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?
They do it to protect their feelings. They’ve normalized the use of something most people hate, so they want everyone else to adopt it, too. That way, they won’t feel judged, when they 100% deserve to feel judged.
Yes to everything you said. It’s basic FOMO, the same behavior with people who were selling bitcoins.
If it was good, we would use it. And any way, it’s like learning how to use Google, it doesn’t take weeks to understand how to write a basic sentence. It’s a skill that you could acquire in 24 hours at most if you speak English.
Also, according to the boosters, if it gets as good as they insist it’s going to get, we wouldn’t even need to learn how to use it!
At that point I’d be more concerned about the collapse of the economy than my specific job. Why buy any service when the replicator does it
The people who espouse such nonsense as “if you don’t use AI you’ll fall behind” believe that using AI will become an absolute necessity in the future, and that those who use AI now will have more expertise in using AI than those who don’t, giving them better prospects. Those same people end up saying “you’re just not prompting it right” when you point out flaws in the LLM’s responses.
Prompting is obviously a skill that you can improve, but if you compare it with the skills they are trying to replace it’s a very basic skill. Going through a computer science program and a few years of work experience vs figuring out what prompts it tends to fuck up and learn to safe guard against that (as much as you can) are different leagues, different sports, different everything.
It’s like saying that if you don’t start using lemmy now, you’ll fall behind when the year off the fediverse is upon us, when you’ll just pick it up as well if need be.
Prompting reminds me that most people around me don’t know how to use Google. If I want a recipe for an apple pie, I type “apple pie recipe” (3 words). Other people would type “i want to make an apple pie and I need a recipe or something.”
And now it’s worse with chatbots because they would say “dear ChatGPT, I have been thinking of my grandma and I would loooove to make an apple pie like the one she did, it would mean a lot to me, and also the sun is shining, thanks, kiss, goodbye, have a nice day.” It’s horribly inefficient and shows that most people cannot use computers properly, and don’t understand that they are fast calculators and not magical brains.
It is even worse, since LLMs talk back like that, which probably encourages people to be like that. I had to use one to solve a Linux problem, for which I could not get help any other way, and it was just awful. I do not want the agent to spout useless phrases like a human, it just wastes so much time to read them, when you have to figure out are the answers even close to being useful. Maybe I could have prompted it to just reply more efficiently, but I tried to keep the usage minimal anyway. That discussion made me sound more like the robot. “Blahblah not working” “Oh I’m so sorry you are having this problem. Lets start with…”
Fucking awful.Right! These people are now “super human AI prompt masters”, nut my natural ability with written language from a young age and early exposure to technology has made me (and anyone with good vocabulary and grammar mechanics) better than a lot of these idiots could ever hope to become with years of practice. The thing about corporate cultism, though, is in your mind it always makes you “superior” somehow, if you can stick your head far enough up your ass. Corporatism is all about enthusiastic support of your own exploitation, and this shit is the ultimate expression. We need fucking LLMs more than clean drinking water to hear these robber baron fucks tell it.
From what I’ve experienced it’s mostly managers saying this. They’re afraid of competitors taking over the market because they can be more efficient with AI. They say this without any idea of how exactly that would work.
FOMO, and the temptation of being able to get the speed of AI without the drawbacks of “vibe coding”.
Reality is much more nuanced.
You can get a massive boost in your productivity if you use dependencies or just steal code, compared to writing everything from zero. I personally just reuse my own code snippets, and even started to put regularly reused code into their own libraries (next up is to make stuff for parsers).
I also seen cases, when “AI assisted” coding had the same amount of issues as fully vibe coded stuff, as the person really wanting to cram the chatbot into their workflow did that trusted Grok too much with understanding the documentations, so he just ended up trying to implement stuff based on Grok’s summary, which was wrong at places.
If you ask: artists also sometimes fall for this trap, though much less often.
It’s from the same people who tell you to “GET IN EARLY” for whatever hot trend is about to take off, usually involving markets and trade.
Bullshit said by people who do not understand that LLMs are NOT AI
NOT AI, not even a little
Why try to argue against the vocabulary on this one?
Of course it’s artificial intelligence.
We’ve used “artificial intelligence” to mean everything from bots in games to Deep Blue, to protein folding and ML predictions, and those are a whole hell of a lot more specialized than llms.
Modern llms pass the Turing Test for a LOT of people.
Are there lots of problems with it as it is now? Absolutely yes. Environmental, ethical, economic, and on and on and on. All this on top of the fact that it quite bad at many many tasks. But if it’s not artificial intelligence, you’re just moving the goal posts.
Just a common phrase used by people trying to scam you. Basic Marketing really. Create the sense of a time crunch and people more likely to buy in. People don’t like the concept of missing out on something. Same reason they have countdowns on when sales end on websites and even in certain stores.
Its people falling for propaganda.
The fact of the matter is, AI can be useful for minor coding help. The reality is its stealing advice from one or a few sources and spitting out an answer based on them, but it can be a quick delivery of advice.
The major problem is
- AI (these LLMs) hallucinate ALL THE TIME. Relying on them to code for you is fucking moronic. Every coworker I’ve seen who does vibe coding is constantly getting dunked on, their pull requests are torn to pieces, and its baffling why they still get a paycheck.
