THIS POST IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION
For some time now I have contemplated collecting my thoughts regarding AI and its ever-growing presence in daily life. What better place to do so than here.
I want to preface this by recognizing that AI is revolutionary, I know that. I see it shaping the future of technology in ways we could have only dreamed of a few decades back. I myself now make use of it all time time, whether to quickly debug or sketch out snippets of code or to help answer some questions when a google search fails to satisfy. However, regardless of all the positives this theology may bring, I think there are some dangerous side effects that are evident in the kind of thing we are seeing online and, regrettably, in every aspect of life.
With every technology that makes our lives easier, unfortunately many see it as just an easy way out. A way to cut out the need to invest more time and effort or even to entrust other much more qualified humans. “Enshittification”, as it has been called, is a very real phenomenon and far more than just a meme. AI has empowered those that see the world as nothing more than a means to an end (that end being profit of course).
I’m no expert in machine learning or how this technology works, but I have a basic understanding as an IT nerd and plenty of experience prompting it. I can tell you this: AI is useless without a human giving it thought. To put this is simpler words, AI cannot think for you. It does not replace that task, and if you let it, you will fail at whatever you are trying to achieve. People will always be necessary to steer things in the right direction, to actually have ideas. Think about AI art. Why does it look so uninteresting and bland? Because there wasn’t an idea behind it. Its effectively the result of averaging a bunch of data the AI reasoned as relevant based on some text input. There was no choices made, nothing was put where it was for any reason. This works for generic things, sure, but for what we would consider art as humans, it literally fails at the very definition.
Programming is, believe it or not, exactly the same. Can it make code? Yes, absolutely. Can it have ideas and reason why a specific way of doing things may be better over another? Absolutely not. Writing the code is half the battle. The other half is thinking about how you are going to structure what you are coding and that, my friend, only you can do. So this concept of AI being unable to come up with ideas and just doing things based on nothing but averages is what I wanted to lay down before covering what I think is the most pressing issue.
The ease with which work can be stolen.
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