Bunch of disparate thoughts about this. Apologies.
You can’t just purity test an entire profession. Or at least it isn’t reasonable to do so.
You have to dig, but there are artists and authors out there who have positive opinions about AI. I’m sure the folks more active on !techtakes@awful.systems could get a list together of their favorite sneer targets.
I’d suggest that it’s worth remembering that a large portion of any online discourse is going to be made up of teenagers, college students, and people new to whatever it is they’re discussing. But almost all of them will talk with an implied authority on whatever subject it is anyway. Many subs on reddit have done demorgraphics polls (or polls that included a question about age) and the results makes the sillier places like relationship advice make a hell of a lot more sense.
I have almost a decade or work experience in IT, more if you count some intro to programming teaching gigs I did. AI coding assistance tools are positioned perfectly to be like crack for early learners, but don’t actually add too much value for more experienced folks (especially not anything can’t be done faster with existing non-ai tools, like an IDE’s code snippets features for repeated boilerplate code, which is the most frequent excuse I see online).
That said, I have literally never met any dev in real life that thinks favorably of AI coding assistance.
What I see more and more is corporate management types being afraid that all the hype for AI coming out of Gartner etc means that if they don’t force their employees to use it they will get left behind as their competitors magically produce more somehow. At that point as an employee your choices are to work to meet whatever shit metric they’ve constructed or give up making a paycheck.
It’s very easy to tell other people they need to be more principled when it’s not your food/shelter/insurance/livelyhood on the line.
And it’s also worth noting that what the current wave of popular AI (LLMs) does best is generate text. So of course you’re going to see text posts online trying to shift the window. That’s the company using their horrific tool as designed. There was evidence of AI bots hyping AI in the programming subs on reddit that got overshadowed by them shutting off third party API access.
AI is only as inevitable for as long as the megacorps can keep funneling money into the pit. The world leader in AI conpanies, OpenAI, is doing so great with money that they are trying to threaten their business partner Microsoft out of roughly $40B. This could all blow up fairly soon. I hope it does.
There absolutely are devs out there who are getting ground down, where there principles are becoming eroded over time.
But like with many things in life, the rabble at the bottom aren’t the ones effecting real long term change, media coverage, corporate adoption, etc. Don’t turn this into some crab pot situation.
Go after the tech reporters continually giving AI the benefit of the doubt. Go after industry steering publications like Gartner. Go after politicians giving AI projects sweetheart deals that allow them to coast by without having to compete fairly based of their actual costs (OpenAI loses money on every request it serves). That allow AI datacenters to continuously violate local laws. That allow the datacenters to pollute their local water table. Go after the management enacting requirements that their subordinates demonstrate how AI is improving their work efficiency on pain of firing. You get the picture.
And sure, call out individuals. But please don’t label us all as a group on this.
Bunch of disparate thoughts about this. Apologies.
You can’t just purity test an entire profession. Or at least it isn’t reasonable to do so.
You have to dig, but there are artists and authors out there who have positive opinions about AI. I’m sure the folks more active on !techtakes@awful.systems could get a list together of their favorite sneer targets.
All the anti-ai tools are coming from programmers. anubis, iocaine, nepenthes, nightshade, and more.
I’d suggest that it’s worth remembering that a large portion of any online discourse is going to be made up of teenagers, college students, and people new to whatever it is they’re discussing. But almost all of them will talk with an implied authority on whatever subject it is anyway. Many subs on reddit have done demorgraphics polls (or polls that included a question about age) and the results makes the sillier places like relationship advice make a hell of a lot more sense.
I have almost a decade or work experience in IT, more if you count some intro to programming teaching gigs I did. AI coding assistance tools are positioned perfectly to be like crack for early learners, but don’t actually add too much value for more experienced folks (especially not anything can’t be done faster with existing non-ai tools, like an IDE’s code snippets features for repeated boilerplate code, which is the most frequent excuse I see online).
That said, I have literally never met any dev in real life that thinks favorably of AI coding assistance.
What I see more and more is corporate management types being afraid that all the hype for AI coming out of Gartner etc means that if they don’t force their employees to use it they will get left behind as their competitors magically produce more somehow. At that point as an employee your choices are to work to meet whatever shit metric they’ve constructed or give up making a paycheck.
It’s very easy to tell other people they need to be more principled when it’s not your food/shelter/insurance/livelyhood on the line.
And it’s also worth noting that what the current wave of popular AI (LLMs) does best is generate text. So of course you’re going to see text posts online trying to shift the window. That’s the company using their horrific tool as designed. There was evidence of AI bots hyping AI in the programming subs on reddit that got overshadowed by them shutting off third party API access.
AI is only as inevitable for as long as the megacorps can keep funneling money into the pit. The world leader in AI conpanies, OpenAI, is doing so great with money that they are trying to threaten their business partner Microsoft out of roughly $40B. This could all blow up fairly soon. I hope it does.
There absolutely are devs out there who are getting ground down, where there principles are becoming eroded over time.
But like with many things in life, the rabble at the bottom aren’t the ones effecting real long term change, media coverage, corporate adoption, etc. Don’t turn this into some crab pot situation.
Go after the tech reporters continually giving AI the benefit of the doubt. Go after industry steering publications like Gartner. Go after politicians giving AI projects sweetheart deals that allow them to coast by without having to compete fairly based of their actual costs (OpenAI loses money on every request it serves). That allow AI datacenters to continuously violate local laws. That allow the datacenters to pollute their local water table. Go after the management enacting requirements that their subordinates demonstrate how AI is improving their work efficiency on pain of firing. You get the picture.
And sure, call out individuals. But please don’t label us all as a group on this.