teach it something. It’s a tool. It doesn’t have to replace your brain.
Calculators replace cognitive work. Are you anti-calculator?
The issue is that most people seem to enjoy offloading their cognitive work to LLMs and take their results at face value, that is what I dislike.
Calculators… are devices designed to produce deterministic results that can be proven (and yes, with a seed AI is technically deterministic, but that doesn’t make it easily provable) as accurate very easily. If you removed calculators from a task, either the result would be completely the same, or it would be worse due to error introduced by something unpredictable.
past like really, really early education, I don’t really see a point to go without a calculator since it uses up so much time for little gain.
llms are able to do a lot of things many people simply can’t (at least without spending a long time learning), although the result can be mediocre. it’s being misused widely, but doesn’t mean it’s entirely incapable of anything useful.
recently i’ve seen it being used for reverse engineering, seemed like a pretty good usecase.
It really cannot. But people who have no knowledge in a field absolutely think LLMs are proficient in that field. As soon as an expert in that field look at what the LLM is doing in their field, that illusion quickly vanishes.
I absolutely could not build a web app on my own from scratch and at this point in my life I do not have the time to learn how.
There’s absolutely no doubt that AI democratizes many capabilities that people otherwise would not possess, whether the output is “slop” or not. Sometimes you just want to quickly prototype something. Doesn’t have to be perfect. You can do that in minutes to hours. If you like it, pay somebody to do it right, or AI may even be able to do it right depending on the task.
I think you look at a web app too narrowly, a web app could be any page that loads content from an external source.
I am not a web developer, and I built a system that logs the water temp to a database and a webpage displays it to help people know if they want to go for a swim or not.
It took a few weeks of free time to get everything to work, but it has been running for about 5-6 years continuously.
That is a web app, an application solving a need running on the web.
It was developed by me without any AI, and I have only limited experience with web development.
I think you can do more than you give yourself credit for without AI.
I mean you probably could do a decent range of web apps in a day as a minimum viable product, if you already have a solid plan ready. But that’s kind of the thing with AI.
AI… really seems to just make derivative stuff. I tried asking it to replicate one of my terminal text editors (via a description of it), and it ended up making… essentially a 1:1 rip off of different editor but with more comments. I have a feeling that the massive amount of training data is what makes it seem like it can write lots of applicable code, while it’s still suffering from quite literally being just a larger version of this half-decade old Google Translate update under the hood.
Of course it’s derivative, but just like any tool, the user plays a huge role in the output. You just work with it. It can do lots of things and it can’t do lots of things. Am I gonna sell anything I make with it? Probably not. I use it to help myself and to prototype things really fast.