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This reason makes sense, but that's insanely powerful (and valuable) if it ends up working out. It basically democratizes programming.

butler14 3y ago
That's exactly what it does. It closes the gap. Even now with all its shortcomings and issues. It's actively solving problems for people and saving time / creating efficiency. That has value and economic utility. I honestly don't get what a lot of the cynics in this thread and their "highly technical/IT friends" are missing.
- perrygeo 3y ago
  It's not saving time or creating efficiency for everyone equally. It's absolutely democratizing some complex tasks. I'll stick to software here, where AI enhances the abilities of non-programmers to give them a taste of what programmers have been doing for decades. But does it enhance the end product? Does it improve upon the work of already competent developers? Does it actually solve the real problems that software engineers face? Highly debatable. It certainly makes cranking out code more "efficient" - but anyone who's every created software knows that cranking out lines of code is a terrible metric for success. Poor quality code has less than zero value, it's a liability. As the prevalence of bot-generated code goes up, it will place an increasingly high burden on actual professionals to clean up the mess.
byteware 3y ago
how is programming "democratized"?
- square_usual 3y ago
  More people can now cobble barely functioning python scripts together and shoot themselves in the foot when it does something they don't understand :>
  - throwuwu 3y ago
    The point is they don’t need any code. They can copy paste a csv or something even messier and ask it to write a somewhat personalized email to each person in the list, if they’re smart about it they can include a few small details with each input entry that get included in the email. They also now have access to most NLP tools like sentiment analysis or feature extraction which allows them to process large amounts of text and extract valuable insights. They don’t need Python or a programmer as long as they’re smart enough to try out new things and learn the ins and outs of these models.
    - square_usual 3y ago
      Realistically, nobody is working with CSVs so small that they fit within ChatGPT's window. I've helped friends and faily use ChatGPT to generate a python script that did what they wanted with CSV, and they all started with attempting to paste a ~x00 line CSV in the chat.
SoftTalker 3y ago
Except the essential difficulty with programming is not typing the code or even understanding the syntax and idioms of a particular language.

butler14 3y ago

That's exactly what it does. It closes the gap. Even now with all its shortcomings and issues. It's actively solving problems for people and saving time / creating efficiency. That has value and economic utility. I honestly don't get what a lot of the cynics in this thread and their "highly technical/IT friends" are missing.

perrygeo 3y ago
It's not saving time or creating efficiency for everyone equally. It's absolutely democratizing some complex tasks. I'll stick to software here, where AI enhances the abilities of non-programmers to give them a taste of what programmers have been doing for decades. But does it enhance the end product? Does it improve upon the work of already competent developers? Does it actually solve the real problems that software engineers face? Highly debatable. It certainly makes cranking out code more "efficient" - but anyone who's every created software knows that cranking out lines of code is a terrible metric for success. Poor quality code has less than zero value, it's a liability. As the prevalence of bot-generated code goes up, it will place an increasingly high burden on actual professionals to clean up the mess.

byteware 3y ago

how is programming "democratized"?

square_usual 3y ago
More people can now cobble barely functioning python scripts together and shoot themselves in the foot when it does something they don't understand :>
- throwuwu 3y ago
  The point is they don’t need any code. They can copy paste a csv or something even messier and ask it to write a somewhat personalized email to each person in the list, if they’re smart about it they can include a few small details with each input entry that get included in the email. They also now have access to most NLP tools like sentiment analysis or feature extraction which allows them to process large amounts of text and extract valuable insights. They don’t need Python or a programmer as long as they’re smart enough to try out new things and learn the ins and outs of these models.
  - square_usual 3y ago
    Realistically, nobody is working with CSVs so small that they fit within ChatGPT's window. I've helped friends and faily use ChatGPT to generate a python script that did what they wanted with CSV, and they all started with attempting to paste a ~x00 line CSV in the chat.

SoftTalker 3y ago

Except the essential difficulty with programming is not typing the code or even understanding the syntax and idioms of a particular language.