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 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.