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?
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?
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.
Unfortunately, that’s not true. LLMs have proven new results in mathematics, at extremely high levels, conjectures open since decades.
I am personally very against this use of AI, but let’s be clear on its capacities.
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 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.