I just had AI rewrite two pages of text from 1st person to 3rd person to use in different marketing material.
I had AI reformat text I'd pulled from a PDF that had weird line breaks.
In both cases, it wasn't doing any "writing" but the end result was AI assisted.
Its a glorified spellchecker, treat it like one.
nah, I'll just right click on the words with the red line under them and correct the words
That's how I use it in code. Especially seeing my old stuff.
"This is gross, I don't know what I was thinking. Use the method I used in this and match the formatting."
Saves me 15 mins retyping out a full block or method.
When I use it to do anything new, I'm 80% done and tell it the tidy up. It's real bad at joining in on the coding and just fucks things. But it's useful and fast at crossing my t's and dotting my i's. Doing things like a final logic sweep like, "You refer to this in this logic but that block isn't calling in the thing you're implying." You know, those things on line 350 that drive you insane for an hour until you finally have that, "Fuck! I'm an idiot!" moment and fix it in a couple keystrokes.
That's assistance.
I'm not a skilled coder but sometimes need/want to get things done. So I'll try my best get something that doesn't quite work right then ask it to tell me what's wrong and fix it. Once it works I ask it to explain the issue further. Its helped me learn.
I prefer to use it for really basic copy paste but with one variable changed. (Last time it still managed to screw this up by forgetting the plural)
I limit my usage to a minimum as while it's proper usage, it probably runs on data centers that makes everyone unhappy
And for art, I don't. While I could try to get it to give me advice, I don't think it's worth the cost
The environmental impacts are real and substantial, though still on the same scale as video streaming which didn't get the same reaction, so that's not the whole story.
And both are dwarfed by the meat industry. Be fair to become vegetarian and continue using AI a bit.
Ai is all about confidence. If you are confident that the task will be written without mistakes or not so important change that you can allow few bugs then its fine
Question: if I have an AI write a few hundred lines of code I was already going to write myself, but it just does it faster, is it slop?
You're going to lose the ability to do it yourself if you keep doing that. I used to use AI occasionally for code until one day I tried doing it on my own and realized that I had forgotten how to do it without AI. I feel rather embarrassed to admit that, and imo LLMs are like the smoking of our generations and lots of people, including me, jumped on the hype train not knowing of all the harms it causes.
Question: if I have an AI write a few hundred lines of code I was already going to write myself, but it just does it faster, is it slop?
Question: If I define a problem differently than everyone else, have I won the argument?
Maybe
A couple hundred lines?
It's honestly going to do it it's way. You'll likely have to go through it all in the end and change a lot. If somehow it pulls it off as you would, there's the issue of debugging or modifying it later. You'll look at it and have to figure it out first before you can start. That takes a lot of extra time.
I find it really unproductive and dangerous to do bigger tasks. Basically anything "from scratch" that isn't the basics, you'll regret it like a rake to the face at some point.
It means somewhere else it already exists. If you don't want to write that, just look for dependencies. Or write your own codegen tools.
I think modern software being chock full of dependencies is a problem. There are security and other issues introduced by devs who literally are just avoiding writing a pretty simple function or two and that's bad. If you properly check those functions I would even say that using AI in that context is the better option.
You can just fork the dependencies into your own project, or use snapshots (dub allows that via versioning).
Yes, you could. As always I think the context dictates what makes sense. I am not generally in favor of ai for software or much else but there could be some examples where writing a small amount of code with it is better than jumping through hoops to use someone else's project.
Using AI is exactly jumping through hoops to use someone else's project.
With all things we can either practice moderation or not. A couple of functions that avoid adding dependencies and sub dependencies is a good option. I know this because I am a JavaScript developer. Try dealing with a project with dozens of dependencies and tell me you won't spend a small amount of effort trying to avoid that. Had to do a fire drill deploy just the other day because of a zero day. That one was a complicated thing I couldn't just write a function for but the principle remains. always adding more dependencies is not a good move.
That's not how LLMs or coding agents work. They aren't a database of existing code snippets for it to choose from.
Yesn't. It's more than ai can introduce a subtle bug that you may overlook. But if you do it, you'd actually think about it
Y-yeah, I'd certainly never overlook subtle bugs in my own handwritten code, haha!... ha...
Yes it is because you didn't put in the work you lazy pig!
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
