3 ms·

If no one is able to tell, does it matter?

• lucb1e 3y ago
  I think it does, at least until it produces better work than humans on average/median. We have enough trouble spotting bugs (including vulnerabilities) before they hit a beta or production release as it is. If the same diligence went into checking machine output, I think we would get worse code because in the scenario where you wrote it yourself (I'm imagining a patch here, not a whole project), you've got a good understanding of what you just wrote: how it's meant to work, why that method works, what the intention was with every statement. With machine output, you have to build that understanding before you can validate its work, and with the state of the art as far as I'm aware, the validation step really is necessary. It is also a matter of the universe versus the software engineers. With the universe striving to make better idiots¹ who can all tell a machine what it should do in natural language without needing ~any skills, it would be the task of other people to mop up their potential mess. (Not saying that prompt engineering is a skill, just that you can get started without having acquired that skill yet.) Open source contributions are a benefit in several ways: it looks good on your CV, you feel like you're helping society, or perhaps you just want to fix a bug that you're personally affected by. I can see legitimate motives for using "AI" as seven-league boots, but the result where someone else has to do the work for you in the end seems immoral, even if that someone can't tell if the person was just unskilled or if it's machine-generated ("AI") output ¹ https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rick_Cook#The_Wizardry_Compiled_(1989) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rick_Cook#The_Wizardry_Compile...