it’s getting to the point where I notice people say it a lot, especially IRL now for whatever reason recently.
And for clarity I’m not in research or anything, so these people just mean ‘LLM/image gen’, not utilities like OCR or (usually not) transcription.
Some have argued it’s just more efficient (which I can kind of get), while others think you’re actively hindering your intelligence somehow.
On the first point:
I’ve tried it occasionally to see how it compares to my own skill, and while it produces a functional result, it’s always very derivative work to the point where you can find things with the exact same names of other ‘public’ (but not libre) works, and often isn’t the ideal solution to what it targets. So I can see how you can get things out of it, but it never felt really that profound to me.
But for the second… isn’t this supposed to be the tool for people to do things they aren’t experienced in? If anything, you probably need to be able to understand how to write pertaining to the task so the token probabilities are biased toward writing from that area.
And even then, if all you end up doing is prompting AI, then wouldn’t you ultimately serve no purpose outside of being glorified QA?
I guess I’m trying to figure out what exactly non-users would be ‘falling behind’ in that affects them more than those who use AI?
It means they preach bullshit.
What society before us had AI, and how much more successful were they? Einstein didn’t need AI. Newton didn’t need AI. Oppenheimer didn’t need AI… The list goes on. Who does, other than the lazy and those who can’t think for themselves?
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
- 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.
- 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.
If you’re actually curious, same idea as not knowing how to use a search engine in the 2000s/2010s
It’s widely ubiquitous technology that can be extremely useful if used properly and not knowing how will waste a lot of time and likely frustrate you to the point you just give up or ask you family tech person.
people who can afford to pay for LLM tokens are always going to be fine as tokens get more expensive. this is just a thinly veiled way to say an increasing amount of people are going to end up poor and completely fucked as AI pushes all of the resources upwards.
You’ll fall behind in the race to the lowest IQ as they all turn their thinking over to AI and get lazier while you continue to exercise your brain.
Fuck 'em.
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
Yeah, BUT only YOU own the gorilla with the pink cowboy hat! You just gotta understand NFTs man! /s
NFT was literally a foreshadowing of what was to come. You know that villain hero beats up at the start of the film but main villain is someone else?
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.
Ai is more like adding lead to gasoline; it does stuff we could already do ever so slightly better, but for an immense and irreversible cost.
i wouldn’t say better, a better analogy, is cheaper gasoline, with worst results than more expensive gasoline.
honestly, depending on how it affects media in the future, it could really have a similar effect on us, even if it doesn’t directly poison people. Poorly presented information/misinformation has, and will certainly continue to result in so many preventable tragedies.
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.
No. There’s no way I could build a full web app on my own in under a day. AI enables me to do that. You’re basing your whole opinion about AI solely on how capitalism is leveraging it. There is a lot of great potential with AI. Medical fields. Non-profit space. The list goes on.
I’ve got some bad news for you. Even with AI you still can’t make a full web app in under a day.
You can make a fun little demo for sure, but that’s a long way away from a full web app. Even without doing any coding or using the computer, simply describing a full web app using pen and paper would actually take more than a day. And when it comes to actually making such a thing, there’s so many things besides the coding and even with regards to the coding you haven’t considered.
This is a big issue with AI. It provides a shortcut to some sort of end result. Since people get a result, they tend to think they have actually achieved the desired result. But in reality most things are much more complicated and people often have entire careers specializing in one aspect or the other. There’s so much that goes on, without people not in the know realizing. Without being an expert yourself, you wouldn’t even consider those things to be important.
Let me explain using an example. I can write words on a page. I could even think of a story and give it some structure. Does that mean I can write a book? Technically yes. Would that book be any good and people want to read that book? Probably no. That’s because I know enough about writing books, that I know I don’t know shit about writing books and would not be able to without years of learning and failing. Now AI could help me vomit out words faster. More words more quickly means I can get a whole book worth of words out in no time at all. But does that mean I somehow gained the knowledge of how to write a good book? No, because I didn’t learn anything. In fact I would learn less from using the AI than I would have simply writing down the words myself. Using a tool doesn’t magically grant skills that weren’t there before.
A lot of people don’t understand this and shit out shitty AI books anyways, which then nobody likes. They shit out apps, which then nobody likes and they get abandoned almost immediately. They shit out “art”, which then nobody likes. And since they got to some kind of a result, they glaze the AI tools and say it’s amazing, even though the results were shit.
I see it with ADAS.
It appears that the more Advanced Driver Assistance Systems a vehicle has, the less competent the driver is and the more likely it is that they will not react correctly (or at all) in an emergency situation.
ANCAP and ENCAP are realising this now and their ratings are no longer weighted so heavily on ADAS.
Yeah, this has been a long problem in government agencies here.
There was a political decision made years and years ago, that in-house expertise was too expensive and that they would hire consultants when they needed specific skills.
That works only as long as you have the in-house skills to determine what external skills are needed.
Same here, without the skills to do the work, you don’t have the skills to correctly evaluate the work of an LLM.
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?”
Sure. Protein structure is the clean example. For decades the same thing was done without AI: crystallise the protein, collect diffraction or NMR data, solve the fold. That works. It also costs years and a specialist lab per structure. AlphaFold did not invent a new kind of knowledge. It made the existing problem cheap enough that we now have predicted structures for hundreds of millions of proteins instead of a few hundred thousand experimentally solved ones.
“Could you have done it without AI?” is the wrong test. The test is whether the extra cost of doing it the old way is worth paying every time. Sometimes it is. Often it is not.
People aren’t talking about alphafold when they’re talking about “AI” in 2026. They’re talking about chatgpt, claude and copilot.
“Could you have done it without AI?” is the wrong test. The test is whether the extra cost of doing it the old way is worth paying every time. Sometimes it is. Often it is not
I would hard disagree. It absolutely applies for super narrow applications like alphafold, but in general, LLMs aren’t remotely close to being worth it. You don’t need to look beyond how hugely unprofitable AI companies are. The only companies who aren’t completely shoveling money into the furnace are the ones selling hardware to the companies that do.
We also see that the consequences of AI use are pretty harsh. Students who use a lot of AI are a full year behind their counterparts that don’t, according the the latest PISA data.
So what we have is something that is unaffordably expensive, with dubious benefit and immense second order effects.
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’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.
Levergism. To get what you want in the world you need power to get power you need leverage to the keys to power.
For working class folks that tends to be in the form of withholding labor, providing labor both of which are dictated by supply and demand. So learning a specialty in an in demand field or getting/making tools or skills that make you more demand is common technique. (Organizing with others to be noted also a huge way to do this)
They are arguing that learning AI is like learning to drive a forklift or an excavator. Like sure you could use a shovel or set up pullies but it’s just faster and thus more valuable to use those tools.
The difference being we don’t actually know what tools and varients of those tools actually make sense. So it’s like saying you need to learn to use motors to a 1900s factor worker.
