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"Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

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Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#321

Post by NIckGeek »

xp84 wrote: post #45

The ending is a really powerful point. Most people apparently agree on two things: 1. AI is a great boon for all tasks and specialties we don’t have the skills to do ourselves. Understandable, since (A) we’re ill equipped to see the flaws in its output because it isn’t our area of expertise, and (B) it often can unlock great gains because if we trust it, we then don’t have to pay and wait for humans to do that thing.…

The fundamental issue imo is that LLMs are trained to make believable outputs. They can be complete horseshit, but because they look plausible they get treated like quality.

I swear that the intensity and time I've had to take with code reviews has gone up because LLMs are so good at making flawed code look good. I assume the same goes for everything else we use LLMs for.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#322

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

s_tec wrote: post #91
xp84 wrote: post #45

The ending is a really powerful point. Most people apparently agree on two things: 1. AI is a great boon for all tasks and specialties we don’t have the skills to do ourselves. Understandable, since (A) we’re ill equipped to see the flaws in its output because it isn’t our area of expertise, and (B) it often can unlock great gains because if we trust it, we then don’t have to pay and wait for humans to do that thing.…

It seems to be a general principle: If AI is better than you at something, you use it. If AI is worse than you, you don't. Each time the frontier models get better, I see another wave of AI doubters suddenly become believers. People say things like, "AI couldn't code last year, but now I use it for everything!" Interesting. Now we know how that the person who said this has the coding skills of a Claude Opus 4.5 or wh…

If AI is not better than you at a task, but it's good enough and saves you time, it also makes sense to use it. Many of my uses of AI fall in this category.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#323

Post by SCdF »

Kiro wrote: post #217
CGMthrowaway wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said. Everyone agrees AI can't do their job, so it ends up doing everyone else's. I'm not sure how to formulate it yet but it seems there is some Peter Principle/Gell-Mann Effect corollary that is AI-related we can say here. Perhaps: "AI rises to the level of its users' incompetence." Or: "Confidence in AI output is inversely proportional to one's ability to verify it"

> Everyone agrees AI can't do their job, so it ends up doing everyone else's. In real life I haven't met a single programmer who doesn't think AI can do their job. If someone would actually say that I would immediately think they have hubris and overestimate their skills.

We must live in different realities, because I have the direct opposite experience.

Perhaps we are defining "job" differently? AI can, with much coaching, _perhaps_[1], do some _aspects_ of a programmer's job. But not all of it, or even the most important parts of it.

[1] given that we have spent the past many decades pointing out that developer productivity is possibly impossible to measure, or at least very hard; given "done" vs "done done"; given the history of "rock star" developers creating messes behind them, the difference between short and long term thinking and the external imperceptability of that difference; given all of that, we haven't really had enough time to form a valid opinion on what AI can do, in the long run.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#324

Post by alex0015 »

ClimaxGravely wrote: post #166
duffycommaryan wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Language is incredibly complex. I remember a TikTok from a bilingual English-Korean speaker comparing the English subtitles from a Squid Game scene to what was actually being said by the characters. The nuance and info density lost in translation made the subtitles feel completely remedial. Americans were basically watching a different show altogether.

I'm by no means a native level Japanese speaker but I'm frequently surprised at how off Japanese-English subtitles can be.

I was watching the Netflix show The Empress with Chinese subtitles that did a pretty good job translating the German. I switched to English subs for one episode and couldn't stop telling the people I was watching with "That's not what he said! That's completely different!"

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#325

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

xp84 wrote: post #45

The ending is a really powerful point. Most people apparently agree on two things: 1. AI is a great boon for all tasks and specialties we don’t have the skills to do ourselves. Understandable, since (A) we’re ill equipped to see the flaws in its output because it isn’t our area of expertise, and (B) it often can unlock great gains because if we trust it, we then don’t have to pay and wait for humans to do that thing.…

my skills are at such a high level that it’s almost theoretical that it’ll ever be good enough to replace me for 90% of what I get paid to do.

Is it really true for most people that they are using their core advanced skills 90% of the time? I'm curious about how people feel about this.

