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This is the disconnect between proponents and detractors of AI. Detractors say it's the process and learning that builds depth. Proponents say it doesn't matt

This is the disconnect between proponents and detractors of AI. Detractors say it's the process and learning that builds depth. Proponents say it doesn't matter because the tool exists and will always exist. It's interesting seeing people argue about AI, because they're plainly not speaking about the same issue and simply talking past each other.

jchw 1y ago
> It's interesting seeing people argue about AI, because they're plainly not speaking about the same issue and simply talking past each other. It's important to realize this is actually a general truth of humans arguing. Sometimes people do disagree about the facts on the ground and what is actually true versus what is bullshit, but a lot of the time what really happens is people completely agree on the facts and even most of the implications of the facts but completely disagree on how to frame them. Doesn't even have to be Internet arguments. A lot of hot-button political topics have always been like this, too. It's easy to dismiss people's arguments as being irrelevant, but I think there's room to say that if you were to interrogate their worldview in detail you might find that they have coherent reasoning behind why it is relevant from their perspective, even if you disagree. Though it hasn't really improved my ability to argue or even not argue (perhaps more important), I've definitely noticed this in myself when introspecting, and it definitely makes me think more about why I feel driven to argue, what good it is, and how to do it better.
ants_everywhere 1y ago
I usually see the opposite. Detractors from AI often refuse to learn how to use it or argue that it doesn't do everything perfectly so you shouldn't use it. Proponents say it's the process and learning that builds depth and you have to learn how to use it well before you can have a sensible opinion about it. The same disconnect was in place for every major piece of technology, from mechanical weaving, to mechanical computing, to motorized carriages, to synthesized music. You can go back and read the articles written about these technologies and they're nearly identical to what the AI detractors have been saying. One side always says you're giving away important skills and the new technology produces inferior work. They try to frame it in moral terms. But at heart the objections are about the fear of one's skills becoming economically obsolete.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  > But at heart the objections are about the fear of one's skills becoming economically obsolete. I won't deny that there is some of this in my AI hesitancy But honestly the bigger barrier for me is that I fear signing my name on subpar work that I would otherwise be embarrassed to claim as my own If I don't type it into the editor myself, I'm not putting my name on it. It is not my code and I'm not claiming either credit nor responsibility for it
  - add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
    Unfortunately the majority don't think like this and will take whatever shortcut allows them to go home at 5.
  - armada651 1y ago
    > If I don't type it into the editor myself, I'm not putting my name on it. It is not my code and I'm not claiming either credit nor responsibility for it This of course isn't just a moral concern, it's a legal one. I want ownership of my code, I don't want to find out later the AI just copied another project and now I've violated a license by not giving attribution. Very few open-source projects are in the public domain and even the most permissive license requires attribution.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - thfuran 1y ago
      And, though I don't think it's nearly settled, in other areas courts seen to be leaning towards the output of generative AI not being copyrightable.
  - benreesman 1y ago
    I think you're very wise to preserve your commit handle as something other than a shift operator annotation, not everyone is. I think I'm using it more than it sounds like you are, but I make very clear notations to myself and others about what's a big generated test suite that I froze in amber after it cleared a huge replay event, and what I've been over a fine tooth comb with personally. I type about the same amount of prose and code every day as ever, but I type a lot of code into the prompt now "like this, not like that" in a comment. The percentage of hand-authored lines varies wildly from probably 20% of unit tests to still close to 100℅ on io_uring submission queue polling or whatever. If it one shots a build file, eh, I put opus as the meta.authors and move on.
ninetyninenine 1y ago
>It's interesting seeing people argue about AI, because they're plainly not speaking about the same issue and simply talking past each other. There's actually some ground truth facts about AI many people are not knowledgeable about. Many people believe we understand in totality how LLMs work. The absolute truth of this is that we overall we do NOT understand how LLMs work AT all. The mistaken belief that we understand LLMs is the driver behind most of the arguments. People think we understand LLMs and that we Understand that the output of LLMs is just stochastic parroting, when the truth is We Do Not understand Why or How an LLM produced a specific response for a specific prompt. Whether the process of an LLM producing a response resembles anything close to sentience or consciousness, we actually do not know because we aren't even sure about the definitions of those words, Nor do we understand how an LLM works. This erroneous belief is so pervasive amongst people that I'm positive I'll get extremely confident responses declaring me wrong. These debates are not the result of people talking past each other. It's because a large segment of people on HN literally are Misinformed about LLMs.
- whatevertrevor 1y ago
  I couldn't agree more, and not just on HN but the world at large. For the general populace including many tech people who are not ML researchers, understanding how convolutional neural nets work is already tricky enough. For non tech people, I'd hazard a guess that LLM/ generative AI is complexity-indistinguishable from "The YouTube/Tiktok Algorithm". And this lack of understanding, and in many cases lack of conscious acknowledgement of the lack of understanding has made many "debates" sound almost like theocratic arguments. Very little interest in grounding positions against facts, yet strongly held opinions. Some are convinced we're going to get AGI in a couple years, others think it's just a glorified text generator that cannot produce new content. And worse there's seemingly little that changes their mind on it. And there are self contradictory positions held too. Just as an example: I've heard people express AI produced stuff to not qualify as art (philosophically and in terms of output quality) but at the same express deep concern how tech companies will replace artists...
  - the_af 1y ago
    > Just as an example: I've heard people express AI produced stuff to not qualify as art (philosophically and in terms of output quality) but at the same express deep concern how tech companies will replace artists... I don't think this is self contradictory at all. One may have beliefs about the meaning of human produced art and how it cannot -- and shouldn't -- be replaced by AI, and at the same time believe that companies will cut costs and replace artists with AI, regardless of any philosophical debates. As an example, studio execs and producers are already leveraging AI as a tool to put movie industry professionals (writers, and possibly actors in the future) "in their place"; it's a power move for them, for example against strikes.
jibal 1y ago
This is a radical misrepresentation of the dispute.
- Loughla 1y ago
  I disagree with you. Please expand.
  - skydhash 1y ago
    Not GP, but I agree with him and I will expand. The fact isn't that we don't know how to use AI. We've done so and the result can be very good sometimes (mostly because we know what's good and not). What's pushing us away from it is its unreliability. Our job is to automate some workflow (the business's and some of our owns') so that people can focus on the important matters and have the relevant information to make decisions. The defect of LLM is that you have to monitor its whole output. It's like driving a car where the steering wheel loosely connected to the front wheels and the position for straight ahead varies all the time. Or in the case of agents, it's like sleeping in a plane and finding yourself in Russia instead of Chile. If you care about quality, the cognitive load is a lot. If you only care about moving forward (even if the path made is a circle or the direction is wrong), then I guess it's OK. So we go for standard solutions where fixed problems stays fixed and the amount of issues is a downward slope (in a well managed codebase), not an oscillating wave that is centered around some positive value.
    - Loughla 1y ago
      I understand that but I'm not sure how it's a response to my original statement.

