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?

  • stoy@lemmy.zipEnglish
    0·
    3 days ago

    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.

    • venusaur@lemmy.world
      0·
      3 days ago

      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.

      • Thorry@feddit.org
        1·
        3 days ago

        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.