Yeah we all hear the main arguments… AI is bad because of slop content, stealing from creators, brain rot & brain damage, privacy concerns and most importantly… how billionaires are just using it for their own selfish reasons
But I’m asking about YOU 🫵 personally. The individual. What do you really think about AI? Do you care or are you indifferent? Has it actually affected your day to day life?
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I went through a phase where I was doing a lot of vibe coding. I thought that I was smart enough to be working around the known problems and limitations of it. I was not. Pretty much everything “I” had made turned into an unmaintainable nightmare once it passed a certain level of complexity, and in practice when you’re trying your best to actually make vibe coding work on a project larger than one file you spend so much time reviewing every little thing, rewording your specs etc that you might as well just write the fukken code yourself.
So I deleted all of those projects, and now I use AI for brainstorming (I talk into speech to text, usually while doing something else, then give the text to an LLM and say “organize these ramblings into a design document for me”) and simple specific task automation (“comment my code” and “update my readme”). I figure the one thing LLMs are demonstrably good at is summarization, so pretty much everything I ask them to do is along those lines.
That said, if I could press a button that would make all of the ai companies crash and burn but it meant that I would have to back to doing those things manually, I would press it in a heartbeat. The externalities that the tech world is forcing into all of us for this thing that makes summarizing documents more convenient are way too much.
As for anything else, generative images or video or whatever… I just have zero interest in making or consuming them. Sure it hits my feed like it does for everyone else but I’d say at this point my reaction is about 1/10 “haha” and 9/10 “ugh” when I see them. There was already so much human made art out there that you could be looking at new things all day every day and you wouldn’t be able to keep up.
edit: also, regarding the coding: if your goal isn’t “learn to code” but rather “make a quick python script that needs to work exactly one time”, then vibe coding can be a valid use case. but if you are trying to learn then prompting cannot teach you in the same way that you will never learn to make high quality digital art by prompting for image generator.
I find it’s perfectly possible to write large maintainable projects using these tools. I have a Rust project I built with LLMs that’s over 150k loc now, and it’s structure is a lot better than anything I would’ve ended up on my own. One of the things I do is ask the LLM to come up with a phased plan for introducing new features. I also ask the model to make mermaidjs diagrams I can inspect and come up with file layout up front. Then I get it to make a branch for each phase and implement a focused feature. Then I can review it and I have good context for what it’s supposed to be doing, and it’s scoped so that the code is manageable enough to fit in my head. Doing that alone gets you a long way. Another thing I do is ask it to make refactors by looking through the code base and finding repeating patterns in code that can be consolidated, or large files that need to be split up. If you do this regularly, you end up with much cleaner code, and the agent is much better at doing that at scale than you could by hand.
Testing is another really important aspect. I always ask the model to do TDD, and then add end to end integration tests for features. For web apps, using playwright storybooks is really effective. You can define exactly what the user workflow is and then have the model test it through a headless browser end to end. This creates a contract where you know what that functionality is actually working end to end.
As long as you don’t just let the model crap out tons of code unsupervised, and box it in sufficiently with a contract, then the code is no worse than what a human would produce. And I’d argue that it’s often better.
Openspec is along these lines and works well ime
Yeah it’s a nice tool, you really just need a bit of rails to keep the model on track I find. They’re good at doing well defined tasks, and if you have a plan where they just check steps off as they go, things tend to work well. I also found beads is a really handy tool for task tracking cause then you can just file stuff in there and instead of writing tasks in markdown you have a real history along with the status of the tasks. It solves the problem with markdown checklists getting stale.
good to know, I’ll check out beads. I was forced to start using Claude at work and had mixed impressions but once we started using openspec to keep it on rails as you say, it got hard to deny its capabilities.
I find I kind of look at the whole LLM + agentic harness setup as a genetic algorithm. Your tests and specs are the fitness function for the program you’re evolving, and the LLM is the mutator. At each step it generates some output, it gets tested against the fitness function, the LLM gets feedback and iterates on it. Eventually something working falls out in the end. The better you can define the selection criteria the more you box the agent in the better results you get.
Depends what you mean by AI. Because for the most part “AI” nowadays is just a pure marketing term. What the tech company marketing calls “AI” is not any kind of intelligence in the actual sense of the term. It’s just some machine learning algorithms and fancier CGI. We had “AI” back in the 90s too. Every computer game where the computer player makes autonomous decisions is a kind of AI. It’s the marketing that is the problem. The idea that it is some kind of revolutionary technology that can replace human labor. It’s not and it won’t be. It’s just another tool. Unfortunately too many people have fallen for the marketing hype, which has served to inflate the AI bubble that will pop sooner or later.
