it’s getting to the point where I notice people say it a lot, especially IRL now for whatever reason recently.
And for clarity I’m not in research or anything, so these people just mean ‘LLM/image gen’, not utilities like OCR or (usually not) transcription.
Some have argued it’s just more efficient (which I can kind of get), while others think you’re actively hindering your intelligence somehow.
On the first point:
I’ve tried it occasionally to see how it compares to my own skill, and while it produces a functional result, it’s always very derivative work to the point where you can find things with the exact same names of other ‘public’ (but not libre) works, and often isn’t the ideal solution to what it targets. So I can see how you can get things out of it, but it never felt really that profound to me.
But for the second… isn’t this supposed to be the tool for people to do things they aren’t experienced in? If anything, you probably need to be able to understand how to write pertaining to the task so the token probabilities are biased toward writing from that area.
And even then, if all you end up doing is prompting AI, then wouldn’t you ultimately serve no purpose outside of being glorified QA?
I guess I’m trying to figure out what exactly non-users would be ‘falling behind’ in that affects them more than those who use AI?
The only thing I think it might be relevant for is coding really although I have not used it much for that. I feel its good for people to use it at the very least to actually understand its limitations. I often say people should use it on things they know well so that they can get an idea for the level of caution you should take if using it for something you don’t know about. Outside of that it really is, to me, a lot like terminal vs gui. its something that is easier to do and there is less to learn long term about it. So awhile back people might say a programmer needs to do visual programming or get left behind but plenty still code in a text editor.
It’s honestly not very good for that either. Any code it generates tends to either just not work or be really inefficient and insecure.
At best, you could use code to give a basic summary on what the code you’re looking at does and us it to spot potential bugs. But you should only treat it as a bug report where it’s a starting point on manually finding a fix. Don’t let an LLM do bugfixes on its own because it’ll most likely make several more bugs in the process