Thoughtful. I can relate to a lot of what you've written here. What are your thoughts on the rich getting richer? I really worry about wealth inequality.
I haven’t thought about this aspect of AI nearly as much, just because I spend a lot of time thinking about writing code and very little time thinking about macroeconomics. But I think you’re probably right to be worried, especially with the hype explosion caused by ChatGPT. I think ChatGPT is nigh-useless in a real practical sense, but it may work very well for the purpose of making OpenAI money. They’ve announced partnerships with huge consulting firms. It’s easy to imagine it as this engine of making money for corporations based mostly on its perceived amazing capabilities, without actually improving the world in any way. Consulting is already a cesspool of huge sums of capital that accomplishes nothing (I work in consulting). ChatGPT is perfect for accelerating that. It’s also worth pointing out how these latest models like GPT require ungodly amounts of data and compute—you have to be obscenely rich to create them.
I'm a programmer, ChatGPT is incredibly useful to me now. I use it like a search engine that is able to pull up the perfect example I can use to get me over hurdles. Even when it's wrong it's still useful like having a human tutor, that can also be wrong.
Ultimately, I think this type of AI will have a similar effect as Google.
Wow, this is just what I've been looking for without even realizing it. A lot of my friends who are newer to the world of programming are very excited by this new wave of generative AI, particularly ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot. Conversely, I personally have a lot of misgivings about AI programming sort of half-formed in my mind. I've been programming for a while now (although I'm sure relative to all the SDF veterans I'm still pretty new to the game) and I can't bring myself to believe that prodding ChatGPT into a reasonable output is more efficient than just writing the code yourself... and then I start to worry that perhaps I'm biased. As they say, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it".
Anyways, your headline alone is a better argument against the merits of AI programming than anything I was able to come up with, so going into it I knew the post would be a good read. And I wasn't disappointed: you've provided me with a much better framework to discuss generative AI with folks moving forward. Thanks for writing this!
Think about using AI output as inspiration, examples, getting over writers block, etc, and less about using it to cut and paste it's output wholesale as completed work.
Fans of SDF