joe

Quoting an Adam Sandler movie at me instead of addressing anything I said says more about you than what I said. lol

People using it to spit out entire projects is terrible though and it’s destroying the open source ecosystem by making it difficult to find projects that aren’t jank and likely to be immediately abandoned

This is a temporary issue; if a project you are interested in gets abandoned, fork it and maintain it (with AI). The problem is that too many people are rejecting the tool that can mitigate the issue. If history is any indication, this is just growing pains, and won’t last long.

But in regards to generating any sort of art media, there is no good output or skilled creators because there’s no skill or effort put into it

I really don’t mean this to sound harsh, but what you’re saying here is gatekeeping and inaccurate.

I can give you an entire movie studio with everything you need to create a movie, including writers, actors, special effects, etc-- leaving only the directing to you, and you can still output garbage. Just having all the tools at your disposal doesn’t make something good quality. However, if we put a skilled director in that same exact situation, and the output will be significantly better. AI can handle much of the process, but that doesn’t mean there’s no skill or effort involved.

Additionally, writing prompts does involve creativity. Coming up with an idea is a creative process. To lean on your metaphor, coming up with an interesting and delicious dish is the creative aspect of the process, not just cooking it.

The solution is to not worry about whether it’s AI generated. It’s a tool; it can be used well by skilled people to create a good output, and it can be used poorly by unskilled people to create a poor output.

You are talking about a different thing than I am. The American healthcare system is garbage with or without AI, but AI is helping the medical field. Getting a more accurate analysis of an MRI scan is objectively a good thing, for example, even if the healthcare system that performed the scan is garbage.

It’s pretty normal for an employer to dictate what tools and applications an employee uses. If you prefer gitlab but your employer requires teamcity, you don’t really get a say, right?

However, if you think you can meet your deadlines without using a code generating AI tool, then don’t use it. Ideally, if they are as useless as you imply, no one will be able to tell whether you’re using it. The conflict should only really appear if they do increase productivity, and you refuse to use them, resulting in less productivity than your peers.

The medical field is one of the places where AI has made real, tangible improvements.

I can’t vouch for that other person’s anecdote, but it seems entirely plausible that an LLM chatbot would be able to better diagnose an issue than a search engine, or even a human doctor, especially if the underlying issue was something like an autoimmune disease, which are notoriously difficult to diagnose.

One of the big flaws in the medical profession (and, really, most professions) is that once you are out of school, nothing forces you to keep learning as the field advances. This potentially, and counterintuitively, results in gaps in knowledge that increase the longer a doctor has been practicing. LLMs, with access to the newer medical information and with the ability to receive and output natural language, do make good tools for diagnosis.

AI, as it turns out, is also way better at analyzing MRI scans and x-rays than humans.

An old-fashioned Google search can point you to more information, if you’re curious about how AI has advanced the medical field.

Can you elaborate? I’m not following what you’re saying.

There are other examples but I take your point.

To be clear, Doctorow discussed switching off AI and proposed that there would be little to no change on the world. I was just changing the technology to show the flaw in the stance.

I apologize to anyone I may have just gravely offended.

lol

I don’t know how “non-techie” you are, but a good example is online games. When you’re playing Fortnite, Roblox, World of Warcraft, etc you’re not going to a web page, but you’re on the internet.

Oh look it’s arbitrary-narrow-definition-that-fits-the-argument-I-want-to-make man!

I’m saying there’s more to generative AI than chatbots. My definition of AI is broader. What are you going on about?

I don’t disagree that the term AI has shifted significantly in the last 4 years or so, but I was actually meaning it in the other direction, as in, there is more to generative AI (what people are calling “AI” these days) than just chat bots.

The world is full of people who insist that “AI is changing everything” but who – when pressed – have to admit that what they mean is that they’re pretty sure that AI will change everything.

If Donald Trump ordered Big Tech to turn off all of your country’s chatbots tomorrow, nothing would change. Every one of your country’s ministries and corporations would chug on with nary a hitch. Households, too, though perhaps a few of the younger members of those families would have to do their own homework again.

He is definitely pretending that change is either on or off.

Are CEOs jumping the gun on how quickly they adopt AI into workflows? Definitely. However, there’s a big difference between “AI isn’t at a threshold where it is disruptive” and “AI isn’t disruptive”. Or, to belabor the metaphor: CEOs are jumping the gun, but the race is about to start and they’re on the correct track.

Speaking at the level of your target audience is wise, but there is a point where information is not just simplfied, but lost, and I think equating chat bots with AI in the broader sense is past that point. It would be like equating websites with the internet.

Hyperbolic insults don’t help your case. If you did think critically about this, feel free to show your work and talk through your thought process.

Generative AI is just a tool. Using it is not much different than using a thesaurus while writing. You can quickly tell when someone has over-used the thesaurus, and it affects the quality of the output, but that doesn’t make it bad to use a thesaurus.

I generally respect this guy’s opinion (I probably use the term “enshitification” multiple times a week!), but pretending that “AI” and “Chabot” are interchangeable terms seems wildly reductive, and the subtle presumption that the process of changing is a binary changed/non-changed situation instead of a curve is just ignorant.

If the internet was “turned off” after 4 or so years not much would have changed, either.

What privacy existed? (Note: not the illusion of privacy.) Snapchat has full access to all her messages, and always has.

She was not charged, let alone prosecuted.

There was a point where it was pretty simple not to use the internet, too. This analogy drives a question: were those people who rejected the internet at the beginning better off in the long run, when compared to people who embraced it?

Generative AI can be a very useful productivity tool. Choosing not to use an available tool is “easy”, but is it wise?

I find myself agreeing with the person you responded to; you don’t appear to be thinking critically about the implications of LLMs/generative AI. That, or you are speaking more literally than it seems, and you mean, literally, that it’s easy not to use AI, without commenting on how wise that decision may or may not be.

If the government asks, they typically need a warrant. (There are exceptions, but they’re fairly narrow). Is there a specific example you’re thinking of?

This scenario, though, is Snapchat volunteering the information. It wouldn’t really make much sense to require the government to get a warrant to recieve a tip, would it?

And shouldn’t we applaud the practice? Sure, in this scenario it was a false positive, but if this student teacher were actually planning to do what she joked about and Snapchat sat on that information, I suspect many of the people poohpoohing Snapchat would be angry that they didn’t inform law enforcement.

I have no idea why people are using Snapchat in 2026; it was never as private or discreet as it pretended to be, as you could just take a picture of the “self deleting” message with another device. However, it sounds like people still using it need to demand E2EE direct messages. It worked for Facebook.

Hey, if you want to be angry at Snapchat, be my guest. I have never used it so I don’t know for sure what they claim. I do assume that they never explicitly say your DMs can’t be read by them, because lawyers exist.

There is no victim here. The student teacher did say she was going to shoot up a school. There were no charges filed, and she rightfully lost her job for poor judgement.

If she wanted a truly private conversation, there are plenty of options. Hell, even Facebook encrypts DMs by default, iirc.

People need to learn the difference between “feels private” and “is private”.