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?
Levergism. To get what you want in the world you need power to get power you need leverage to the keys to power.
For working class folks that tends to be in the form of withholding labor, providing labor both of which are dictated by supply and demand. So learning a specialty in an in demand field or getting/making tools or skills that make you more demand is common technique. (Organizing with others to be noted also a huge way to do this)
They are arguing that learning AI is like learning to drive a forklift or an excavator. Like sure you could use a shovel or set up pullies but it’s just faster and thus more valuable to use those tools.
The difference being we don’t actually know what tools and varients of those tools actually make sense. So it’s like saying you need to learn to use motors to a 1900s factor worker.
This is so spot on. VFD’s revolutionized manufacturing, but telling that to someone in the 1900 would have been crazy.