I just had AI rewrite two pages of text from 1st person to 3rd person to use in different marketing material.
I had AI reformat text I’d pulled from a PDF that had weird line breaks.
In both cases, it wasn’t doing any “writing” but the end result was AI assisted.
Its a glorified spellchecker, treat it like one.
I use it to help me make my personal bash scripts better. I like it for that. I can make a super basic bash script, this helps me make them better!
nah, I’ll just right click on the words with the red line under them and correct the words
I prefer to use it for really basic copy paste but with one variable changed. (Last time it still managed to screw this up by forgetting the plural)
I limit my usage to a minimum as while it’s proper usage, it probably runs on data centers that makes everyone unhappy
And for art, I don’t. While I could try to get it to give me advice, I don’t think it’s worth the cost
The environmental impacts are real and substantial, though still on the same scale as video streaming which didn’t get the same reaction, so that’s not the whole story.
And both are dwarfed by the meat industry. Be fair to become vegetarian and continue using AI a bit.
Question: if I have an AI write a few hundred lines of code I was already going to write myself, but it just does it faster, is it slop?
You’re going to lose the ability to do it yourself if you keep doing that. I used to use AI occasionally for code until one day I tried doing it on my own and realized that I had forgotten how to do it without AI. I feel rather embarrassed to admit that, and imo LLMs are like the smoking of our generations and lots of people, including me, jumped on the hype train not knowing of all the harms it causes.
what if i try to write code, and when i get stuck, i ask the llm why my method or my syntax failed and it tells me how i ducked up? like a tutor but with forced infinite patience?
Sorry for the large block of text, but here’s my answer and reasoning;
That causes you to lose your ability to problem solve, which is very important for programming. I started programming years before vibe coding was a thing. When you run into a problem you reread your code, look at the docs, search/ask on a forum, or go for a walk a come back later. I’ve spent days trying to solve problems many times, especially when I first started programming or am working on something particularly tough. That’s very normal and over time you get better and learn to recognize those problems and are able to solve them faster. If someone else or an LLM does it for you, you lose out on foundational problem solving knowledge, which makes doing more complicated stuff later on much more difficult. You never really learn if you don’t have to do it yourself and even if you have learned, not doing it for a long enough time will regress your skills.
maybe but i would also point out that under the same argument being taught by a teacher, or a tutor would not actually allow a novice to learn either.
and i see very little difference between the text on the page vs text from an ai, except for accessibility.
but like all things, you get out what you put in. if you ask the llm to write you code for something, you don’t get anything out of it, unless you count the amount of time it takes to fix the guaranteed mess of code you get as trouble shooting time.
i find the llm’s are crapp at a lot of things, but when asked it can explain things in a manner that is tailored to the ability of the user. and i have learned quite a lot using llm’s.
Question: if I have an AI write a few hundred lines of code I was already going to write myself, but it just does it faster, is it slop?
Question: If I define a problem differently than everyone else, have I won the argument?
Maybe
It means somewhere else it already exists. If you don’t want to write that, just look for dependencies. Or write your own codegen tools.
That’s not how LLMs or coding agents work. They aren’t a database of existing code snippets for it to choose from.
Yes it is because you didn’t put in the work you lazy pig!
Yesn’t. It’s more than ai can introduce a subtle bug that you may overlook. But if you do it, you’d actually think about it
Y-yeah, I’d certainly never overlook subtle bugs in my own handwritten code, haha!.. ha…
Ai is all about confidence. If you are confident that the task will be written without mistakes or not so important change that you can allow few bugs then its fine
