The argument that programmers are into piracy and therefore should shut up about theft is nonsensical. Not defending piracy, but at least an artist or creator is still credited and their work is unadulterated. Piracy != plagiarism.
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My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
131–140 of 1001 posts
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#132I have one very specific retort to the 'you are still responsible' point. High school kids write lots of notes. The notes frequently never get read, but the performance is worse without them: the act of writing them embeds them into your head. I allegedly know how to use a debugger, but I haven't in years: but for a number I could count on my fingers, nearly every bug report I have gotten I know exactly down to the l…
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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#133The argument seems to be that for an expert programmer, who is capable of reading and understanding AI agent code output and merging it into a codebase, AI agents are great. Question: If everyone uses AI to code, how does someone become an expert capable of carefully reading and understanding code and acting as an editor to an AI? The expert skills needed to be an editor -- reading code, understanding its implication…
It’s a great point and one I’ve wondered myself.
Arguments are made consistently about how this can replace interns or juniors directly. Others say LLMs can help them learn to code.
Maybe, but not on your codebase or product and not with a seniors knowledge of pitfalls.
I wonder if this will be programmings iPhone moment where we start seeing a lack of deep knowledge needed to troubleshoot. I can tell you that we’re already seeing a glut of security issues being explained by devs as “I asked copilot if it was secure and it said it was fine so I committed it”.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#134> but the plagiarism
This entire section reads like, oddly, the reverse of the "special pleading" argument that I usually see from artists. Instead of "Oh, it's fine for other fields, but for my field it's a horrible plagiarism machine", it's the reverse: "Oh, it's a problem for those other fields, but for my field get over it, you shouldn't care about copyright anyway".
I'm all for eliminating copyright. The day I can ignore the license on every single piece of proprietary software as I see fit, I'll be all for saying that AIs should be able to do the same. What I will continue to complain about is the asymmetry: individual developers don't get to violate individual licenses, but oh, if we have an AI slurp up millions of codebases and ignore their licenses, that's fine.
No. No, it isn't. If you want to ignore copyright, abolish it for everyone. If it still applies to everyone else, it should still apply to AIs. No special exceptions for mass-scale Open Source license violations.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#135It's so all-or-nothing this debate. If you're drawing a benefit from using AI tools, great. If you aren't, then maybe don't use them, or try some other approach to using them.
Personally I find AI coding tools situationally useful. I certainly wouldn't use them to write all my code, but I also think I'd be a fool not to leverage them at all.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#138I can sum it up like this: if I could know in advance the exact right thing to build, producing the physical code, has not for a long time, been the bottleneck. I've been vibe coding long before it was cool. It's sometimes called model driven development.
For those that think only procedurally, I can see how it helps them. Because procedural first development has a lot of boilerplate logic.
For those who think model first, the AI may help them rubber duck, but ultimately the physical writing of the characters is minimal.
Most of my time is thinking about the data model. The AI writes almost all of my procedures against said data model. But that is about 20% speedup.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#139I have been using agentic AI to help me get started writing an OpenGL-targeted game from scratch (no engine). I have almost no background experience with computer graphics code, but I understand most of the fundamentals pretty well and I have almost 13 years of software experience. It's just that the exact syntax as well as the various techniques used to address common problems are not in my arsenal yet. My experienc…
> which will get me 90% of the way there
This is roughly my experience as well. The AI is great at the first 90% of the work and actively counterproductive for the remaining 90%
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#140This happened with the introduction of smartphones too. Every slashdot post had a haughty and upvoted ‘why would i want such a thing!!!’. It was obviously huge. You could see it taking off. Yet a lot of people proudly displayed ignorance and backed each other up on it to the point that discussion around the topic was often drowned out by the opposition to change. Now today it takes minutes of playing with ai coding a…
I still think smartphones are a huge negative to humanity. They improve a narrow case: having access to ephemeral knowledge. Nobody writes articles or does deep knowledge work with smartphones.
My position with the AI is almost the same. It is overall a net negative for cognitive abilities of people. Moreover I do think all AI companies need to pay fair licensing cost to all authors and train their models to accurately cite the sources. If they want more data for free, they need to propose copyright changes retroactively invalidating everything older than 50 years and also do the legwork for limiting software IP to 5 to 10 years.