I’ve messed with neural nets over a decade ago and ever since I realized their limitations back then I’ve lost all interest.
It can never outgrow its own boundaries. If you train one too much then its output will just be the literal training data with some error, but never anything better, no matter how much data you throw at it.
That alone has always made the ideas that it can “create” things or “think”/“solve problems” absolutely ridiculous to me.
I’ve said this before on lemmy and have gotten downvotes from it, but neural nets are much closer to something like an ASIC.
And now there actually is a company that literally makes ASIC chips that implement neural nets! ;DI’m not denying that neural nets do have genuine uses, but the way most are being used in the 2020s just grosses me out.
The idea that it is some kind of revolutionary technology that can replace human labor.
Now people say that but 10+ years ago nobody cared. I had 2 chatbots talking to each other about random things that got picked from the Internet as an experiment all running 24/7 on a Pentium D PC, and whenever I showed this to someone they responded with a “uh cool.” Now these same people think they’re interacting with a “thinking” being that is capable of doing their job whenever they engage with some LLM-based bot, when in reality it’s not too different from what I had back then at its core.
it is inevitable, but it can be used responsibly and for the greater good, or it can used selfishly and for the greater evil just like most technology
AGI is not inevitable, and the LLM bubble looks like it’s about to burst
It’s a tool to shorten research time with the result potentially having a margin of error. It means you need some sort of capable mechanism of error checking, which often means either being a specialist in thing you are developing/investigating or having some kind of external reference that act as that for you.
I’ve played with it on occasion, see no practical use in my case. I do think its neat because it further illegitimatizes copyright law. and maybe puts a few white collar workers out of a job. but thats about it.
why do you oppose copyright laws in this current system
It’s because the right to redistribute is an inalienable human right that should not be infringed upon by governments
why wouldn’t i? its a bourgeois concern. the concept of ‘owning’ anything digital is artificially imposed and dumb.
do you make art?
I understand copyright law is what allows individual artists to make a living under the currently dominant ideology, it still doesn’t change the fact that materially it doesn’t make sense and it’s an entirely ideological construct. Even today under capitalism electronic devices, storage on those devices and bandwidth to get data to those devices via the Internet is really cheap, this is proven by the fact that lots of people in extremely poor countries have smartphones and an Internet connection even when they don’t have basic amenities like proper healthcare or education. The vast majority of the world population can have pretty much any kind of digital art in the palm of their hands very quickly for essentially free, the current material conditions allow for this, it is why piracy exists, it exists because it easily can exist.
Copyright law is here only to impose the dominant ideology onto the essentially post-scarcity digital world and for that to happen it needs to introduce significant inefficiencies in the distribution of digital goods that are materially extremely cheap to reproduce after the initial cost of making them.
its not about that though. some people here are arguing that AI art is not theft…
If you believe in intellectual property, you got a lot to unlearn. Try this, it snapped me out of it:
https://polclarissou.com/boudoir/posts/2023-02-03-Artisanal-Intelligence.html
even north korea signed into some sort of intellectual property laws
Everyone makes art.
I have a 3d paper plane I designed myself, for example.
I’ve made spritework for my game, and it’s all freely redistributable because that is the only ethical choice
i think that a lot of evil consequences of AI have more to do with its usage than the AI itself, sorry not sorry… people have convinced each other to end their lives and hurt each other since the dawn of time. i HATE reducing every negative human behaviour to a singular cause whether its video games, movies, internet forums etc. when historically, they happened even without them. if the internet shut down tommorow we would still have racism and violence just as we did in the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s etc.
i oppose genAI for creating photos and art because 1. its art theft 2. it can be used for propaganda. i believe that art is a universal luxury that should never be at anyones disposal. if you want art you have to pay.
the way the US goes about data centers is horrible. its mostly racial minorities and working class people who have to deal with it and its unacceptable
I believe that IP should be abolished. Redistribution is not theft.
ai art is theft
You cannot steal something that is not finite
you can steal someones art bro
okay agree about the data centers, crisis of overproduction with the whole ai bubble going on. definitely will need to be rectified at some point. but since when did communists care about art theft lmao? you hear yourself? i would argue that them losing their class position is helpful, actually. perhaps they would lose their attachment to property while they are at it. because that kind of thinking certainly isn’t indictive of being a revolutionary subject.
since when did communists care about art theft lmao?
