[bakugo]

You're working under the assumption that punching a prompt into ChatGPT and getting up to grab some coffee while it spits out thousands of tokens of meaningless slop to be used as a substitute for something that you previously would've written yourself is a net upgrade for everyone involved. It's not. I can use ChatGPT to write 20 paragraph email replies that would've previously been a single manually written paragraph, but that doesn't mean I'm 20x more productive.

And yes, ChatGPT is kinda like an addictive drug here. If someone "can't work without ChatGPT anymore", they're addicted and have lost the ability to work on their own as a result.

[KoolKat23]

That's a very broad assumption.

It's no different to a manager that delegates, are they less of a manager because they entrust the work to someone else? No. So long as they do quality checks and take responsibility for the results, wheres the issue?

Work hard versus work smart. Busywork cuts both ways.

[aurareturn]

You’re assuming that there is zero quality check and that managers and clients will accept anything chatgpt generates.

Let’s be serious here. These are still professionals and they have a reputation. The few cases you hear online of AI slop in professional settings is the exception. Not the norm.

[isamuel]

> And yes, ChatGPT is kinda like an addictive drug here. If someone "can't work without ChatGPT anymore", they're addicted and have lost the ability to work on their own as a result.

Come on, you can’t mean this in any kind of robust way. I can’t get my job done without a computer; am I an “addict” who has “lost the ability to work on my own?” Every tool tends to engender dependence, roughly in proportion to how much easier it makes the life of the user. That’s not a bad thing.

[johnnyanmac]

> you can’t mean this in any kind of robust way.

Why not?

>I can’t get my job done without a computer; am I an “addict” who has “lost the ability to work on my own?”

It's very possible. I know people love bescmirching the "you won't always have a calculator" mentality. But if you're using a calculator for 2nd grade mental math, you may have degregaded too far. It varies on the task, of course.

>Every tool tends to engender dependence, roughly in proportion to how much easier it makes the life of the user. That’s not a bad thing.

Depends on how it's making it easier. Phones are an excellent example. They make communication much easier and long distance communication possible. But if it gets to the point where you're texting someone in the next room instead of opening your door, you might be losing a piece of you somewhere.

[danaris]

There's a big difference between needing a tool to do a job that only that tool can do, and needing a crutch to do something without using your own faculties.

LLMs are nothing like a computer for a programmer, or a saw for a carpenter. In the very best case, from what their biggest proponents have said, they can let you do more of what you already do with less effort.

If someone has used them enough that they can no longer work without them, it's not because they're just that indispensable: it's because that someone has let their natural faculties atrophy through disuse.

[bakugo]

> I can’t get my job done without a computer

Are you really comparing an LLM to a computer? Really? There are many jobs today that quite literally would not exist at all without computers. It's in no way comparable.

You use ChatGPT to do the things you were already doing faster and with less effort, at the cost of quality. You don't use it to do things you couldn't do at all before.

[aurareturn]

I can’t maintain my company’s Go codebase without chatgpt.