jchw 1y ago

> It's interesting seeing people argue about AI, because they're plainly not speaking about the same issue and simply talking past each other. It's important to realize this is actually a general truth of humans arguing. Sometimes people do disagree about the facts on the ground and what is actually true versus what is bullshit, but a lot of the time what really happens is people completely agree on the facts and even most of the implications of the facts but completely disagree on how to frame them. Doesn't even have to be Internet arguments. A lot of hot-button political topics have always been like this, too. It's easy to dismiss people's arguments as being irrelevant, but I think there's room to say that if you were to interrogate their worldview in detail you might find that they have coherent reasoning behind why it is relevant from their perspective, even if you disagree. Though it hasn't really improved my ability to argue or even not argue (perhaps more important), I've definitely noticed this in myself when introspecting, and it definitely makes me think more about why I feel driven to argue, what good it is, and how to do it better.

ants_everywhere 1y ago

I usually see the opposite. Detractors from AI often refuse to learn how to use it or argue that it doesn't do everything perfectly so you shouldn't use it. Proponents say it's the process and learning that builds depth and you have to learn how to use it well before you can have a sensible opinion about it. The same disconnect was in place for every major piece of technology, from mechanical weaving, to mechanical computing, to motorized carriages, to synthesized music. You can go back and read the articles written about these technologies and they're nearly identical to what the AI detractors have been saying. One side always says you're giving away important skills and the new technology produces inferior work. They try to frame it in moral terms. But at heart the objections are about the fear of one's skills becoming economically obsolete.

