My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

In the sense that the posts distill whatever HN at the time would accept as thought leadership it's a good pulse check on the community.

I've never been a completionist. I'm distracted. I like novelty. I make half-form experiments, but mostly provide deeply immersive conversations for the benefit of a small group of people around me, some of whom go on to make/do things that I proudly feel my influence on. The final 10% of work often defeated me.

Now, I just make it happen. The pain is gone. Something else can carry the last 10%, and my ideas get realized by me (and AI).

I can't even conceive how this will change the world en masse. Knowledge domains (not just tech, but science, art, etc) have been built of the things that the type-A completionists knew how to see. The others didn't finish, and what they saw of the world has largely been marginalized.

The mind of ADHD and creative types is about to get much more represented in the output products of civilisation. This is going to be a big recalibration, and I think a re-balancing toward something more healthy tbh

I take serious issue with the "but you have no idea what the code is" rebuttal, since it - to me - skims over the single largest issue with applying LLMs anywhere where important decisions will be made based on their outputs.

To quote from the article:

  People complain about LLM-generated code being 
  “probabilistic”. No it isn’t. 
  It’s code. It’s not Yacc output. It’s knowable. The LLM 
  might be stochastic. But the LLM doesn’t matter. What 
  matters is whether you can make sense of the result, and 
  whether your guardrails hold.

  Reading other people’s code is part of the job. If you can’t metabolize the 
  boring, repetitive code an LLM generates: skills issue! How are you handling the 
  chaos human developers turn out on a deadline?

EDIT: formatting

I am curious about this part though

This kind of guilt-by-association play might be the most common fallacy in internet discourse. None of us are allowed to express outrage at the bulk export of GitHub repos with zero regard for their copyleft status because some members of the software engineering community are large-scale pirates? How is that a reasonable argument to make?

The most obvious problem with this is it's a faulty generalization. Many of us aren't building large-scale piracy sites of any sort. Many of us aren't bulk downloading media of any kind. The author has no clue whether the individual humans making the IP argument against AI are engaged in piracy, so this is an extremely weak way to reject that line of argument.

The second huge problem with this argument is that it assumes that support for IP rights is a blanket yes/no question, which it's obviously not. I can believe fervently that SciHub is a public good and Elsevier is evil and at the same time believe that copyleft licenses placed by a collective of developers on their work should be respected and GitHub was evil to steal their code. Indeed, these two ideas will probably occur together more often than not because they're both founded in the idea that IP law should be used to protect individuals from corporations rather than the other way around.

The author has some valid points, but dismissing this entire class of arguments so flippantly is intellectually lazy.