Ask Lemmy

AI is the first major technology that I have have actively worked against.

I am a person who strongly believe that technology should make us better, and I can only see AI/LLMs making us weaker.

I tend to have a vivid imagination, and all I am thinking of when seeing people use AI is, "ok but could you have accomplished the same thing without AI?"

When the AI bubble pops like the overstuffed bubble it is, and prices are going up, will you remember how to do your job without it?

Or, even simpler, what about if the AI service goes down, will you still be able to do your tasks?

For many, I suspect the answer is no.

The people who espouse such nonsense as "if you don't use AI you'll fall behind" believe that using AI will become an absolute necessity in the future, and that those who use AI now will have more expertise in using AI than those who don't, giving them better prospects. Those same people end up saying "you're just not prompting it right" when you point out flaws in the LLM's responses.

I translate this to: “if I’m making a horrible mistake, I want you right there with me when it blows up in my face.”

If they actually felt it gave them an advantage they wouldn’t be trying to convince everyone else to do it too.

Yes to everything you said. It's basic FOMO, the same behavior with people who were selling bitcoins.

If it was good, we would use it. And any way, it's like learning how to use Google, it doesn't take weeks to understand how to write a basic sentence. It's a skill that you could acquire in 24 hours at most if you speak English.

I'm in software engineering. AI is pretty far along in my field, and also very suited for it. I've spent two decades writing everything from very low-level to high-level code. I enjoy it, but it's just labor at this point. What LLMs allows me to do is move to the role of systems architect. I have an endless supply of tireless jr engineers to execute my designs.

I get quick results. But I'm not as in touch with the codebase as if I had written it myself. You can do things wrong, and you can do things right. I like to compare it with a chainsaw. You get the job done a lot faster than with a regular saw, but you can fuck up a lot harder, too.

The field is moving fast. In the last two years it's gone from helpful auto-complete to finishing projects on its own.

I expect to be downvoted.

im going to put it easy: You work doing some kind of research or whatever on daily basis. You used to do that task in maybe 5-6 hours, same as your colleagues. Now all your colleagues use AI and do the same task in about 20min (even if the result is crap it does have some good takes), so the CEO sees you are the only one who doesn't perform equally because you choose not to, and you're fired.

So yeah... it's crap, it will make things worse, but for now you have to use it wheter you like it or not.

They do it to protect their feelings. They’ve normalized the use of something most people hate, so they want everyone else to adopt it, too. That way, they won’t feel judged, when they 100% deserve to feel judged.

Put simply, it's propaganda by the LLM salesman and liars like scam altman.

Avoid LLMs. Preserve your brain and skills. Don't become a slophead.

The only think you'll fall behind on is humanity's race to the bottom into total idiocracy.

Its people falling for propaganda.

The fact of the matter is, AI can be useful for minor coding help. The reality is its stealing advice from one or a few sources and spitting out an answer based on them, but it can be a quick delivery of advice.

The major problem is

1. AI (these LLMs) hallucinate ALL THE TIME. Relying on them to code for you is fucking moronic. Every coworker I've seen who does vibe coding is constantly getting dunked on, their pull requests are torn to pieces, and its baffling why they still get a paycheck.
2. AI can only, in the best circumstances, do exactly what you tell it to do. That is to say, you need to explicitly spell out what you want for it, including explicitly covering edge cases. If you don't, you end up with situations like Microsoft making Notepad code executable (which actually fucking happened.

Promotion of AI is total horseshit by the fascist tech broligarchs being done so they can replace the worker and, and I'm serious, achieve immortality by transferring their consciousness to machine. That isn't a fucking joke, that's an actual belief they hold. The AI and general tech CEOs are all in a massive death cult. This is real.

From what I've experienced it's mostly managers saying this. They're afraid of competitors taking over the market because they can be more efficient with AI. They say this without any idea of how exactly that would work.

My experience of a decade in corporate US companies:

Quantity > Quality; no matter what the marketing line says. People who speak a lot in meetings and send a lot of emails are regarded as better at their job, substance is only somewhat relevant. And LLMs are great at producing lots and lots of well sounding slop.

They think there's some skill necessary to use LLMs for some reason

Remember NFTs? when people were buying pictures of cartoon monkeys and people were saying, if you don't buy it now you will be left behind

I think when people talk about "falling behind" they're actually talking about missing out on the initial gold rush of novel uses, quick cash grabs, and straight up scams that a lot of people are making short term money on.

I kind of look at it from the point of view of people who are bad at their jobs.

They don't understand what looks good. They don't understand how long something should take. They don't understand how to do parts of their job without copying the work of others. Then, they get given a tool with the promise that the tool will do most of the hard work for them.

And unlike most computer stuff they can't understand, they can understand how to use AI. So if they can understand how to use AI, anyone can. And it isn't like most people are good at their jobs anyway.

There's a lot clearly unemployed/in industry that doesn't spin around AI in here.

