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- cross-posted to:
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Imagine taking the lightweight, privacy-focused appeal of Linux and completely ruining it by hardwiring AI models straight into the OS. Nobody is switching from Windows for more forced AI features.
And just like a tool, it can be too dull, too sharp, or just wrong for the job.
Oh, absolutely. The person wielding it needs to know what they’re doing. You don’t hammer nails with a screwdriver unless you’re a total masochist. IMO current LLMs are ideal for generating the filler for self-help books. You have like 10 pages worth of ideas to say, but the publisher demands a 250-page book.
lol okay. For a second there, with that previous comment you made, you made me think you actually thought LLMs were good for coding.
Well, it depends. Mostly, I’m against it, but there are ways to vibe code responsibly. My requirements are very high. I don’t think most people vibe that way, hence the slop code you see out in the wild. If you’re using an LLM to write your code, I expect you to read and understand every line thoroughly. The programmer should be prepared to answer tough questions about any part of the code as if they wrote all of it.
If you actually take the time to do that, you’ll either request a few more iterations of updates or fix it yourself. In reality though, people can’t be bothered to do it properly, and in that context vibe coding should be banned.
I just think I wouldn’t be able to be proud of my work anymore. I wouldn’t feel good signing off on generated stuff. It’s not my work.
It’s like generating a poster for a movie or something. Taking credit for that is just scummy, you know? I know people don’t think anyone writes their own code anymore, professionally…
… but I would know. It would bother me.
If it’s a static one click product, I wouldn’t be proud of it either. That’s just slop really.
What I’m thinking of is a process, where some steps are handled by an AI, but the rest is all human. You could use an AI generated background layer in a picture. You could use generated code as a starting point, and modify it to do exactly what you want. You could dump an early draft of a story to an LLM for style polishing. The output would probably be mostly fine, but you would still want to tweak a few things here and there.
If you skip your part, you end up with slop. Sadly, that’s how most people appear to be using AI these days. If you take the time to refine the output to meet your standards, you’re doing it properly. In that case, you should be proud of your work.
Think of it like a team effort. Even though you didn’t do all of it, you still did something. That something has value too. For example, building a house is a team effort. The electrician can’t be proud of all of it, but they can be proud of making sure the cables, sockets and switches are installed properly. Maybe they can also be happy about the whole house to some extent. Imagine you’ve worked on the cables of the Sydney Opera House. You would probably feel a little bit proud.
The thing is, nobody knows how much effort I put into it versus the AI. There’s just no scenario where I could proudly take credit for using AI. Either I put in tons of work but others have no idea how much work is mine vs not, or I don’t do much work and I’ll know I don’t deserve credit.
Like I understand where you’re trying to come from here but I just can’t see myself winning with AI, against my own morals.
Me collaborating with a human is different. Then the other human and I will know how much work went into it, and at least two real people will share the knowledge of who did what.
How about digging a ditch with a hand shovel vs. using an excavator? About a hundred years ago, you would have hired a bunch of men to chop down a forest, and dig ditches so that the land could be turned into a field. Digging the ditches was hard work, but excavators changed that completely. What used to require 10 strong men and a week, could be done by a single excavator operator in an afternoon. The result is still pretty much the same, even though the bucket of an excavator isn’t quite so precise. You still get the job done, but most of it was done by a machine. Should that one guy be proud of the work? Sure, it didn’t take much time effort, and to him it was probably just afternoon like any other. A few months later, that gig begins to blend in with hundreds of others like it, so it’s not going to be very significant to him. But can you still be proud of your work?
Similar kinds of shifts have happened before that, and the industrial revolution in the textile industry is clearly the most famous example of that. I’m thinking AI in similar terms, even though the details differ. There’s still enough to compare. They both produce trash if you skip quality control. They both reduce the amount of time and effort required. The cheap trash is sold on Temu and dumped in the landfills of wealthy countries. Same process with proper quality control results in all sorts of nice products you would never find on Temu. I think the same logic applies to AI generated things. So far, we’ve seen plenty of Temu grade trash, AKA slop. There’s no reason to be proud of that.
The difference here is that I know as well as everyone else that I couldn’t possibly do what the excavator does with my own two hands, so the skill here becomes operating the vehicle itself. But what the LLM can do, I can do.
This is so often the argument when talking to LLM apologists/proponents, that “this is a shift just like any other before it”, but it isn’t. It sneakily resembles one, but it is not exactly like one. There are major differences that set it apart from previous shifts. This isn’t just a “paradigm shift”. We are no longer thinking of solutions on our own, so we are/will be losing the ability to do so, yet we are expected to be the judges as to whether the generated solutions are good or not. That doesn’t add up.
Once a few generations of “developers” have grown up with LLMs, it’ll eventually be like using a calculator to solve divisions with large numbers, yet still you have to check your work. But if you keep using the calculator, or you never even trained yourself to do the divisions by hand in the first place, you won’t be able to check the solution is correct.