AI has an issue that AI assistants tends towards mediocrity. In the mid-term this is great for sub-mediocre AI users who seemingly get a boost in performance/q

AI has an issue that AI assistants tends towards mediocrity. In the mid-term this is great for sub-mediocre AI users who seemingly get a boost in performance/quality, etc, but people tend to not recognize that in the long term there is a dangerous feedback loop. AI models just regurgitate their training, pretending it's state of the art. Every now and then people bring up the fact that relevant long tail Google results are no more. Every time we click through on the first page, we are collectively training google to be mediocre and in exchange it's training us to be the same. We had the same debate around criminal profiling, insurance, credit ratings, automated censorship, even 'art'. Programming won't be that different. It will be even useful in a limited sense. AI will give a lot of mediocre results for mediocre questions and the wrong answer for 'new' questions, but we won't know which one is which. But remember that in the long term we are feeding the outcome back to the models, so it's not real progress, it's just a proliferation of "meh".