- AI can only, in the best circumstances, do exactly what you tell it to do. That is to say, you need to explicitly spell out what you want for it, including explicitly covering edge cases. If you don’t, you end up with situations like Microsoft making Notepad code executable (which actually fucking happened.
Promotion of AI is total horseshit by the fascist tech broligarchs being done so they can replace the worker and, and I’m serious, achieve immortality by transferring their consciousness to machine. That isn’t a fucking joke, that’s an actual belief they hold. The AI and general tech CEOs are all in a massive death cult. This is real.
Anyone saying that unironically has a vested interest in AI succeeding and are trying to produce FOMO. They likely missed their chance to make big bucks during the .com boom and they see AI as a second chance thinking it will inevitably become as ubiquitous as the internet itself.
They can generally be ignored and nothing of value will be lost.
Those people see AI as a transformational technology that is going to be central to how everything is done 10 years from now for better or for worse, and trying to ignore that is just putting your head in the sand.
They’re very very very few tasks in which AI is great. Everything else is just a waste of money and unnecessary at the cost of destroying the planet.
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.
Because the reality is that you’ll ship projects faster. Check out lemmy selfhosted community. I just checked and 8/10 of the latest projects were AI assisted.
It’s not a panacea. For example, don’t rely on it for security focused applications. But most evidence suggests that if you are careful about where and how you use AI, you will move faster.
Yes there are ethical concerns too. We all know them at this point. So the question becomes whether or not those concerns outweigh the human desire to make an impact on the world.
A lot of activism is bragging rights. Hence the meme about vegans always talking about veganism. But with AI, it’s bragging rights on both sides. If you don’t use jt you can brag about your environmental concern. If you use it you can brag about all the cool projects you made. Which do you want to brag about?
Because the reality is that you’ll ship projects faster. Check out lemmy selfhosted community. I just checked and 8/10 of the latest projects were AI assisted.
Call me back when most of these projects actually are useful (a lot of stuff posted in various selfhost community are actually rehash of existing things, or provide no actual useful features), live more than a few months without being abandonned, and are not stagnating messes impossible to fix with issues growing faster than a magic bean.
Using LLM to produce something decent requires a fair amount of work. And work requires time and skills. Something that’s sharply declining when you look at the amount of garbage we get. I’ll admit that it’s a lot of garbage, coming very fast, though.
Call me back when most of these projects actually are useful (a lot of stuff posted in various selfhost community are actually rehash of existing things, or provide no actual useful features), live more than a few months without being abandonned, and are not stagnating messes impossible to fix with issues growing faster than a magic bean.
This was true before AI. Open source projects have always had short life spans. Using AI means that you don’t spent forever on a project that might only last a few weeks.
Using LLM to produce something decent requires a fair amount of work
Which is why I said you have to be careful when and where you use it. But it does boost productivity if you use it wisely.
Ugh, a lot of tunnel vision in here. Good open source projects often last years or decades and are holding most of the internet alive today. They used 0 LLMs and are starting to use it today with dubious results. Many professionals ghat used it in programming reported an initial boost in production followed by an incedible boost in deal breaking bugs and higher fixing times: turns out that if you don’t directly write code debugging is hell and all the gains vaporize when you need to manually verify every line again. That said, mental atrophy is also worth researching. All in all, whoever uses it in fun projects and didn’t formally study code is always the most vocal about LLMs and those who did study and are forced to use it by their boss always describe it as bad. Wonder why
I think about it like this: let’s say you don’t use AI but a majority of other people do. Let’s assume AI helps the majority do things faster or cheaper than you (maybe that’s not true yet, but it will probably be true soon). In this situation, if you’re not using AI then you’ll almost always lose to those that are. Therefore you should learn how to use it or else you’ll be left behind.
Let’s assume the reverse: using AI makes you dumber and slower. Actually, let’s not assume, since we have evidence: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volume-i_73451bc5-en.html
The information in your link is about school aged children, and it doesn’t say AI use automatically makes you dumber. It says:
The relationship between AI use and student performance is complex How AI use relates to student performance is complex, varying with how students use it and what for. PISA data show that students who use AI for specific schoolwork tasks, such as summarising texts, drafting or conducting research, attain lower scores in science than students who do not use AI. In these scenarios, students who do not use AI outperform those who do, on average, by around 20 points – equivalent to being around one year of schooling ahead of their peers. However, weekly users of AI for general purposes have similar performance outcomes to non-users. Students who regularly use AI for general purposes, and have learning opportunities at school to develop AI literacy skills, tend to have slightly higher scores in science. However, these opportunities are more common among socio-economically advantaged students, risking a growing AI divide.
So I’d conclude that kids shouldn’t be handed AI when they’re young. Not only that, they shouldn’t get to use it until they’re taught how.
I have a young kid and I don’t know what to do. I’m leaning towards keeping them away from AI as long as possible in the hopes that they build a very strong knowledge and problem solving foundation. Then AI can hopefully multiply their abilities.
And that brings me back to my original point. It will likely provide a competitive advantage to those that use it over those that don’t, but the size of that advantage depends on the abilities of the user.
