[brookst]

“Automobiles: a convenient crutch for people who can’t ride horses, or a recipe for disaster?”

“Word processors: a convenient crutch for people who can’t type, or a recipe for disaster?”

God these headlines are going to be hilarious in ten years.

Yes, AI code is primitive today. The first implementations sometimes get basic stuff wrong and often get complicated stuff wrong.

But the state of the art is evolving daily. It’s somewhere between ignorance and gatekeeping to act like the issues we see today (which are already much fewer than we say a year ago) are so endemic to the concept of generated code that the whole thing is a terrible idea.

Most code will be written by AI. You can choose to adapt and leverage that, or you can choose to be that guy who insists that your field is the one true place that we should resist automation (for the good of the world, of course, not any self-interest, that’s just a coincidence).

[Casteil]

>God these headlines are going to be hilarious in ten years.

We'll see. I think you're pulling an "apples to oranges" here, comparing the AI situation to the advent of automobiles and computers/word processing.

The big difference is the typical application of the technology. By comparison, AI is absolutely RIFE with fraud & lazy get-rich-quick schemes - on an absolutely unprecedented scale & scope. Just like cryptocurrency: art generation/NFTs, SEO arms race, generated blogs, generated articles, etc. If you look at ChatGPT prompt repositories, these type of prompts are virtually always filling the top several pages when sorting by ratings/views.

I'm more than a little concerned with where things are headed as the internet gets more and more crapped up by AI generated hot-air, riddled with factual inaccuracies. Another concern is, as more companies adopt & rely these tools for regular use, they often downsize their workforces in the process and lose valuable subject matter experts (knowledge) along the way.

There's also the fact that this is going to compound in later training models. I'm not sure where exactly the demarcation point will ultimately lie, but I think we're going to end up thinking of the Internet as two main epochs: "pre-AI" and "post-AI".

IMO: All AI-generated or AI-assisted content should be clearly tagged as such.

[brookst]

I understand the concerns, but I think you’re assuming that we are frozen in time. I think this is a brief moment where text is either AI generated or not.

In a year or two, leveling content as AI assisted would be like labeling something “electricity assisted” today; you’d just label everything (California prop 65 style).

Everything will have some level of AI involved. I mean even today we have spell checkers and grammar checkers and automatic summarizations that tons of people use. The gradient from that to text expansion and whole document creation is going to be blurry and gradual.

With you on pre-AI and post-AI epochs. It will be sort of like the way the internet itself caused pre-security and post-security epochs, and we’re still dealing with that.

But I think it’s great. Yes, we have to grow up. Yes, our tools have to get better. But just like the internet’s benefits far outweigh the security pain, I feel pretty good about AI cost/benefit ratios.

[sorokod]

Perhaps in ten years, till then I'd like software to be clearly labeled with "contains AI generated code" when that is the case.

[brookst]

Sure, just as soon as we get those “contains code from new college hires” label I’ve been asking for.

Relying on perfect coding skills is a losing game. Way better to have healthy code review and testing processes that assume your developers are fallible.

[sorokod]

I was writing in jest but yours is a fine label too.

[uoaei]

The idea of AI assistants is good. The hype around current AI assistants is bad. You may comfortably assume everyone critical of LLMs' current performance believes this. Begone, straw men.