5 ms·

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. P

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.
  - mwcampbell 1y ago
    I wonder if it's actually accurate to attribute authorship to the model. As I understand it, the code is actually derived from all of the text that went into the training set. So, strictly speaking, I guess proper attribution is impossible. More generally, I wonder what you think about the whole plagiarism/stealing issue. Is it something you're at all uneasy about as you use LLMs? Not trying to accuse or argue; I'm curious about different perspectives on this, as it's currently the hang-up preventing me from jumping into LLM-assisted coding.
    - benreesman 1y ago
      I'm very much on the record that I want Altman tried in the Hague for crimes against humanity, and he's not the only one. So I'm no sympathizer of the TESCREAL/EA sociopaths who run frontier AI labs in 2025 (Amodei is no better). And in a lot of areas it's clearly just copyright laundering, the way the Valley always says that breaking the law is progress if it's done with a computer (AI means computer now in policy circles). But on code? Coding is sort of a special case in the sense that our tradition of sharing/copying/pasting/gisting-to-our-buddies-fuck-the-boss is so strong that it's kind of a different thing. Coding is also a special case on LLMs being at all useful over and above like, non-spammed Google, it's completely absurd that they generalize outside of that hyper-specific niche. And it's completely absurd the `gpt-4-1106-preview` was better than pre-AI/pre-SEO Google: LLM is both arsonist and fireman like Ethan Hunt in that Mission Impossible flick with Alex Baldwin. So if you're asking if I think the frontier vendors have the moral high ground on anything? No, they're very very bad people and I don't associate with people who even work there. But if you're asking if I care about my code going into a model? https://i.ibb.co/1YPxjVvq/2025-07-05-12-40-28.png https://i.ibb.co/1YPxjVvq/2025-07-05-12-40-28.png
Shorel 1y ago
> But at heart the objections are about the fear of one's skills becoming economically obsolete. Unless I can become a millionaire just with those skills, they are in a limbo between economically adequate and economically obsolete.
ludicrousdispla 1y ago
>> 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. That's like telling a chef they'll improve their cooking skills by adding a can of soup to everything.
SirHumphrey 1y ago
> 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. But here is the problem - to effectively learn the tool, you must learn to use. Not learning how to effectively AI and then complaining that the results are bad is building a straw-men and then burning it. But what I am giving away when using LLM is not skills, it's the ability to learn those skills. Because if the LLM instead of me is solving all easy and intermediate problems I cannot learn how to solve hard problems. The process of digging for an answer through documentation gives me a better understanding of how some technology works. Those kinds of problems existed before - programming languages robed people of the necessity to learn assembly - high level languages of the necessity to learn low level languages - low code solutions of the necessity to learn how to code. Some of these solutions (like low level and high level programming languages) are robust enough that this trade-off makes sense - some are not (like low code). I think it's too early to call weather AI agents go one way or the other. Putting eggs in both baskets means learning how to use AI tools and at the same time still maintaining the ability to work without them.
- paulryanrogers 1y ago
  I stopped using auto complete for a while because I found that having to search for docs and source forced me to learn the APIs more thoroughly. Or so it seemed.
- fsmv 1y ago
  If you assume all AI detractors haven't tried it enough then you're the one building a straw man
  - ants_everywhere 1y ago
    I said often not always
    - seadan83 1y ago
      All the same. There's a mixture of no-true-scotsman in the argument that (paraphrasing) "often they did not learn to use the tool well", and then this part is a strawman argument: "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.
- mwcampbell 1y ago
  I wonder if it's actually accurate to attribute authorship to the model. As I understand it, the code is actually derived from all of the text that went into the training set. So, strictly speaking, I guess proper attribution is impossible. More generally, I wonder what you think about the whole plagiarism/stealing issue. Is it something you're at all uneasy about as you use LLMs? Not trying to accuse or argue; I'm curious about different perspectives on this, as it's currently the hang-up preventing me from jumping into LLM-assisted coding.
  - benreesman 1y ago
    I'm very much on the record that I want Altman tried in the Hague for crimes against humanity, and he's not the only one. So I'm no sympathizer of the TESCREAL/EA sociopaths who run frontier AI labs in 2025 (Amodei is no better). And in a lot of areas it's clearly just copyright laundering, the way the Valley always says that breaking the law is progress if it's done with a computer (AI means computer now in policy circles). But on code? Coding is sort of a special case in the sense that our tradition of sharing/copying/pasting/gisting-to-our-buddies-fuck-the-boss is so strong that it's kind of a different thing. Coding is also a special case on LLMs being at all useful over and above like, non-spammed Google, it's completely absurd that they generalize outside of that hyper-specific niche. And it's completely absurd the `gpt-4-1106-preview` was better than pre-AI/pre-SEO Google: LLM is both arsonist and fireman like Ethan Hunt in that Mission Impossible flick with Alex Baldwin. So if you're asking if I think the frontier vendors have the moral high ground on anything? No, they're very very bad people and I don't associate with people who even work there. But if you're asking if I care about my code going into a model? https://i.ibb.co/1YPxjVvq/2025-07-05-12-40-28.png https://i.ibb.co/1YPxjVvq/2025-07-05-12-40-28.png

Shorel 1y ago

> But at heart the objections are about the fear of one's skills becoming economically obsolete. Unless I can become a millionaire just with those skills, they are in a limbo between economically adequate and economically obsolete.

ludicrousdispla 1y ago

>> 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. That's like telling a chef they'll improve their cooking skills by adding a can of soup to everything.

SirHumphrey 1y ago

> 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. But here is the problem - to effectively learn the tool, you must learn to use. Not learning how to effectively AI and then complaining that the results are bad is building a straw-men and then burning it. But what I am giving away when using LLM is not skills, it's the ability to learn those skills. Because if the LLM instead of me is solving all easy and intermediate problems I cannot learn how to solve hard problems. The process of digging for an answer through documentation gives me a better understanding of how some technology works. Those kinds of problems existed before - programming languages robed people of the necessity to learn assembly - high level languages of the necessity to learn low level languages - low code solutions of the necessity to learn how to code. Some of these solutions (like low level and high level programming languages) are robust enough that this trade-off makes sense - some are not (like low code). I think it's too early to call weather AI agents go one way or the other. Putting eggs in both baskets means learning how to use AI tools and at the same time still maintaining the ability to work without them.

paulryanrogers 1y ago
I stopped using auto complete for a while because I found that having to search for docs and source forced me to learn the APIs more thoroughly. Or so it seemed.
fsmv 1y ago
If you assume all AI detractors haven't tried it enough then you're the one building a straw man
- ants_everywhere 1y ago
  I said often not always
  - seadan83 1y ago
    All the same. There's a mixture of no-true-scotsman in the argument that (paraphrasing) "often they did not learn to use the tool well", and then this part is a strawman argument: "They try to frame it in moral terms. But at heart the objections are about the fear of one's skills becoming economically obsolete."