I’m not down with Google swallowing everything posted on the internet to train their generative AI models.
A thoughtful approach from Sam:
- Use AI only for tasks you already know how to do, on occasions when the time that would be spent completing the task can be better spent on other problems.
- When using AI, provide the chosen tool with something you’ve made as an input along with a specific prompt.
- Always comprehensively review the output from an AI tool for quality.
We value learning. We value the merits of language design, type systems, software maintenance, levels of abstraction, and yeah, if I’m honest, minute syntactical differences, the color of the bike shed, and the best way to get that perfectly smooth shave on a yak. I’m not sure what we’re called now, “heirloom programmers”?
Do I sound like a machine code programmer in the 1950s refusing to learn structured programming and compiled languages? I reject that comparison. I love a beautiful abstraction just as much as I love a good low-level trick.
If the problem is that we’ve painted our development environments into a corner that requires tons of boilerplate, then that is the problem. We should have been chopping the cruft away and replacing it with deterministic abstractions like we’ve always done. That’s what that Larry Wall quote about good programmers being lazy was about. It did not mean that we would be okay with pulling a damn slot machine lever a couple times to generate the boilerplate.
My social networks are currently awash with Deep Blue:
…the sense of psychological ennui leading into existential dread that many software developers are feeling thanks to the encroachment of generative AI into their field of work.
The issue isn’t with the code itself, but with the understanding of the code.
That’s the difference between technical debt and cognitive debt.
- I don’t and won’t use “AI” in the text of any of my published work.
- I’m not worried about “AI” replacing me as a novelist.
- People in general are burning out on “AI.”
- I’m supporting human artists, including as they relate to my own work.
- “AI” is Probably Sticking Around In Some Form.
- “AI” is a marketing term, not a technical one, and encompasses different technologies.
- There were and are ethical ways to have trained generative “AI” but because they weren’t done, the entire field is suspect.
- The various processes lumped into “AI” are likely to be integrated into programs and applications that are in business and creative workflows.
- It’s all right to be informed about the state of the art when it comes to “AI.”
- Some people are being made to use “AI” as a condition of their jobs. Maybe don’t give them too much shit for it.
Knock, knock! Who’s there? Control freak (now you say “control freak who?”)
Wake me up when we get to the plateau of productivity.
Language matters.
Large language models are big messy brushes, not scalpels.
A large language model is as neutral as an AK-47.