In dev, AI saves fuck tons of time. But there's no nuance on the Internet so everyone assumes I'm advocating for vibe coding. I'm not.

What the "fall behind" is referring to is the simplest fact, if you're in a team and you're not using AI? You are very likely outputting at a much slower speed.

Now more caveats, you're not a lead dev or principle architect, your code isn't second coming of Jesus, you need to get a task done. Like it or not, the pace rest of the team sets? Is the new floor.

I manage a team and while I give them a lot of time to get work done well, the world around us is shrinking in resources. Business cares not that a job takes 4 weeks, they need it done in 2, ideally in 1 week.

Hopefully this sheds some light on this. I'm getting downvoted regardless. I'd probably have more popular opinion praising trump than daring say anything positive about AI here.

It's a desperate marketing strategy based on the classic "peer pressure" technique. "Everyone's doing it. You don't want to be the only one who isn't."

Try throwing AI at boring repetitive work.
I argued with an LLM for about 15 minutes and got a list of IPs and the name of the systems that used them. I could have done it manually in about an hour.

Also I'd argue that it's the opposite. It's for people that are experienced. If you can't check the output for correctness it's most likely wrong. I've never had the right answer the first time I asked.

AI is a tool. Learning to wield it effectively is a skill. What they're saying is that if you don't learn it now, you'll have to learn it later when everyone is an expert and you'll still be a beginner.

IMO it's a bit like computers. I imagine at some point AI-resistant people will be like the "not computer people" that still do everything using paper and faxes.

I know every 2-3 years there's a new hype in tech that eventually fizzes out: Web 2.0, social media, virtual reality, cryptocurrency, etc. All of them were supposed to revolutionize the world, but not all of them actually did. I think AI is a lot more like social media than crypto; it's here to stay. I think the best possible outcome at this point is that the open-source models eventually get good enough and small enough to run on our local hardware, but things sadly don't seem headed that way...

FOMO, and the temptation of being able to get the speed of AI without the drawbacks of "vibe coding".

Reality is much more nuanced.

You can get a massive boost in your productivity if you use dependencies or just steal code, compared to writing everything from zero. I personally just reuse my own code snippets, and even started to put regularly reused code into their own libraries (next up is to make stuff for parsers).

I also seen cases, when "AI assisted" coding had the same amount of issues as fully vibe coded stuff, as the person really wanting to cram the chatbot into their workflow did that trusted Grok too much with understanding the documentations, so he just ended up trying to implement stuff based on Grok's summary, which was wrong at places.

If you ask: artists also sometimes fall for this trap, though much less often.

They (pretend to) believe, either due to experience or marketing or a combination, that AI* will be such a ubiquitous tool within their lifetime that "not using AI" would be like "not using electricity". There are people that do not use electricity, even when it is available, today, but they are broadly considered "behind" the times and out of touch with broader (including global) society. AI advocates are unlikely to always have the same idea about exactly what the advantages are, though speed is often among them.

The actual scientific studies we have done are limited, but so far do not back up these claims. For example, AI assisted programmers self-report being faster, but are actually slower at the same tasks than a similar cohort without AI.

I have a fairly strong anti-AI bias, but my limited experiences with them have been quite poor. Maybe I'm just asking the "wrong" questions, but my experiences have had them either give an response that is internally inconsistent, contains easily refuted factual inaccuracies, or (for tasks with no reality/logic testing) absolutely the least creative, most middle-of-the-road text. I'm also aware of the human rights abuses that Amnesty International has reported around generative AI, the copyright "minefield" around models where you do not know all of the training data, and how we've lost at least a decade of sustainability goals because of the desire for "more compute".

So, keep my bias in mind when considering my reply. I might already be "falling behind".

I can think of some ways to use an LLM that are interesting to me, but for now I'm staying away from the tech until the bubble bursts and the hype disappears. It'll be easier to make informed decisions about what, if any, to use then.

(If it really does improve society, I'm sure I can be retrained then, or at least I can be taken care of one AI-incompatibility is recognized as a disability. /s)

AI: They probably can't define this term, but likely to have a specific product in mind.

People who say that don't mean anything. They are either trying to sell something or repeating bullshit they heard somewhere.

It really is that simple.

And remember, the AI salesmen will never, ever, define "AI". They can't, because the minute they do, their product sales will evaporate. If all you have is vaporware, you desperately need to pass it off as something else.

There's a ~~truism~~ cliche that, when asked a question to which they don't know the answer, women will say"I don't know" while men will confidently guess.

LLMs are like men on steroids. From time to time they will (by chance) stumble on a correct answer, but mostly they just confidently guess with far less comprehension than even the most stupid man. And yes, I do mean the most stupid man.

Edit: 'truism' was a poor choice of word. I've changed it to cliché.

They think AI is as life changing to our society as the internet is as steam engines were long ago. They're trying to promote its use because it doesn't have a good specific use for day to day. If anything AI has made the internet MUCH worse, there's so much AI Slop media on youtube and similar that I don't look at much new stuff anymore because of it.