My understanding of the “ai art is theft” take in this context is like this. Making art is a form of labor, where one’s artwork is the output of one’s labor. Models trained on a particular artist’s style can emulate the style of that artwork. Companies who build models trained this way profit off of that style emulation without compensating the artist. Their (unique) art (style) has thus been stolen, for another’s profit.
I’m not trying to weigh in one way or another on the debate; just sharing how I understand what other people mean when they say ai art is theft. Perhaps I’m wrong in my understanding.
i suggest you read that thread on asklemmygrad about the new person asking why we support china. many people in the comments are breaking down why private property is not a moral term
Depends on the game. seriously though. LLMs are not AI. They are not intelligent and they are not artificial. They are just a brute force algorithm to decode and respond in natural human language.
I often use deepseek instead of using search engines but only because SEO and LLM generated websites have ruined search results. I have used it to make a few simple programs which is great because I have no clue how to program.
Some people are using these tools for stupid shit but people always use tools for stupid shit. Atleast all the hype is going to break usa’s economy and maybe things will get bad enough that usaians will finally deal with their fascist overlords and become a normal country.
This pretty much sums my thoughts.
The USA cannot ever become a normal country. Settler colonies shall always be haunted by their birth.
I’m frustrated by LLMs. I can see the use cases, I understand why western LLMs are the way they are (and eastern ones as well). I just get so annoyed with companies pushing AI entshittification, people using it for stupid tasks, assuming the answers are correct when they’re not, people making themselves dumb because they don’t think or do anything digital for themselves anymore, searching the web for something and only finding AI generated SEO slop, ignoring the billionaire and anti-worker interests behind the LLMs… but I know these are all functions of the relations of productions and the way western capitalist society works.
AI is a bourgeois establishment. It’s an affront to humanity. Every datacenter should be bulldozed and the prompt engineers should all be given 30 years of hard labour in Yekokataa.
On a personal level I find uses for it but I’m always aware of its inherent limitations. It’s a cool gizmo but honestly I don’t think it’s worth spending so much resources on it and tolerating the excesses it causes like AI psychosis. If it disappeared overnight I wouldn’t cry about it, I don’t think it’s gonna change the world in spectacular ways.
Like pretty much any new technology it’s cool but gets corrupted by the profit motive almost immediately.
They are basically summed up here: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Essay:Intellectual_property_in_the_times_of_AI
I remain critical of their use cases and environmental impact but I am not opposed to it.
The consensus we reached with our party is that it is better to understand it and know how to use it because our enemy, the ruling class, is in control of it and is also using it. The party made the mistake with the rise of the internet to pass it off as some hype and years later when internet was widespread and common in use, they were behind on their knowledge and missed to boat. They won’t let it happen again.
- This is not directed at you, but AI is such a shit term. Its just too broad and I feel like it feeds into that tech/finance bro thing of making things sound more complex than they actually are.
2.Im not super anti-ai, but I wouldn’t publish anything with ai in it. At least in my experience it’s not great. For brainstorming or personal use it’s fine, but for public consumption I’d just make it myself
3.The idea of ai “proletarianizing” artists is just really wierd. Its a very, very tiny amount of the world population who make their income from art commissions online or making murals and such. Other artists actually make income by being part of teams, whether that is game design, movies, TV, advertising, etc.
4.I do stand by what I said that ai art just has a fundamental flaw of being unable to generate anything new (as in, ai could not make a new art form or movement. It couldnt make realism if you gave it all the romantic paintings, for example), meaning that human artists, even individual artisans, still have to exist.
- Honestly, it’s just ugly a lot of the time. I’m not saying that it might not get better, but seeing so many on social media is honestly not very great. Not even because i have a personal crusade against it, and I get why people in china (for example) like it, but I do honestly think it looks like crap in a very unnatural, uncanny valley way.
Edit: also, ai summarizing articles and books for people is just stupid. Youre missing the point if you read an ai summery of something, same if you were to read the cliff notes of something (except the ai is probably gonna do worse anyway).
I’m honestly shocked how good the Claude models are for development.
I personally know a guy that’s losing his mind from Ai psychosis. Really, it’s probably just mostly reinforced the latent narcissistic personality but it’s still wild.
So far, mixed bag with all kinds of signs saying shit is going to get weirder and worse, partly as a consequence of this tech.
i have my own llm setup on my pc totally offline, using open webui and qwen and deepseek. it’s a useful tool like a search engine, good with text. i don’t bother with anything else really, ai art looks bad.
