Ginny [they/she]

I’m pretty sure I would want a nap after eating an entire beef wellington, but I wouldn’t call that peasant food.

What a ridiculous name for a cat! Paul?! That’s a person’s name!

A black African-American person of colour, no less!

I’m a senior full-stack developer of 15 years, and more recently, a new tech lead (specifically a Systems Architect) at an AI startup. I’m definitely not attacking AI as a concept in general.

I, too, am a developer of closer to 15 years than I’d like to admit to myself, though mostly embedded and/or back-end. And while I have no problem with AI in its broad sense (obviously machine learning/spicy statistics, computer vision, and natural language processing and whatnot have potential to be enormously useful), I am generally hostile to generative AI. I thinking using copyrighted material as training data without the copyright holders’ permission should be banned. And while I would have no objection to ethically-trained models in a hypothetical future where we have abundant clean energy to run the data centres and also all the new desalination plants we would need, that also remains a problem, and so I have resisted using such tools at work, too.

Now to generative AI (for the multimedia substrate)…

I agree with everything you’ve said after this point.

No. What I’m judging them for is delegating their critical thinking capacity to an external entity, and stunting their own cognitive growth (their literal reason for existing in the first place, their continuity mechanism to stay in the gene pool, and their sole means of improving at being long-term lazy) by being short-term lazy. Makes sense?

This is the crux of my problem. I find it to be overly judgemental. If you’re self-employed and you need a website for your business or whatever, then you could pay someone to do it for you, but then you only have so much money in the budget. You could also learn how to code and/or graphic design and do it yourself, but then you only have so many hours in the day. If vibe coding produced something viable for you in the quickest, cheapest way, then that is obviously the rational and sensible thing to do. You might even spend the time learning something else instead that is more relevant to your interests.

Using generative AI to do something doesn’t (necessarily) mean that you don’t value the knowledge or skills required to do it the hard way, it only means that you value it less than something else that you might otherwise be doing with your time, and I don’t think that is a moral failing.

As an example, I occasionally like to a bit of shitposting. Were it not for all those other things that I don’t like about generative AI, I would probably be generating AI slop memes with the best of the them. As it is I mostly just stick to text-based comments with bad puns and references to song lyrics no-one will remember. I could put in the hours to learn how to use GIMP so I could do it without AI, but quite frankly I have books on the go, I’ve got a couple of musical instruments to learn/practise, and I spent all day at my software job, where I think critically (or so I claim), so I’d rather being doing those things instead. I don’t think I have neglected my cognitive growth; I’ve just chosen to focus it on something different to what you might have.

Look, I don’t want to be in a position of defending the plagiarism machines that are burning the world’s forests whilst simultaneously somehow using all of the world’s fresh water, but come on. The vast majority of people who are using AI image generation are not people who would otherwise have been involved in the creative process.

They are people who want to avoid learning Photoshop (reasonable - it takes a long time to learn, which may or may not be worth it given what you want to do, and also Adobe sucks shit) or want to avoid paying someone who knows how to use Photoshop (understandable - and would obviously be worth consideration if it weren’t for all of the other problems with AI).

When you attack AI on the basis of it making people lazy - rather than any of the other things that are wrong with it - it just comes across as “Luddite”. (Which is ironic, given that Luddism was originally about machinery resulting in worse working conditions for skilled workers, which is one thing AI actually will do.)

And it follows that if you know how to code, then you would be more efficient with GitHub copilot, yes?

She had presumably forgotten that conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

Use of AI robs you of the opportunity to learn/practice/hone your skills in a certain area. why would someone use ai for any reason other than to get out of having to learn something?

This is not really a good argument against AI. Almost everything ever invented was invented to avoid doing something else that would take more time.

Why would anyone use animation software other than to avoid learning to draw your frames in sequence?

Why would anyone use a loom other than to avoid having to learn how to weave?

Why would anyone read a book other than to avoid learning by experience and experimentation?

Freezing

adjective

(colloquial)

Cowd enough to shrivel your bawbag.

To be fair, it’s not like HP software could get any worse.

Ferengii, but the second i is silent.

Can’t wait until we burn an entire rainforest running a clanker that gets into a “let me google that for you” infinite loop.

In fact, if you kill or severely maim someone, you’ll always feel conflicted about it if you are a good human

If someone you thought was a good person killed someone else - in self defence let’s say - and didn’t feel bad about it at all, would you then categorise that person as a bad person?

knock knock

Have you heard the good news about our lord and saviour, Linus Torvalds?

I do now.

That’s an otterly different name!

Obviously fake. No mention of trains.

Hexagons are the bestagons!

Pansexuals are simply omnisexuals who don’t understand that it is wrong to use Greek prefixes with Latin root words. /hj

We see “-tastic” used as a suffix so often that it seems genuinely odd to see it explicitly explained.