Loved this blog post by Robin Sloan on whether AI is okay. The subject is complicated and deserves longer posts like this. It’s a whole new thing. It’s not definitely good or bad.
The part about writing code also resonated with me:
I think the case of code is especially clear, and, for me, basically settled. That’s both (1) because of where code sits in the creative process, as an intermediate product, the thing that makes the thing, and (2) because open-source code has carried the expectation of rich and surprising reuse for decades. I think this application has, in fact, already passed the threshold of “profound social good”: opening up programming to whole new groups of people.
As a programmer, my reaction could be that I don’t want to be replaced by AI, but I’ve said forever — I know Daniel and I talked about it on Core Intuition — that I actually don’t like writing code. I like building products, and it turns out you have to write code to do that. Making sure we’re building the right thing will always be more important than the code itself.
Alan Jacobs’s comment is also great:
It’s perfect that Robin is doing this in a blog post — the first of several, perhaps — because this kind of open-ended thinking is what blogs are best suited for.
You could try to split Robin’s post into a series of tweets, but you would inevitably butcher it of nuance in the process, and so you’d lose everything good about it.
Tom Loughlin Thanks for sharing the article. Not being a coder/programmer, it will probably take one or two more reads for me to translate it. First impressions: it seems to make very benign assumptions about human nature. And it throws artists right under the bus, waving away any concerns with the cliché "they'll adapt. They always do." That's both irritating and condescending.
Manton Reece @apoorplayer I should have added some context in my post that Robin is an author (I just read his novel Sourdough) and I think that's why the post works for me. I'm sure he doesn't really want books to be churned out by AI!
Tom Loughlin To be clear, I did not get that impression either concerning books. He was not clear about who an "artist" is, but as a lifelong theatre artist, the greatest frustration we have is that our concerns are always considered secondary. Sloan makes it clear that super-science comes first, while artists can just fend for themselves.
Felix @manton for the coding part the article is assuming that "it just works"? Because as a programmer myself I can say that the code creation part of "ai" is still really bad. Context is too small so it will inevitably make up APIs and components. All it can do reliably is veeeery basic stuff and "better" autocomplete.
Use it as a learning tool for newcomers? Maybe - but if the newcomers dont learn the basic stuff, how will they be able to debug? Also, letting ai code = so much code review!
