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?
I don’t know what they mean, but,
In my experience, it’s an accelerant towards burnout.
And it even entices you in deeper, with the continuing illusion of ease of productivity, deeper, into burnout.
Burnout is no fun. [Note: To be clear, that’s “no fun”, not merely “not fun”. As in, it saps, eliminates and prevents all fun from your life while in burnout. And it takes twice as long to recover as it seems, ~ so the moment you think you’ve recovered, you’re only half way there, and need to keep on having no fun for as long again, despite feeling like you can have fun, and every bit of energy expended on fun can still more readily send you back into burnout and extends the recovery time, tormenting you further. Seriously, burnout, is no fun. ~ Speaking as someone with (at last count) 65 ailments (some of which reduce some people to tears when they hear about), and I remain chipper, mocking the harrowing symptoms of it all, by calling it “fun” (e.g. “oh my flesh is rupturing again, what fun”), but burnout… that’s no fun.]
So, I suspect we may see an increase in burnout among our developers. And that’s speaking just from the enticing use on an individual level, before considering then also the added workload from everybody else churning through LLM accelerated workloads, having to deal with all the bug reports and pull requests (many of which will be hallucinated, or have insidious malicious injections, many of which will be vital critical issues), and then all the extra pressure to try harder to keep up your own skills against the accelerating spray, and those skills being moved to where your lower level skills atrophy, especially amidst the social pressure, perhaps even economic pressure and pressure from bosses and hierarchies and investors, to “keep up”, and quantity over quality lines being blurred in the self reassurance that it’s not being enshitified and our atrophying capacity to discern for ourselves… the demands increasing and capacity decreasing, drives the race to the bottom even harder. So I suspect we may see an increase in burnout among our developers.
Rather than relaxing back towards a 4 hour working week, or to lives of leisure, the driving inertia of society’s contemporary socio-economic model would instead have us see this promise of extra potential as something to maximally exploit, for the more that can be done. … Which in turn drives that ambition even more. And do-addiction is a hard chariot to dismount from, or to slow down. Unlike food-addiction [the other difficult addiction (~ because you have to eat)], the dopamine from a do-addiction is largely celebrated and not shamed nor generally offered help to break the addiction.
All this a verbose way to get around to depicting that… we may see many of those who embrace “AI” more, despite an initial apparent “getting ahead”, may be headed for a big long stall and crash, and instead it’s they who “fall behind”.
Depends how one uses it; How well one manages to titrate ones use. It could be a great pedagogical facilitator. But then, so could the internet… remember…? Remember when the internet was more like a library and science club, before it became more like TV and a bar fight? … With the perverse incentives of big actors with the most grasp of the steering wheel, we may see LLMs/AI head the same degenerative direction, despite the early hopium promise that it wont be skynet, and will be a paradise generator that helps us sublimate past such societal structural corruption issues. Remember when electromagnetism was going to power the world for free, wirelessly in cymatic cromulence, making us all free and healthy (~ no, I guess not… a bit before our time), and now look and the technology born of electromagnetic discoveries and depictions, the prisons it gets shaped into, by those lacking the wisdom to see beyond their petty parasitic short-loop “well I have more than them”, with all it’s attention hijacking, with trillions invested in ensnaring our minds [(~ glad I got outta that biz, where that used to be my “just doing my job”)]. Difficult to see, if pattern will hold, with all this hopium and urgent socio-economic pressure and terror gumming up our senses. It could save us, you have to or you’ll fall behind, it could enslave and kill us all. Hope, pressure, terror. But if we take a step back… maybe we can get a more sober assessment.
Anyways, long rambles aside, really just posing the counter-notion to the assumption in the statement being queried in the original post,
despite an initial apparent “getting ahead”, with the demand, the churn, the lure, they may be headed for burnout, and instead it’s they who “fall behind”. Depends tho.