Quote from: PowerGlove on Today at 04:08:10 PM

Quote from: Free Market Capitalist on February 19, 2025, 09:28:13 AM

Quote from: suchmoon on February 18, 2025, 09:06:15 PM

Did you ask ChatGPT to give you some links?

Of course, I hardly use search engines like google anymore. I had to do my part, though, as it first gave me some sources that I did not consider of quality, like wikipedia, and I refined the search a couple of times, apart from selecting from what it gave me.

I'd personally (that is, if it were you and I talking rather than you and suchmoon) find a response consisting of a lightly-curated set of ChatGPT-sourced links to be pretty irritating...

When I'm chatting with someone, I'm interested in engaging with them (and enjoying their style of writing/talking/thinking, while considering their perspective on things, and maybe setting aside some time to digest the resources that they have recommended to me, etc.)

If someone feels that they must involve the output of an artificial intelligence model in their post (even if it's just to clean up their writing), then I'd personally prefer that that was made very clear (so that I know what not to consider when trying to evaluate them; beyond knowing what content I should ignore, I also don't want to, for example, think "Wow this person is very detail-oriented!" only to later find out that, when writing without assistance, they're actually the kind of person who frequently mixes up "its" and "it's").

One of the things that worries me about this new generative AI frontier is the difficult-to-appreciate damage that I think it's going to inflict on society as human activity shifts even further away from "comprehension", and further towards "productivity". That is, people seem to think that it's a good idea to be able to operate outside of the limits of their own understanding, and to, for example, write programs beyond their ability as a programmer, or make music beyond their ability as a musician, or paint scenes beyond their ability as an artist. While most people seem super excited about these new low-comprehension paths to productivity being opened up, I mostly just see paths that will inevitably lower the average value of things as it becomes less and less popular for people to invest the time it takes to build real expertise in something.

What follows is a personal anecdote that probably most people can't relate to, so feel free to skip it, but, when I was a kid, I was fascinated (to put it mildly) by computer games and wanted to know how to make one myself. Back then, the answer wasn't "That's easy, just pick between Unity and Unreal Engine!", it was "Computer games are just programs. Advanced computer games are advanced computer programs. If you're aiming to make high-quality computer games, then you'll need to become a highly competent computer programmer, first."

That put me on a learning path that went: Logo (via "turtle graphics"), then BASIC, then Pascal, and then C and x86 assembly. Looking back, I feel really fortunate that I was effectively forced (by the lack of easier alternatives) to go down that very difficult and very tedious path (which was honestly way too challenging for me at the age I started, but, I didn't know that at the time, and so I just did my best and kept trying and trying until things clicked). I'm grateful because, by the time I was 13 (and my friends were struggling with problems like how to style their hair, or how to get shoes with lights in them), I was happily programming little graphical demos and implementing things like Bresenham's line algorithm in x86 assembly and learning about things like perspective projection, and had somehow become a surprisingly well-rounded if very inexperienced programmer. I didn't know it at the time, but I now know (or at least, very strongly suspect) that minus that early high-difficulty foundation (or one similar to it) I'd be a much, much less capable person today (I mean, life knocked me off the path I started down, like it does to many people, and I never actually did get involved in commercial game development, but I did do a lot of dependency-free DOS-era gamedev in private, and that ended up forming the bedrock of my programming style).

From my perspective, the skill of programmers (on average) has been dropping for a long time now. Most programming these days seems to be about stitching together a set of not-fully-understood dependencies, and then hoping for the best while you endlessly push bugs around or turn them from one kind into another. Add a synthetic "programming assistant" to the mix and even the stitching becomes something that most people will decide not to do on their own (which means that they'll typically neither understand the components being bound together, nor understand the binding itself; writing code that appears to work correctly is easy, it's the full comprehension of it along with all of its dependencies that's the hard part).

We will reach a point where art and music will be almost entirely replaced by AI, discouraging people from creating new things... but we will also reach a point where AIs will be fed basically by content generated by themselves, that is, there will come a point where AI will start to become dumb and we will once again have stimuli and a need to have more real people creating and producing again... we will have a paradox in truth. Roll Eyes