The crisis in programming hasn’t been writing code. It has been developing languages and tools so that we can write less of it that is easy to verify as correct. These tools generate more code. More than you can read and more than you will want to before you get bored and decide to trust the output. It is trained on the most average code available that could be sucked up and ripped off the Internet. It will regurgitate the most subtle errors that humans are not good at finding. It only saves you time if you don’t bother reading and understanding what it outputs.
I don’t want to think about the potential. It may never materialize. And much of what was promised even a few years ago hasn’t come to fruition. It’s always a few years away. Always another funding round.
Instead we have massive amounts of new demand for liquid methane, infrastructure struggling to keep up, billions of gallons of fresh water wasted, all so that rich kids can vibe code their way to easy money and realize three months later they’ve been hacked and they don’t know what to do. The context window has been lost and they ran out of API credits. Welcome to the future.
Yeah basically this. If I look at how it helps me as an individual, I can totally see how AI can sometimes be useful. If I take a look at what societal effect of AI, it becomes apparent that AI just is a net negative. Some examples:
- AI is great for disinformation
- AI is great at generating porn of women without their consent.
- Open source projects massively struggle as AI scrapers DDOS them.
- AI uses massive amounts of energy and water, most importantly the expectation is that energy usage will rise when we drastically in a world where we need to lower it. If Sam Altman gets his way, we're toast.
- AI makes us intellectually lazy and worse thinkers. We were already learning less and less in school because of our impoverished attention span. This is even worse now with AI.
- AI makes us even more dependent on cloud vendors and third-parties, further creating a fragile supply chain.
Like AI ostensibly empowers us as individuals, but in reality I think it's a disservice, and the ones it truly empowers are the tech giants, as citizens become dumber and even more dependent on them and tech giants amass more and more power.
I can't believe I had to dig this deep to find this comment.
I have yet to see an AI-generated image that was "really cool".
AI images and videos strike me as the coffee pods of the digital world -- we're just absolutely littering the internet with garbage. And as a bonus, it's also environmentally devastating to the real world!
I live nearby a landfill, and go there often to get rid of yard waste, construction materials, etc. The sheer volume of perfectly serviceable stuff people are throwing out in my relatively small city (<200k) is infuriating and depressing. I think if more people visited their local landfills, they might get a better sense for just how much stuff humans consume and dispose. I hope people are noticing just how much more full of trash the internet has become in the last few years. It seems like it, but then I read this thread full of people that are still hyped about it all and I wonder.
This isn't even to mention the generated text... it's all just so inane and I just don't get it. I've tried a few times to ask for relatively simple code and the results have been laughable.
The crisis in programming hasn’t been writing code. It has been developing languages and tools so that we can write less of it that is easy to verify as correct. These tools generate more code. More than you can read and more than you will want to before you get bored and decide to trust the output. It is trained on the most average code available that could be sucked up and ripped off the Internet. It will regurgitate the most subtle errors that humans are not good at finding. It only saves you time if you don’t bother reading and understanding what it outputs.
I don’t want to think about the potential. It may never materialize. And much of what was promised even a few years ago hasn’t come to fruition. It’s always a few years away. Always another funding round.
Instead we have massive amounts of new demand for liquid methane, infrastructure struggling to keep up, billions of gallons of fresh water wasted, all so that rich kids can vibe code their way to easy money and realize three months later they’ve been hacked and they don’t know what to do. The context window has been lost and they ran out of API credits. Welcome to the future.