bluefirebrand 1y ago
> But at heart the objections are about the fear of one's skills becoming economically obsolete. I won't deny that there is some of this in my AI hesitancy But honestly the bigger barrier for me is that I fear signing my name on subpar work that I would otherwise be embarrassed to claim as my own If I don't type it into the editor myself, I'm not putting my name on it. It is not my code and I'm not claiming either credit nor responsibility for it
- add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
  Unfortunately the majority don't think like this and will take whatever shortcut allows them to go home at 5.
- armada651 1y ago
  > If I don't type it into the editor myself, I'm not putting my name on it. It is not my code and I'm not claiming either credit nor responsibility for it This of course isn't just a moral concern, it's a legal one. I want ownership of my code, I don't want to find out later the AI just copied another project and now I've violated a license by not giving attribution. Very few open-source projects are in the public domain and even the most permissive license requires attribution.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - thfuran 1y ago
    And, though I don't think it's nearly settled, in other areas courts seen to be leaning towards the output of generative AI not being copyrightable.
- benreesman 1y ago
  I think you're very wise to preserve your commit handle as something other than a shift operator annotation, not everyone is. I think I'm using it more than it sounds like you are, but I make very clear notations to myself and others about what's a big generated test suite that I froze in amber after it cleared a huge replay event, and what I've been over a fine tooth comb with personally. I type about the same amount of prose and code every day as ever, but I type a lot of code into the prompt now "like this, not like that" in a comment. The percentage of hand-authored lines varies wildly from probably 20% of unit tests to still close to 100℅ on io_uring submission queue polling or whatever. If it one shots a build file, eh, I put opus as the meta.authors and move on.

ninetyninenine 1y ago

>It's interesting seeing people argue about AI, because they're plainly not speaking about the same issue and simply talking past each other. There's actually some ground truth facts about AI many people are not knowledgeable about. Many people believe we understand in totality how LLMs work. The absolute truth of this is that we overall we do NOT understand how LLMs work AT all. The mistaken belief that we understand LLMs is the driver behind most of the arguments. People think we understand LLMs and that we Understand that the output of LLMs is just stochastic parroting, when the truth is We Do Not understand Why or How an LLM produced a specific response for a specific prompt. Whether the process of an LLM producing a response resembles anything close to sentience or consciousness, we actually do not know because we aren't even sure about the definitions of those words, Nor do we understand how an LLM works. This erroneous belief is so pervasive amongst people that I'm positive I'll get extremely confident responses declaring me wrong. These debates are not the result of people talking past each other. It's because a large segment of people on HN literally are Misinformed about LLMs.

whatevertrevor 1y ago
I couldn't agree more, and not just on HN but the world at large. For the general populace including many tech people who are not ML researchers, understanding how convolutional neural nets work is already tricky enough. For non tech people, I'd hazard a guess that LLM/ generative AI is complexity-indistinguishable from "The YouTube/Tiktok Algorithm". And this lack of understanding, and in many cases lack of conscious acknowledgement of the lack of understanding has made many "debates" sound almost like theocratic arguments. Very little interest in grounding positions against facts, yet strongly held opinions. Some are convinced we're going to get AGI in a couple years, others think it's just a glorified text generator that cannot produce new content. And worse there's seemingly little that changes their mind on it. And there are self contradictory positions held too. Just as an example: I've heard people express AI produced stuff to not qualify as art (philosophically and in terms of output quality) but at the same express deep concern how tech companies will replace artists...
- the_af 1y ago
  > Just as an example: I've heard people express AI produced stuff to not qualify as art (philosophically and in terms of output quality) but at the same express deep concern how tech companies will replace artists... I don't think this is self contradictory at all. One may have beliefs about the meaning of human produced art and how it cannot -- and shouldn't -- be replaced by AI, and at the same time believe that companies will cut costs and replace artists with AI, regardless of any philosophical debates. As an example, studio execs and producers are already leveraging AI as a tool to put movie industry professionals (writers, and possibly actors in the future) "in their place"; it's a power move for them, for example against strikes.

jibal 1y ago

This is a radical misrepresentation of the dispute.

Loughla 1y ago
I disagree with you. Please expand.
- skydhash 1y ago
  Not GP, but I agree with him and I will expand. The fact isn't that we don't know how to use AI. We've done so and the result can be very good sometimes (mostly because we know what's good and not). What's pushing us away from it is its unreliability. Our job is to automate some workflow (the business's and some of our owns') so that people can focus on the important matters and have the relevant information to make decisions. The defect of LLM is that you have to monitor its whole output. It's like driving a car where the steering wheel loosely connected to the front wheels and the position for straight ahead varies all the time. Or in the case of agents, it's like sleeping in a plane and finding yourself in Russia instead of Chile. If you care about quality, the cognitive load is a lot. If you only care about moving forward (even if the path made is a circle or the direction is wrong), then I guess it's OK. So we go for standard solutions where fixed problems stays fixed and the amount of issues is a downward slope (in a well managed codebase), not an oscillating wave that is centered around some positive value.
  - Loughla 1y ago
    I understand that but I'm not sure how it's a response to my original statement.