I'm a professor, which is supposed to be an intellectually demanding job. I do research in NLP/AI, and I don't think AI will replace my core intellectual tasks in the near future, but I don't think my core intellectual tasks represent even 10% of my time. Most of the time is taken by various things like writing bureaucratic reports, writing and polishing grant applications, grading exams and exercises, designing a poster, planning a course's calendar for a given year, creating a figure for slides, writing assignments and exams, attending teaching coordination meetings... which definitely are or should be automatable. Probably even teaching the same lesson for the umpteenth time also is from an objective point of view, we'll probably be kept doing it due to the human factors driving motivation but not because a lecture given by a human is intellectually superior.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#326

Post by [deleted] »

tombert wrote: post #9

I have no doubt that the writer is better at translating than AI, but I have to say that AI translation has gotten so good that I'm not sure how much longer translation work will be there, or rather it might end up being more about auditing. For example, I just read the Lawrence Ellsworth translation of The Three Musketeers, which I very thoroughly enjoyed. I don't speak or read French, but from my understanding Ells…

[deleted]

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#327

Post by esailija »

tpmoney wrote: post #292
perrygeo wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At what point does this become an issue for data quality and global epistemology? It seems inevitable that we ask for more AI assistance on topics we don't understand. And therefore have the least context to correct. Result: a flood of poor quality information. In areas we DO understand, we'll either not ask AI at all, or treat its results with a higher degree of skepticism. Result: a lack of high quality information…

> The result will be an internet full content written from the perspective of an ignoramus; not addressing any complex issues, Not to be overly negative, but have you really looked at the vast majority of the content on the internet? There are good pockets of real, in depth content. But the absolute vast majority of it is surface level basics at best, and completely wrong hot takes at worst. Content farms and click s…

Yes, the first 80% of a subject is repeated everywhere (including all the misconceptions) and you cannot go deeper except if you got very lucky like found a 5 year old youtube video with 130 views or an old blog post or a downvoted reddit comment. This is what makes internet so addicting to me, the small chance of finding these hidden gems inside mountains of garbage.

Having 80% in a broad amount of subjects is basically worthless, it is the 90% and further that have value because it took luck and actual personal experience and effort to take it that far.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#328

Post by anotherevan »

mcmcmc wrote: post #235
hyperpape wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First sentence: > In my Ottawa life, every Tuesday evening, I take two gym classes back to back—boxing and the pompously named “body sculpt,” which makes me discover muscles I didn’t know I had. The em-dash matches how you'd speak out loud. You'd say "I take two classes every Tuesday back to back, boxing and 'body sculpt'. Weird name." (Parts of that sentence did flow oddly, but not because of the em-dash). Grammaria…

If I had a nickel for every em-dash I saw that could’ve been a colon…

You'd be full of shit.

Oh, sorry, I thought you said colon…

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#329

Post by [deleted] »

tombert wrote: post #139
lelanthran wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you get to senior level then most of your job probably is not writing code, but planning things out. If they're so good at banging out code now, they're coming for that too, you know.

I don't necessarily disagree, but there's gotta be a name for some kind of "infinite extrapolation" fallacy, where you assume that the current rate of progress will continue indefinitely. That might happen, but I don't think it's implied, at least given literally every other bit of technology that has ever happened in history ever.

[deleted]

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#330

Post by zuzululu »

tombert wrote: post #15
zuzululu wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This moment is coming for software developers too

Yeah almost certainly, especially the ones who made a career out of "copypaste from StackOverflow", which is most engineers. But even the good engineers should likely be a little worried.

why would it be different for other people if you already said senior level is not writing code but planning things out?

is there something about planning that LLMs cannot do being your crux of the argument?

what do you believe about your jobs or function that you think will be immune from AI replacing you?

If anything it seems your role is not that dissimilar to those translating languages or business requirements.

I am struggling to see what it is about this planning you do that cannot be done by AI because it seems to me thats not where the moat is rather I find the middle man jobs to be the most vulnerable to AI immediately much more than people writing code.

Because at least someone is watching the outputs from AI and understands the code and can communicate it easily back to the stakeholders without the middle man gate keeping and applying their "taste".

I have a feeling that anyone in your shoes is going to be working with code soon or they won't have much to offer anymore to the business. A stakeholder could easily replace the middle layer with AI and even as a business owner myself I do not see any need to add any more humans at the layer anymore unless they write code.

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