it’s getting to the point where I notice people say it a lot, especially IRL now for whatever reason recently.
And for clarity I’m not in research or anything, so these people just mean ‘LLM/image gen’, not utilities like OCR or (usually not) transcription.
Some have argued it’s just more efficient (which I can kind of get), while others think you’re actively hindering your intelligence somehow.
On the first point:
I’ve tried it occasionally to see how it compares to my own skill, and while it produces a functional result, it’s always very derivative work to the point where you can find things with the exact same names of other ‘public’ (but not libre) works, and often isn’t the ideal solution to what it targets. So I can see how you can get things out of it, but it never felt really that profound to me.
But for the second… isn’t this supposed to be the tool for people to do things they aren’t experienced in? If anything, you probably need to be able to understand how to write pertaining to the task so the token probabilities are biased toward writing from that area.
And even then, if all you end up doing is prompting AI, then wouldn’t you ultimately serve no purpose outside of being glorified QA?
I guess I’m trying to figure out what exactly non-users would be ‘falling behind’ in that affects them more than those who use AI?
A lot of people think AI makes things exponentially easier, exponentially better, exponentially faster, exponentially more accessible. So, they can do more, faster, with less work. And obviously, if you don’t do that yourself, you’ll be an inefficient, hard working idiot.
There’s also something psychological about peer pressure; if more people do the same thing you do, it’s more acceptable/better/the norm, and the various issues becomes less importants. Kinda like when cryptocurrencies would fix ALL issues everywhere at once forever. Funny enough, we were already taking about how inefficient and costly that was back then.
Of course, people using it without any knowledge of what the output should look like find it magical, but knowledgeable people are more… let’s say, prudent. The faster outcome is debatable; it still requires a fair amount of actual work to be put in unless you just do the same thing that’s been done millions of time before. And worst of all, some people seems to “forget” how to do things without an LLM very quickly, to the point that they’ll tell you that some things are actually impossible to do without them.