Bunch of disparate thoughts about this. Apologies.
You can’t just purity test an entire profession. Or at least it isn’t reasonable to do so.
You have to dig, but there are artists and authors out there who have positive opinions about AI. I’m sure the folks more active on [email protected] could get a list together of their favorite sneer targets.
I’d suggest that it’s worth remembering that a large portion of any online discourse is going to be made up of teenagers, college students, and people new to whatever it is they’re discussing. But almost all of them will talk with an implied authority on whatever subject it is anyway. Many subs on reddit have done demorgraphics polls (or polls that included a question about age) and the results makes the sillier places like relationship advice make a hell of a lot more sense.
I have almost a decade of work experience in IT, more if you count some intro to programming teaching gigs I did. AI coding assistance tools are positioned perfectly to be like crack for early learners, but don’t actually add too much value for more experienced folks (especially not anything can’t be done faster with existing non-ai tools, like an IDE’s code snippets features for repeated boilerplate code, which is the most frequent excuse I see online).
That said, I have literally never met any dev in real life that thinks favorably of AI coding assistance.
What I see more and more is corporate management types being afraid that all the hype for AI coming out of Gartner etc means that if they don’t force their employees to use it they will get left behind as their competitors magically produce more somehow. At that point as an employee your choices are to work to meet whatever shit metric they’ve constructed or give up making a paycheck.
It’s very easy to tell other people they need to be more principled when it’s not your food/shelter/insurance/livelyhood on the line.
And it’s also worth noting that what the current wave of popular AI (LLMs) does best is generate text. So of course you’re going to see text posts online trying to shift the window. That’s the company using their horrific tool as designed. There was evidence of AI bots hyping AI in the programming subs on reddit that got overshadowed by them shutting off third party API access.
AI is only as inevitable for as long as the megacorps can keep funneling money into the pit. The world leader in AI conpanies, OpenAI, is doing so great with money that they are trying to threaten their business partner Microsoft out of roughly $40B. This could all blow up fairly soon. I hope it does.
There absolutely are devs out there who are getting ground down, where there principles are becoming eroded over time.
But like with many things in life, the rabble at the bottom aren’t the ones effecting real long term change, media coverage, corporate adoption, etc. Don’t turn this into some crab pot situation.
Go after the tech reporters continually giving AI the benefit of the doubt. Go after industry steering publications like Gartner. Go after politicians giving AI projects sweetheart deals that allow them to coast by without having to compete fairly based off their actual costs (OpenAI loses money on every request it serves). That allow AI datacenters to continuously violate local laws. That allow the datacenters to pollute their local water table. Go after the management enacting requirements that their subordinates demonstrate how AI is improving their work efficiency on pain of firing. You get the picture.
And sure, call out individuals. But please don’t label us all as a group on this.
EDIT: old man intensifies. And another thing! (to support my point that the corps need to be the target in these discussions):
Companies like Microsoft are resorting to forcing AI features into their products and defaulting those AI features to ON in order to get the user numbers they need to keep justifying the absurd expenditure on AI, and to be able to keep pushing the false narrative into the media of everyone using AI.
These effectively fabricated increases in user numbers from these features being default on means that the impact of individual programmers and devs deciding to use or not use AI are not going to move the needle significantly enough to make a difference.
I’m proud to say that currently my workplace has all this shit disabled on an enterprise level, and firewall blocks preventing using any of it. Unfortunately that will only last as long as it takes for the suits to come up with a sufficiently paranoid acceptable use policy. We’re doing what we can to keep stoking the idea that putting any info into these things is effectively selling it to potential competitors, but that can only go so far against Gartner and the like whispering in the C-suite’s ear.
Anyway. Everyone has a duty to say no to this shit, but all the companies are already using every dirty trick they can to boost the user numbers. If you’re running around under the impression that the absurd user numbers represent true users, and that those users must be comprised entirely of tech workers because artists never would use AI, then you’re looking at a false narrative being pushed by the people who stand to make the most money off this shit. The user numbers are not accurate to begin with.
Bunch of disparate thoughts about this. Apologies.
