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"ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy

terriblesoftware.org

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Re: "ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy

#51

Post by sanswork »

lrvick wrote: post #23

I do not use AI for engineering work and never will, because doing the work of thinking for myself is how I maintain the neural capacity for forming my own original thoughts and ideas no AI has seen before. If anyone gives me an opinion from an AI, they disrespect me and themselves to a point they are dead to me in an engineering capacity. Once someone outsources their brain they are unlikely to keep learning or evol…

I will not use Jr developers for engineering work and never will, because doing the work of a Jr.....

You don't have to outsource your thinking to find value in AI tools you just have to find the right tasks for them. The same as you would with any developer jr to you.

I'm not going to use AI to engineer some new complex feature of my system but you can bet I'm going to use it to help with refactoring or test writing or a second opinion on possible problems with a module.

> unlikely to have a future in this industry as they are so easily replaceable.

The reality is that you will be unlikely to compete with people who use these tools effectively. Same as the productivity difference between a developer with a good LSP and one without or a good IDE or a good search engine.

When I was a kid I had a text editor and a book and it worked. But now that better tools are around I'm certainly going to make use of them.

Re: "ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy

#52

Post by saulpw »

simonw wrote: post #45
theamk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, if you find a book that is as bad as AI advice, you should definitely throw it away and never read it. If someone is quoting a known-bad book, you should ignore their advice (and as a courtesy, tell them their book is bad) It's so strange that pro-AI people don't see this obvious fact and keep trying to compare AI with things that are actually correct.

It's so strange that anti-AI people think the advice and information you can get from a good model (if you know how to operate it well) is less valuable than the advice and information you can get from a book.

That "a good model (if you know how to operate it well)" is doing a lot of lifting. To be sure, there are a lot of bad books, and you can get negative advice from them, but a book has fixed content that can gain and lose a reputation, whereas a model (even a good one!) has highly variable content dependent on "if you know how to operate it well". So when someone or some group that I respect recommends a book, I can read the words with some amount of trust that the content is valuable. When someone quotes a model's response without any commentary or affirmation, it does not inspire any trust that the content is valuable. It just indicates that the person has abdicated their thought process.

Re: "ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy

#53

Post by JumpCrisscross »

simonw wrote: post #45
theamk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, if you find a book that is as bad as AI advice, you should definitely throw it away and never read it. If someone is quoting a known-bad book, you should ignore their advice (and as a courtesy, tell them their book is bad) It's so strange that pro-AI people don't see this obvious fact and keep trying to compare AI with things that are actually correct.

It's so strange that anti-AI people think the advice and information you can get from a good model (if you know how to operate it well) is less valuable than the advice and information you can get from a book.

> anti-AI people think the advice and information you can get from a good model (if you know how to operate it well) is less valuable than the advice and information you can get from a book

Those people exist and they’re wrong.

More frequently, however, I find I’m judging the model less than its user. If I get an email that smells of AI, I ignore it. That’s partly because I have the luxury to do so. It’s largely because engaging has commonly proven fruitless.

You see a similar effect on HN. Plenty of people use AI to think through problems. But the comments that quote it directly are almost always trash.

Re: "ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy

#54

Post by JumpCrisscross »

einsteinx2 wrote: post #3

I’ve noticed this trend in comments across the internet. Someone will ask or say something, the someone else will reply with “I asked ChatGPT and it says…” or “According to AI…” ChatGPT is free and available to everyone, and so are a dozen other LLMs. If the person making the comment wanted to know what ChatGPT had to say, they could just ask it themselves. I guess people feel like they’re being helpful, but I just d…

> someone else will reply with “I asked ChatGPT and it says…” or “According to AI…”

I had a consultant I’m working with have an employee do that to me. I immediately insisted that every hour they’ve billed on that person’s name be refunded.

Re: "ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy

#55

Post by paulcole »

lrvick wrote: post #34
paulcole wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If this pisses you off, ask yourself why. Why would it piss me off that you’re so closed minded about an incredible technology?

Using an AI to think for me would be like going to a gym and paying a robot to lift weights for me. Like sure that is cool that is possible, but if I do not do the work myself I will not get stronger. Our brains are the same way. I also do not use a GPS because there are literally studies with MRI scans proving it makes an entire section of our brain go dark compared to London taxi drivers required by law to navigate…

Sounds fun!

Re: "ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy

#57

Post by ebb_earl_co »

lrvick wrote: post #23

I do not use AI for engineering work and never will, because doing the work of thinking for myself is how I maintain the neural capacity for forming my own original thoughts and ideas no AI has seen before. If anyone gives me an opinion from an AI, they disrespect me and themselves to a point they are dead to me in an engineering capacity. Once someone outsources their brain they are unlikely to keep learning or evol…

I’m in the same boat, and what tipped me there is the ethical non-starter that OpenAI and Anthropic represent. They strip-mined the Web, ripped off copyrighted works in neat space, admitting that going through the proper channels was a waste of business resources.

They believe that the entirety of human ingenuity should be theirs at no cost, and then they have the audacity to SELL their ill-gotten collation of that knowledge back to you? All the while persuading world governments that their technology is the new operating system of the 21st century.

Give me a dystopian break, honestly.

Re: "ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy

#58

Post by beached_whale »

lrvick wrote: post #23

I do not use AI for engineering work and never will, because doing the work of thinking for myself is how I maintain the neural capacity for forming my own original thoughts and ideas no AI has seen before. If anyone gives me an opinion from an AI, they disrespect me and themselves to a point they are dead to me in an engineering capacity. Once someone outsources their brain they are unlikely to keep learning or evol…

Like any reference or other person, one needs to question whether those ideas fit into their mental models and verify things anyhow. One never could just trust that something is true without at least quick mental tests. AI is no different than other sources here. As was drilled into us in high school, use multiple sources and verify them.

Re: "ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy

#59

Post by simonw »

saulpw wrote: post #52
simonw wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so strange that anti-AI people think the advice and information you can get from a good model (if you know how to operate it well) is less valuable than the advice and information you can get from a book.

That "a good model (if you know how to operate it well)" is doing a lot of lifting. To be sure, there are a lot of bad books, and you can get negative advice from them, but a book has fixed content that can gain and lose a reputation, whereas a model (even a good one!) has highly variable content dependent on "if you know how to operate it well". So when someone or some group that I respect recommends a book, I can r…

I agree that quoting a model's answer to someone else is bad form - you can get a model to say ANYTHING if you prompt it to, so a screenshot of a ChatGPT conversation to try and prove a point is meaningless slop.

I find models vastly more useful than most technical books in my own work because I know how to feed in the right context and then ask them the right questions about it.

There isn't a book on earth that could answer the question "which remaining parts of my codebase still use the .permission_allowed() method and what edge-cases do they have that would prevent them from being upgraded to the new .allowed() mechanism"?

Re: "ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy

#60

Post by theamk »

brookst wrote: post #40
lrvick wrote: post #23

I do not use AI for engineering work and never will, because doing the work of thinking for myself is how I maintain the neural capacity for forming my own original thoughts and ideas no AI has seen before. If anyone gives me an opinion from an AI, they disrespect me and themselves to a point they are dead to me in an engineering capacity. Once someone outsources their brain they are unlikely to keep learning or evol…

Is it OK to outsource to engineers who are either more senior or more junior, or must one do every aspect of every project entirely oneself?

Sure it is, as long as those engineers apply and honest effort and learn from their mistakes. Even if they don't do things faster then you initially, at least they learned something.

Unfortunately that logic does not apply to models.

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