You can’t just purity test an entire profession. Or at least it isn’t reasonable to do so.
You have to dig, but there are artists and authors out there who have positive opinions about AI. I’m sure the folks more active on [email protected] could get a list together of their favorite sneer targets.
All the anti-ai tools are coming from programmers. anubis, iocaine, nepenthes, nightshade, and more.
I’d suggest that it’s worth remembering that a large portion of any online discourse is going to be made up of teenagers, college students, and people new to whatever it is they’re discussing. But almost all of them will talk with an implied authority on whatever subject it is anyway. Many subs on reddit have done demorgraphics polls (or polls that included a question about age) and the results makes the sillier places like relationship advice make a hell of a lot more sense.
I have almost a decade of work experience in IT, more if you count some intro to programming teaching gigs I did. AI coding assistance tools are positioned perfectly to be like crack for early learners, but don’t actually add too much value for more experienced folks (especially not anything can’t be done faster with existing non-ai tools, like an IDE’s code snippets features for repeated boilerplate code, which is the most frequent excuse I see online).
That said, I have literally never met any dev in real life that thinks favorably of AI coding assistance.
What I see more and more is corporate management types being afraid that all the hype for AI coming out of Gartner etc means that if they don’t force their employees to use it they will get left behind as their competitors magically produce more somehow. At that point as an employee your choices are to work to meet whatever shit metric they’ve constructed or give up making a paycheck.
It’s very easy to tell other people they need to be more principled when it’s not your food/shelter/insurance/livelyhood on the line.
And it’s also worth noting that what the current wave of popular AI (LLMs) does best is generate text. So of course you’re going to see text posts online trying to shift the window. That’s the company using their horrific tool as designed. There was evidence of AI bots hyping AI in the programming subs on reddit that got overshadowed by them shutting off third party API access.
AI is only as inevitable for as long as the megacorps can keep funneling money into the pit. The world leader in AI conpanies, OpenAI, is doing so great with money that they are trying to threaten their business partner Microsoft out of roughly $40B. This could all blow up fairly soon. I hope it does.
There absolutely are devs out there who are getting ground down, where there principles are becoming eroded over time.
But like with many things in life, the rabble at the bottom aren’t the ones effecting real long term change, media coverage, corporate adoption, etc. Don’t turn this into some crab pot situation.
Go after the tech reporters continually giving AI the benefit of the doubt. Go after industry steering publications like Gartner. Go after politicians giving AI projects sweetheart deals that allow them to coast by without having to compete fairly based off their actual costs (OpenAI loses money on every request it serves). That allow AI datacenters to continuously violate local laws. That allow the datacenters to pollute their local water table. Go after the management enacting requirements that their subordinates demonstrate how AI is improving their work efficiency on pain of firing. You get the picture.
And sure, call out individuals. But please don’t label us all as a group on this.
EDIT: old man intensifies. And another thing! (to support my point that the corps need to be the target in these discussions):
Companies like Microsoft are resorting to forcing AI features into their products and defaulting those AI features to ON in order to get the user numbers they need to keep justifying the absurd expenditure on AI, and to be able to keep pushing the false narrative into the media of everyone using AI.
These effectively fabricated increases in user numbers from these features being default on means that the impact of individual programmers and devs deciding to use or not use AI are not going to move the needle significantly enough to make a difference.
I’m proud to say that currently my workplace has all this shit disabled on an enterprise level, and firewall blocks preventing using any of it. Unfortunately that will only last as long as it takes for the suits to come up with a sufficiently paranoid acceptable use policy. We’re doing what we can to keep stoking the idea that putting any info into these things is effectively selling it to potential competitors, but that can only go so far against Gartner and the like whispering in the C-suite’s ear.
Anyway. Everyone has a duty to say no to this shit, but all the companies are already using every dirty trick they can to boost the user numbers. If you’re running around under the impression that the absurd user numbers represent true users, and that those users must be comprised entirely of tech workers because artists never would use AI, then you’re looking at a false narrative being pushed by the people who stand to make the most money off this shit. The user numbers are not accurate to begin with.